What Lauren Made This Weekend

This shirt.

What Derek Made This Weekend...

Oars!! Thanks to the lovely Mariah and the fine folks down at the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association, Lauren and I are now the proud owners of 2 beautiful douglas fir ready-for-rowing oars. The icing on the cake was the leather straps we laced on to protect the wood in the oarlock. So pretty.

The class was amazing and fun and educational and I can't wait for more. If you're interested in taking a class down at the Historic Hyde Street Pier, get in touch with Mariah at mgardner(at)maritime.org.

Two of our favorite things...

A celebration of craftsmenship + CBS Sunday Morning.

Pop-Up Magazine Issue No. 3!

Hello Friends:

We wanted to give you all a heads up that tickets are going on sale TODAY (Thursday) at noon for Pop-Up Magazine Issue No. 3. For those of you not familiar with it, Pop-Up is an evening of readings, photography, documentary film, facts, art, and radio performed onstage by an amazing group of extremely talented folks. Lauren and I are the magazine's Creative Directors and it's been a wonderful experience helping to curate and organize this very special event. I encourage anyone who's interested to check out Pop-Up's website for more information and ticket information.

The show is one night only, Friday April 16th, and if you're interested in attending we recommend you check your calendar now and get tickets as soon as possible. We have done Pop-Up a couple times, and it tends to sell out very quickly. We've moved to a larger venue this time, the gorgeous Herbst Theatre downtown, so we're hoping everyone who wants to make it can get tickets. There is going to be an after party at the Herbst immediately following the event, with tons of drinks and delicious food.

We hope to see you there!

Badminton!

We made our way down to the badminton courts on our day off this week, and I think we might have a new hobby in the works...

Music Lessons

We're huge music lovers. We listen to it constantly of course, but we also try to play it on a regular basis. It's relaxing and inspirational and fun. And though it's been a while since either of us actually studied it in any sort of academic sense, we've recently been loving (and learning a ton from) the dvd set of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts.

If you've never heard of it, Leonard Bernstein gave a series of televised performances beginning in 1958 in which he filled Carnegie Hall with young kids and then taught them about music. You can find little snippets of the concerts/lectures on YouTube, but I highly recommend checking out the entire series (we got ours from the library). I love how he doesn't talk down to the children, and takes his time using numerous examples to illustrate a musical point. He even gets the kids involved, doing sing alongs and such that are so magical they'll break your heart.



On a slightly related note (oooh, a pun!) I recently had the pleasure of re-watching Amadeus. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid, but there is a genius scene in which Salieri transcribes a Reqium for Mozart (who isn't feeling so hot) that is so amazing and moving it has been permanently burned into my brain.

Great American Cakes

I love the super simple photographs in this Bon Appétit story on "Great American Cakes".

The Family of Man

"People! flung wide and far, born into toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers. Here are ironworkers, bridgemen, musicians, sandhogs, miners, builders of huts and skyscrapers, jungle hunters, landlords and the landless, the loved and the unloved, the lonely and abandoned, the brutal and the compassionate–one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being." -Carl Sandburg

The Family of Man. "The greatest photographic exhibition of all time." 503 pictures from 68 countries–created by Edward Steichen for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955.

How I would have loved to see this exhibit! Someday I will have to make my way to Luxembourg where it is on permanent display.

Drawing, and drawing, and drawing...

Almost missed this article from the LA Times about our very talented pal Jason Polan. He's on a mission to draw all 8 million people in New York (amongst other things). The article also mentions the Taco Bell Drawing Club, of which we are proud card carrying members...

Jason was nice enough to create some very limited edition art sampler packs for us recently. There are still a couple left here.

Comforter at the Curiosity Shoppe!

We're very excited to invite you to the Shoppe this Friday, March 12th to celebrate the opening of Comforter, our new gallery show featuring drawings, sculptures, and a gianormous quilt by the multi-talented Emily Sevier. Emily is an amazing artist and curator whose colorful (and often cuddly) works play with notions of personal comfort zones and emotional attachment to objects. She has created a beautiful collection of pieces for our space and we're thrilled to share her show with you. Please join us Friday to check out the work, meet Emily, and have a drink and a snack. See you then!!

WHAT: Comforter, works by Emily Sevier
WHEN: Friday, March 12th, 6-8pm
WHERE: The Curiosity Shoppe (855 Valencia St. btwn. 19th & 20th)

*There's so much great art happening this Friday, why not make an evening of it? Come check out Comforter here at the Shoppe, and also make sure to hit up "It's A Sign" at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery featuring work by the amazing artists from New Bohemia Signs (the folks who made The Curiosity Shoppe sign and sandwich board thankyouverymuch!). And then of course there is an epic show at Southern Exposure called Alchemy curated by our pal Sarah Smith.

Wunderkammer Crochet Workshop!!

This Saturday, March 6th, we are thrilled to welcome the amazingly talented Jessica Polka of Wunderkammer back to Shoppe! Jessica will be hosting a crochet workshop based on the delightful Seahorse Crochet Kit she created for us! If you already crochet, come on down and learn some new tricks while Jessica walks you through the pattern. If you've never picked up a hook in your life, now's your chance to learn from a very friendly, very patient pro. We'll have all the kits and supplies on hand, and there will be snacks!
WHAT: Crochet Workshop with Jessica Polka
WHEN: Saturday, March 6th, 2-5pm
WHERE: The Curiosity Shoppe (855 Valencia btwn. 19th & 20th Sts.)
COST: Workshop is free. Kits $20.

See you Saturday!

Neighborhood walk

Every time we drive past the neighborhood of Forest Hill on our way across town, we are tempted to stop the car and look around. Finally the other day we did stop, and spent some time climbing the grand staircase, admiring the beautiful craftsman style architecture and the pristine yards of the homes there. (If anyone's got a couple extra million clams to spare, this Maybeck beauty is for sale! One can dream...)

When it rains... we craft!

All this rain we've been having means lots of time indoors. And since I've been making a valiant effort NOT to spend every waking hour working on the shoppe or some other random work project, I've been doing lots and lots of crafting. First I made a new pillow for our sofa out of some gray wool I had. The scarf pillow we made over a year ago had started disintegrating (it was an old scarf!) so it needed to be replaced. We just finished a project for a friend's book that involves knot tying, so I was feeling inspired to stitch one in the center of the pillow.


I know I say this every year, but this year I'm determined to get better at sewing. I was working on some soft sculptures for another friend's book last week and I feel like it's a slow road but I am learning a lot... so first up are TIES. More wool from my fabric stash and lots of pattern altering to get it just skinny enough but not too skinny... and here we have the first of what will hopefully be a series of new ties for D.

Finally, I am trying to use up all my leftover yarn to make small little projects like hats and gloves. Here are 1 1/2 pairs of fingerless mittens (finished the last one yesterday) which are easy, fast, and are one size fits all, which I love. The pattern for the two-tone ones with the buttons can be found here.

And since the sun did make an appearance on Monday, we made sure to eat lunch outside on our favorite bench in Glen Canyon. In other crafting news, Derek only has one arm left to knit before he is done with his first sweater! At which point we will regale you with photographs and you will see that pretty much everything we've been making these days is grey and brown and woolly. Those are our winter colors, I suppose.

Mail bag

I know I'm not the only one out there who feels like they are tethered to their computer all day writing emails. The amount of time I spend on my laptop and on my phone checking and writing emails could be spent doing soooo many productive things! I do miss physical mail and have started trying to write and send letters again- though I know I'll never give up email. I just have a weird love/hate relationship to it is all. I went back into my "sent mail" folders earlier to see just how many messages I send per day, and it appears that I average around 20, which doesn't actually seem like that much to me. I'm sure if I only checked my inbox 2-3 times a day I could still manage to get that many replies sent out. How many emails do you send each day?

(Envelopes from Kiosk.)

Reminder: Plant Exchange tomorrow morning!

Aurora has organized another plant exchange that will take place in front of the shoppe tomorrow morning from 9-12. Come by with your plant starts or cuttings and trade them for something new for your garden! More information here.

Behold!!!

Aya Brackett "Kyoto"

We finally got the chance to do something we've been wanting to do for a long, long time. Thank you so much to Suzanne Shade for inviting us to be Guest Curators at the Beholder! It was so exciting and fun and inspirational to check out all the amazing work on the site. We had to keep our choices to 10 (which was HARD!), but we managed...So go check out our little curated collection and spend the rest of the afternoon exploring all the other great artists on the Beholder.

Fabian Geyrhalter "Precision"
Lisa Bartleson "the couch, the chair, the rug, the table"

My little sister's all grown up!

Last month, my younger sister Jessie and her boyfriend (now husband) Ian got married at City Hall. Our friend Jessamyn took some beautiful photos!

Jess, Ian, and little Lennon

Beautiful bouquet from Studio Choo

Me and Jess at Presidio Bowl, where we worked up an appetite for our delicious dinner at the Presidio Social Club.

Many, many more pics can be seen here and here.
Congratulations again Jessie and Ian!!

Survival Annex items online!

For the last two weeks of the show- all the items in the Survival Annex are available for purchase online!! Prepare to be amazed...

And for those of you in SF, there will be a plant exchange and all day closing party next Sunday, February 21st. C'mon by!

Calling All Soup Lovers!

We are majorly in love with SOUPLOVE, a new recipe book we are carrying at the shoppe. Especially now that it's mid-February when the contents of our CSA box pretty much consist of leafy greens, root vegetables and even more leafy greens. When this book arrived at the shoppe last week, we flipped to the "Winter" chapter and there was an amazing recipe for Potato Leek and Winter Vegetable soup that pretty much used up everything in our box and fed us for an entire week. For more, check out this awesome review at 101 Cookbooks!


(All the recipes are vegetarian, but that didn't stop us from adding bacon to our soup... it was even better the next day when we pureed all the leftovers. Yummmm!)

A good day.

We took a little field trip yesterday to the town I grew up in, where we visited with family, took a hike in the glorious sunshine, visited our town's historical museum, ate ice cream, visited a cheese factory, took a drive to Pt. Reyes, and ate more food. A lovely Valentine's Day!

Someone posted these signs up and down Valencia Street- a nice way to start the day as we got coffee and headed out of town.

Jessie gave Lennon and I matching pigtails.

Oak trees (and Derek) at Helen Putnam Park

Pt. Reyes