making things and doing the rounds.

today i got up early to make all the stuff i have promised to stores in chicago. invite us into your home, and i will make a mess like the one above on your floor.

with no offense to all the amazing stores i deal with coast to coast, i have to admit a very special fondness for my chicago shops, their managers and staff. these were some of the first stores that ever stocked my stuff and they always take care of me.

aitor and i were reflecting on how we come through chicago and do the same circuit of store visits every time. after asking ourselves if we should bother trying to do any new things in town, we decided that as it stands, our little routine feels like coming home. besides, these are the shops and people we would want to visit regardless.

so here's how it goes:

we started the day off with a visit to quimby's bookstore where we always spend too much money on zines and the the other ephemeral literature that one can easily feel won't be around next time. they also have a photo booth now. then we went to renegade handmade (the newest of my chicago shops). the last time i went there the store was very new and it's really growing and filling up with some truly exceptional handmade stuff from all over the place. i especially liked their growing collection of prints. then to paper boy where we buy our favorite notebooks every time we come through. we finished the day off at chicago comics and filled our bellies with thai food at cozy noodle house. as we noticed more and more people showing up in cubs jerseys, we knew our time in wrigleyville was drawing to a close so we piled into the car to escape the drunken mess we knew was soon to come. besides, the skies were getting dark in a stormy kind of way.



we got back to pilsen and spent our evening doing laundry and reading all the new comics, books and zines we had picked up.

a great, full and tiring day. minus getting swamped by cubs fans, these are all things i recommend you do when you visit chicago. okay, you don't have to do your laundry, either, but clean clothes are always in good fashion.



good night, chicago. we quite adore you.

post script of note: renegade handmade and paper boy each took some of the framed assemblages and prints from the misanthrope specialty co. so there is now a non-craft fair source for these thing in chicago. you know, just sayin'.

sweet home. chicago.

i like chicago a lot. i can never remember exactly why (but it's not the improv scene, i know that much). to add icing to this blustery cake, our friend rebecca has a brand new kitten who attacks all our stuff and screams while he poops and generally entertains us non-stop.

we had to pry ourselves away from the hoopla today to visit one of my favorite stores/places to visit, uncle fun. just look at this:



billy (the manager) also claims that uncle fun houses the world's largest silly string sculpture. who knows if this is true, but i've never heard anyone else make such a claim so i choose to believe him. besides, look:

billy describes it as almost living (kind of like a rubber band ball) in that it is continually drooping slowly and constantly needs to be added to in order to stay alive.





on the way home, we stumbled into some sort a mexican street fair happening at the end of rebecca's street. it seemed to be an end-of-school fundraiser type thing. i was excited because we got to drink orchata and eat fresh fruit for a few bucks. with the heat and humidity and the mariachi, i felt like i could have been in another country. but then, that's kind of what this country is like - a whole bunch of other ones stuck together.

so midwest.

today we drove and drove.

the whole day we seemed to be passing right before, after or beside big storms. we would see massive cloud formations shooting internal lighting bolts traverse the highway miles in front of us, only to have them move out to the north before we met them; we would arrive in soaking wet places and the sun was shining down again.

when we finally made it to a very moist chicago in the evening, we heard tell of all the tornadoes and severe storms we had spent the day sidling up to from the television of the golden apple diner.

then we found rebecca and the punk rock party she had invited us to. in an act of total non-punkdom, we opted to go to her place and shower the muggy grease off ourselves instead of smearing it on strangers to loud music in a dank basement. i really maintain no punk illusions whatsoever.

and we listened to tales of natural destruction all around us and the warnings of more to come. so we closed the windows.

escape from new york.

today we shoved a visit to the etsy offices into our departure plans. it was quite a whirlwind of a visit - meeting people, seeing the space. it has been almost exactly a year since our last visit (when we were sleeping in the loft and feeling like we had the best loft in brooklyn for a weekend). things have really grown. gone are the days of taking in wayward craftspeople - the lawyers and fire inspectors put the kibosh on both that and the loft we slept in (that apparently blocked the sprinkler system). it was such a whirlwind visit, in fact, that i didn't even snap one picture. i hope to have a somewhat more easy going visit if we manage to get back to new york later in our travels. although, that place is such a hive of action it's hard to ever imagine subdued moments transpiring there.

at the suggestion of some etsyians, we ate across the street at junior's before shoving off. you get complimentary beets, pickles, corn bread and slaw when you sit down. i was full before i even started into the tuna melt i ordered. the melt was pretty disappointing and gross, actually; processed cheese = my american enemy). but they have a six dollar slice of cheese cake that makes you think it might be worth it, so they are clearly capable of minor miracles.

after filling our bellies with jewishy foods, we braved the bridges and tunnels to make our escape. we got lost in jersey city (as i think we always do) but finally made it out of the sphere of new york with its yelling drivers and disheveled signage. we drove into the more amish & quaker climes of pensylvannia, made a pit stop in east stroudsburg to mail some letters and finally settled into a cheap motel in clearfield, pa.

the maid was nice enough to leave this note for us on a dirty envelope:



i'm turning its insides into buttons.

all day brooklyn.

today we took it easier. you know, ate some collard greens, walked around, played with a baby. we did a little more visiting with anda and little sido. i modelled with some of my handmade wares for some pictures anda is trying to amass of etsy sellers. it's for a hand-bound book intended for promoting etsy to the press (which is too bad for me because it sounds like a beautiful project that i wouldn't mind seeing).



because all we do while traveling is pose for pictures, aitor later headed out to pratt to sit for some more photos by dominica.

we rounded our day out with some packing, planning and biking through brooklyn over to the bar where dominica works to have a bit too much bourbon, some pizza and a teetering bike ride home.

brooklyn's nice. i like it.

friends, museums, curiosities and a baby.

so, as we were planning this trip, we got in touch with our good friends marc and dominica to alert them to our impending visit. upon starting our dialogue, dominica (musician, photographer, muse) informed us that a picture she had taken of aitor was going to be hanging in the brooklyn museum from june to august. dominica greeted us upon arrival with the smaller test print she is gracefully modeling above. this is her original:

photo by dominica paige

the photograph will be hanging as part of an exhibit called click, an audience curated show wherein included pieces were chosen based on popular vote (insert some kind of electoral process joke here).

we are actually beginning to accumulate a large number of portraits of aitor. there's the water colour zeesy powers did, at least three retaliatory unflattering portraits, one done by his youngest brother and the oil painting his high school art teacher did of him. is it weird to display them all together? although aitor claims he is not narcissistic enough to hang them all in our living room, he did suggest that i start a shine to him. maybe his contradictions make him such a compelling portrait subject.

today's adventures were all about aitor, since he let me drag him to fabric and yarn shops yesterday. although, to be fair, his interests intersect mine more than mine do his. based on a recommendation from a friend of his, we went to obscura antiques last time we were in town and will probably return every time we come through the city. we can't always afford the things we fall in love with (this time, aitor really vacillated about bringing a display set of fake teeth into our lives) but usually end up settling for some smaller relic of days gone by and dream of someday being mad millionaires with a home full of stuffed skunks and hair wreaths.

the small momento we ended up with this time was a book called 'the affected provinicial's companion, volume one' by lord breaulove swells whimsy. this book has come highly recommended to aitor more than once (apparently people feel he needs to read discussions pertaining to dandyism). as we were leaving, the nice lady at the shop gave aitor and old falling apart medical tome about disease (as it was understood in 1918). it has some great plates in it and since it came to us missing pages, i might be able to disassemble it and make some prints on the pages - i usually have a problem wrecking perfectly good things, especially books and typewriters. also, aitor looked amazing riding the subway with this ancient book. dominica and i decided he was certainly a time traveler whose magic book brought him into our time through some sort of portal or spell.



we also went to the craziest camera store in the world - b&h photo - but that's almost too much to talk about. after that went to macy's to ride around on the wooden escalators and feel thoroughly overwhelmed by the throngs. dominica was pretty upset to find that the wooden stairs on the escalators had been replaced with metal ones. after that and penn station, i felt about ready to implode from all the swarms of people. so i was happy when our friend anda invited us over for drinks and snacks and our first visit with her four month old, sido. sido is an amazingly well natured and charming baby who grabbed her way immediately into our hearts. it was also nice to be back in brooklyn.



after the little one was tucked away, we grown-ups did what any self-repecting art/craft nerds would - we drank dark beers, drew pictures and chatted into the night. it is a mildly cruel to keep new parents up late but i figure this is new york and nobody is supposed to sleep, anyway. and we were all just having too much fun to pull away early.

i never live this much at home.

small adventures attached by tunnels.

today we decided to get some sightseeing in and brave the subways of new york (not for fear of danger but for fear of confusion). i actually developed a perfunctory ability in navigating the subway surprisingly swiftly. it is pretty confounding, though.

aitor really did me a solid and agreed to accompany me to purl and purl patchwork (for those who don't know, two little boutique shops that comprise the pinnacle of a quilter/crocheter's wet dream). in typical new york fashion, they've taken two awfully small spaces and turned them into perfectly sorted treasure troves of imported fabrics, reproductions and fine yarns. it's enough to make a burgeoning craft hag's head pop off gently.





i did really well at not going crazy (accomplished easily enough in my current state of financial alarm) but i allowed myself a few fat quarters for my english paper piecing quilt. that quilt, by the way, has recently expanded to a six year project in my mind now that i kind of want to make two full quilt tops to make it a fully reversible opus (the one side i started in browns, yellows and oranges and another in purples and blues). we shall see if this idea is indeed too mental to follow through on. on second thought, maybe nine years.

thankfully, aitor found a nearby tobacconist to entertain him while i drooled over yardage.

after all of our goofing in manhattan, we met up with melissa who, in the continuation of her staycation, was attending a lecture series called adult education. beyond just wanting to converge with melissa again, i was interested to see the show with my connection to trampoline hall and all. adult education is a very different undertaking from trampoline hall. i was surprised to find out that with four lecturers it ran just over and hour (no question & answers, it would seem). the lecturers are also much more uniformly comfortable performing than at trampoline hall (two were comics, one a writer and one a radio dj). the result is a show that i would place (on my personal spectrum) somewhere between trampoline hall and the comedy i most enjoy creating/consuming. it is much less of a social experiment than a themed exploration to the pits of the arcane - with affable and funny elements clearly encouraged. we all laughed very hard at beatles rip-off bands, cringed at horrifying tales of baby dolls at f.a.o. schwartz, and even sobered up with discussion of violence, reality and the media. then we laughed more at fans of the musical cats.

all told, a fantastic night out.