The Best Towel Ever?!

Cindy Sherman towel available at Target. With some of the proceeds going to support the "Art Production Fund's (APF) Mission to Introduce Contemporary Art to a Larger Community and to Help Fund Additional Major Civic Artwork Projects." Also available:
Kehinde Wiley, Elizabeth Peyton, and Jeff Koons. If you head over to the APF website, it looks like there's an Alex Katz towel as well.

Accordion Hero?

I'm not normally a big video game fan, but ever since we got Guitar Hero a couple months ago, Derek and I have been spending quite a few late nights rocking out with our toy guitars in front of the TV.

When Derek showed me this post on "Accordion Hero" that he saw on the Make Blog last week, it cracked me up! If only it truly existed.... it would be the ultimate addition to our growing collection of plastic instruments.

THE THING

We recently subscribed to and received our first installment of a quarterly art subscription called THE THING, a brilliant periodical conceived and organized by artists/editors Jonn Herschend (who also happens to be a friend of ours and had a piece in the Get Together show we hosted at the Hardware Store Gallery last year) and Will Rogan.

Issue #1 was a silkscreened window shade (pictured above, in our dining room) by Miranda July, and issue #2, by artist Anne Walsh will be shipping this week! We can hardly wait.

You can read more about THE THING here, and get your own subscription here.

Yay! We're in the newspaper!

The San Francisco Chronicle has a wonderful article by Ahn-Mihn Le all about local shops that show art. We're honored and thrilled to be featured along with some of our other favorite small businesses: Park Life, Rare Device, Candy Store, Rose & Radish, Doe and Relish At Home. Check out the article here, or better yet, go out and buy a paper so you can cut out the HUGE picture of Shawn Creeden's bat installation in the Shoppe. Or EVEN BETTER YET, come to the Shoppe and see the show in person! For our out-of-towner friends, we've posted Shawn's amazing work on our website.

Try A Little Tenderness

Earlier today in the shoppe we blasted "Try a Little Tenderness" and had fun reminiscing about this scene from Pretty in Pink- one of our favorite movie moments of all time. Enjoy!

Serge Gainsbourg article in Vanity Fair

Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg on the set of the movie Slogan, June 1968. By Gilles Caron/Contact Press Images.

I have been loving the most recent issue of Vanity Fair! It must be a music-themed issue, because there is an article about Syd Barrett, an excerpt from Eric Clapton's new book, an Annie Leibowitz photo essay about folk singers, and a great article about Serge Gainsbourg, which you can read in its entirety here. In addition to many photos of him (always smoking of course) there are photos of his Paris apartment, which has been basically sitting untouched since his death in 1991- cans of food in the cupboard, full ashtrays, the whole 9 yards. And the writer interviewed many of the amazing women in his life, including Jane Birkin, Anna Karina, Francoise Hardy and of course his daughter Charlotte ...basically every chic French woman in recent history.

Of course one of my favorite parts of the story is about a handbag... I knew that the Hermès Birkin bag was named after Jane Birkin, but I didn't know that she was known to carry a wicker basket as a purse. I think it's great how this woman who inspired the design of a highly coveted handbag with a price tag ranging from $7000 to $100,000 herself used a basket as a handbag. That's the best! (Read this Time Magazine article for more on the history of the Birkin bag.)

Bat art is online!

We finally posted images from Hollow Face, Hand Wing on our site! Click here to see Shawn Creeden's amazing bat paintings, embroideries and the limited edition woodblock print he created for the show (pictured above). We have been loving having all the bats hanging in our gallery space at the Shoppe!

The Birds and the Bees

We've had a little bit of an obsession with bees and bats recently, so I was super excited when I stopped in at the post office yesterday and saw these new pollination stamps. Also, after watching "Life in the Undergrowth" (see Derek's post below) I have a whole new appreciation for bugs, so these new stamps were right up my alley.

The design is pretty genius- according to the USPS website, "Artist Steve Buchanan created an intricate graphic scheme for the stamps that emphasizes the ecological relationship between pollinators and plants and also hints at the biodiversity necessary to ensure the future viability of that relationship. To that end, the four different stamps are arranged in two alternate blocks that fit together like interlocking puzzles. In one block the pollinators form a central starburst. In the other block, the flowers are arranged in the center." Pretty cool, right? And certainly more interesting than some of the other stamp choices out there. (The lady at the post office said she preferred the Disney stamps, and that these would have been her "last choice", but I may have to disagree on that one!)

Art Appreciation

The cool kids over at Fecal Face have posted a nice interview with one of our favorite artists ever, Mr. Jim Houser. Check it out, it includes lots of fun pictures of his magnificent work.

WOW!!!!

We recently rented one of Sir David Attenborough's nature documentaries "Life in the Undergrowth" and a week later I still can't stop thinking about it. Practically every single frame of the movie completely blew my mind. Go rent it tonight. And in the meantime, check out some clips over at YouTube. The one above is a time lapse of a spider building a web. Ridiculous! But I must say, of all the amazing things captured in this superb documentary, the slug sex scene is hands-down the most outrageous, surreal, unimaginable, crazytown stuff I've ever witnessed on film.

Fun Thing About Owning a Shoppe #233

Giveaways!!! We're during a little promotion with the wonderful folks over at Apartment Therapy, San Francisco where we're giving away one of our prized Lorena Barrezueta dishes. Go check it out, and maybe you'll be the lucky winner! We'll be adding a bunch more of her pieces to our online Shoppe in the very, very near future, so keep an eye out for those as well...

DIY Wednesdays on design*sponge

We are so excited to be the new DIY contributors on design*sponge! From now on, you can visit the site every Wednesday afternoon to see a new craft project that we've created. Last week we started with a trio of shadowboxes made out of old wine crates that we lined with gift wrap, and this week we recovered one of our old office chairs with a pretty striped fabric. (Click here to read today's post.)

It's going to be a fun challenge coming up with these weekly projects- and what great timing since we just moved and are in desperate need of some cheap and easy decor for our new apartment.

Sea Lions & Pine Cones

We took Shawn on a whirlwind mini tour of SF before he headed back to New York, and we all agreed that the best things we saw were the sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf and these pine cones hanging from the wires outside Mollusk.

It was such a nice treat to get out of the neighborhood, even for a couple of hours! Now it's back to work packing orders and sprucing up the shoppe for tomorrow morning. More soon!

Some pics!!

Finally... here are some photos of our Shoppe. The opening was a blast (expect a full report soon!) Thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate with us.

SHOPPE!

We picked up our lovely hand painted sign from the talented folks at New Bohemia Signs the other day, and we're sooooo excited! Wait until you see how amazing it looks on installed on the front of the building. We'll be posting lots more pics as we get closer to the opening, so stay tuned!

Happy Anniversary to us!

Thank goodness someone reminded us that our anniversary was coming up! (See what happens when things get really busy? I can't believe we BOTH forgot!) Yesterday marked our 3 year wedding anniversary, and we celebrated with a yummy dinner at Spork, one of our new neighborhood restaurants. Then we went to our new favorite video store, Lost Weekend, and rented Casino Royale. (Then we stayed up until 1 am working... but at least we took a little break, right?)

For those of you who want to see how we spent our September 24th three years ago, check out the pics on our friend Jessamyn's awesome photography site, jessamynharrisweddings.com. There is an entire page in the gallery dedicated to our true love log cabin jamboree!

Rit's it

Rit dye is one of those great craft products, like Mod Podge and Aleene's Tacky Glue, that is classic, cheap and multi-functional, and has awesome packaging that doesn't look like it has changed since the '70s.

Of course I've used Rit to dye fabric and yarn (and yes, even a tie-dyed shirt and over-dyed vintage slips back in the day), but it's fun to come up with other things to apply color to that aren't necessarily fiber-based. Back when I was working on Handmade Modern with Todd, we used Rit to stain some pieces of cork for a nightstand, which turned out great. And I've recently been playing around with staining pegboard and wood with it too. What else could we use this amazing dye for? A quick search on Flickr showed a few Blythe dolls with Rit-dyed hair, and the Rit website suggests using it to dye paper as well. The possibilities are endless!

Come one, come all!

It's official... our grand opening is two weeks from today! If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area the on the evening of Thursday, October 4th please stop by to say hello, check out the shoppe, and see some amazing art by our friend Shawn Creeden, whose show, Hollow Face, Hand Wing, will also be opening that night. And make sure to come by on Sunday the 7th at 2pm for what is bound to be an awesome and educational presentation about bats. Here is all the information- hope to see you there!!

The Curiosity Shoppe Grand Opening!
Thursday, October 4th 6-9 pm
Featuring Hollow Face, Hand Wing, new works in the gallery by Shawn Creeden on the subject of bats.

Plus: Join us for a free event featuring live bats, presented by the California Bat Conservation Fund and sponsored by the Curiosity Guild. Sunday, October 7th at 2 pm in the Shoppe.

855 Valencia Street
between 19th and 20th
San Francisco, CA
415-839-6404
www.curiosityshoppeonline.com

Fashion Show!

We are huge fans of Jack Spade, and were so excited when we heard about their recent Spring 2008 fashion show in Bryant Park. A smart, DIY happening that is totally up our alley. Watch it here. (Courtesy of one of our new favorite blogs, Hi + Low.)

THE golden record

Wow, it's been a long time! We've been busy, busy, busy getting ready for the opening of our store (more on that soon) and sadly, Smarts & Crafts isn't the only thing we've neglected (grocery shopping, anyone???) Anyway, I've had the idea to post about The Golden Record for a while now, and wouldn't you know it, those badass brainiacs over at Coudal Partners beat me to the punch. But I'm glad they did, because they found a great site that I somehow missed in my lame attempts at research.

Quick background: In 1977 NASA sent two Voyager spacecraft out into deep space. On those ships were 2 Golden Records chock full of information about our little green planet, the idea being that perhaps an alien life form might find the Voyagers, pop the records on their Hi-Fis and maybe come check us out. The discs include all kinds Earth-related ephemera: pictures, maps, diagrams, and an even an interstellar greeting from our very own President Jimmy Carter. Anyway, most interesting to me was that they also included audio recordings from Earth. Lots of them. Songs, languages, the sound of a mother kissing her baby, a heartbeat, nature noises...I just find the whole things so beautiful and wacky and optimistic and lovely. To get a nice sampling of what our extraterrestrial friends might find on the record click here.