Small Stakes book launch party and signing!

Hello Friends:
Wow! Busy week! In addition to our gallery opening tomorrow evening (see post below), we are also super excited about an event we hope you will join us for on Saturday. Our friend Jason Munn—the wonderful wizard of rock posters—will be launching his brand new, utterly amazing book The Small Stakes Music Posters at our Shoppe. We are truly honored to host Jason and can't wait to celebrate his incredible work. So come on by and meet The Man, buy his book (and get a special limited-edition print!!). There will be snacks to eat, and posters for sale.

WHAT: The Small Stakes Book Signing with Jason Munn
WHEN: Saturday April 10th, 5-8pm
WHERE: The Curiosity Shoppe, 855 Valencia St. (btwn 19th & 20th)

For the Birds Opening!!

Hello Friends!
Please join us this Friday evening to celebrate the opening of our new gallery show, For the Birds! Our talented pals Jeff Canham and Luke Bartels have created an array of amazing abodes, perfect the urban bird. There will be refreshments to peck at.

WHAT: For the Birds opening
WHEN: Friday, April 9th 7-9pm
WHERE: The Curiosity Shoppe 855 Valencia St. (between 19th & 20th)

*More images and a write up on Cool Hunting right here.

Happy Easter!

The shoppe will be closed today for some much needed R&R... hope you all have a Happy Easter!

Typewriter Love

Say hello to our Sears Junior Portable Typewriter, the smallest lil' typewriter in the west! If you want to see some gorgeous typewriter specimens (that are sure to inspire some insane typewriter envy) check out this site. You can search by brand, by period, by author... it's amazing!

Our new secret hide out.

Seriously Curious Confections

We've always admired Mary and Matt's great taste in art and design, music and fashion, and so on and so forth... And then—as if to prove their excellence in a whole different realm of "taste"—they started making mind-blowing, explicative-inducing chocolate. They recently sent us some samples which we shared with customers throughout the day. Everyone fell in love. Now you can too!

National Park Quarters

We can't wait for the National Park Quarters to come out! Hurray for the little joys in life...

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.