Jillian Visser from Los Angeles mailed out these save-the-date napkins for her upcoming March wedding. I hadn’t thought of that but what a great idea! I worked with her designer Abbie Gong
at Passing Notes (http://www.passing-notes.com/). Abbie has such a lovely sense of style and appreciation for hand made; she was a total pleasure to work with.

PASSING THOUGHTS:
How do you feel about “grey” vs “gray”? Today I think grey is crisp and classy whereas gray is dull and lifeless. Then I found an old note to myself where I’d written “do you get a different feeling from the words gray and grey? I do. I prefer gray; it feels more 40’s. ”
It’s amazing how liquid our inner world can be, I guess that’s because we’re 60% water.

Getting press is exciting but “getting” press is fun. Thinking of places that might like linen cocktail napkins and guest towels (fun), contacting people you don’t know who have interesting jobs (fun), and hearing back from them (super fun), seeing your items in a magazine (thrilling), hearing from perfect strangers that they like your stuff (rewarding).

I love the internet because it is a dream come true, really; since i was young I wished I had a library in my home and didn’t have to go out to the library..how amazing that it happened! Speaking of not going out…I love not going out…I could live in a cave (a very chi-chi cave) but I think things are about to change. I’m moving in 2 weeks to Durham, N. Carolina after 30 years in California so Butterfly will be going on vacation from July 14th-July 31st while I dig my way out of boxes.  It already seems like a place where neighbors see neighbors, where you mix and mingle, where opportunity to connect lays down right in front of you and you’d be a fool not to be open to it.

Also, beginning to work on a couple of new linen items: placemats and table runners. When I have samples they’ll go up here. If you need either of those it would motivate me to get those projects going and I’d give you a reduced price in gratitude.

Eric and I had a fun art smackdown yesterday. We wanted to come up with guest towels to coordinate with the Indian Flower cocktail napkins so we took an hour to come up with sketches. He won; we used 4 of his designs and 2 of mine. Eric goes off to grad school at The Art Institute of Chicago when I go off to Durham. I don’t know how I’m going to get along without him.

Indian Flower Cocktail Napkins and coordinating Guest Towels

That’s all she wrote.

Mr Wendell spreads joy and poetry and joyful poetry on the corner of Bundy and San Vicente in Los Angeles.

Here’s his father’s day poem.

Susan (left) and Dr. Jane, two of the characters I hung with in Durham last week. Susan’s husband Michael had happily joined us for the fabulous farmer’s market and then Parker & Otis for great coffee and breakfast but had reached his limit when the conversation turned to haircuts.

Jennings took over P & O two years ago and somehow managed to make it feel like it has been there for twenty. Coming from LA, I almost dropped my socks when I paid $5 for 2 eggs, bacon, fruit, and a big cheddar biscuit (wish I had photos of that, but I was too busy eating it!).

Three dudes from Durham, hangin’ at P & O. They were just so … “dude-ish” … I had to include them.

Back to my pals: Susan is a top Merrill-Lynch advisor whom I’ve known since grade school. Here’s what an A-type personality she is: she gets up 7 days a week at 4:30am so she can exercise and be at work by 8. It’s no surprise she’s tops in the country. She earns it the hard way … work, work, focus, focus. She’s also got one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever encountered.

Dr. Jane lives 2 doors from Susan & Michael and is my new Durham friend. Like everyone I’ve met in this flourishing town she is warm and welcoming. I think Durham is the new Austin but not near as hot in the summer.

Headed back to LA, the airport was crawling with kids.

1. Get in your head something you want to cook and eat.

2.Read a bunch of recipes, write down all the stuff you need to buy at the grocery.

3. Say, oh hell, I’ll just roast them in olive oil and salt; what could go wrong…

I was going to make stuffed onions. All the recipes had a different method for removing the center of the onion where the stuffing would go. Cut a half inch off the tops, cut a bit from the bottom so they would sit flat, poach, boil, cook halfway..All I did was peel the skins off, cut off some of the top and bottom, then rolled them in plenty of olive oil and sprinkled with Maldon coase sea salt, put them in a 370° oven and basted them a couple of times, for about 35 minutes. Turned the oven down to 350° and turned the the onions over. Much to my surprise when I opened the oven door 25 minutes later the centers had popped up, so cute and how easy it would have been to pull the roasted centers out, put in a stuffing and put the little hat back on top or use the roasted goodness as an ingredient in the stuffing. But I ate them out of the pan standing up in my kitchen, happily.

Eric is everything I’m not: male, young, tall, and ok… thin. It follows that his designs are almost the complete opposite of mine, but I love them just the same. We’re going to start printing some of his stuff to run parallel to mine, or maybe to crash into it and explode. Either way, it’s Eric’s World and I’m just pleased to visit.

(Pay no mind to the chaos behind us, it’s just another day at the office!)

Here’s some of Eric’s work, which should show up in the (almost fully re-designed!) store tomorrow.

ABOVE: “California Dryin’” Guest Towels
BELOW: “Yours / Mine / His / Hers / Whose? / Booze!” Napkin Set

I’ve been 30 years in California and am moving to North Carolina in July. It’s got my mind refocusing on things like…visiting Baltimore and the American Visionary Art Museum for the first time..visiting New Orleans more often to see mom…and hiking and canoeing, especially canoeing. Peter Doig’s canoe paintings are so lush. So, all this canoe talk made me think of my favorite camping recipe…

Bring a box of Bisquick. Break a branch off a tree and
using your pen knife scrape off the bark until you get to the green part. Add water to Bisquick. Form dough around bottom of stick.

Cook over campfire. It will contract and fall easily off stick. Fill with jelly. Eat. Be a satisfied outdoorswoman. Lets call them Jelly Sticks.

I saw these on the so interesting site boing boing and found them so smile inducing i decided to share. As Lisa Katayama describes them:

“A cool new way to keep tabletop plants in the house without the hassle of fallen leaves: Domsai, or little light-bulb-shaped bipedal plant-people with ceramic legs and a variation of plant-heads by Italian artist Matteo Cibic. The artist imagines they could double as virtual pets, Tamagochis that don’t whine if you don’t play with it.”

And then, looking further into Lisa Katayama’s blog I got a good laugh from this one. She quotes “John Kostiuk” as saying:

I took this photo with my iPhone on the Hibiya line in Tokyo. I patted the guy on the back and said Naka-Meguro a few times (the station was coming up) but got absolutely no response.

Maybe we Americans shouldn’t try to work as hard as the Japanese afterall.

This is Claire wearing Love & Kisses which I’m sure she gets a lot of. Claire is half French, lovely.

Today we’ve been busy but scattered. Workin’ on an Etsy account and playing catch-up after about a week off (I was in North Carolina and Eric was in Chicago). We’re back, we’re inspired…

Today we’re taking inventory for all of Butterfly’s garments and it seemed like a fitting time to share some images of our latest models. Ezra looking good in Chicago!

Ready for his closeup, Noah from Texas sports this tee with attitude.

I might have to make this shirt in an adult size for Eric who can’t stop eating my chocolate chip cookies and downing cartons of milk. After reading this article from the NY Times I baked the best ones I’ve made in 40 years of baking! Read the article or in a nutshell, here are the secrets:

•let the batter rest 24-36 hours

•make them big enough to get 3 textures; crunchy on the outside, moist on the inside, and toffee-like in between.

•salt, yes salt.