Comparative Menus

menu of bronze patina finishes, Artworks Foundry, Berkeley, CA To me, making is best the more closely it resembles cooking, and a day of making-related meetings is best when it orbits around eating. Our day began yesterday dropping off the completed and finally-approved creatures for our Sunnyside Menagerie Project at Artworks Foundry in Berkeley, where […]

Anni Rapinoja

Trained as a botanist, Anni Rapinoja lives on a remote island off the coast of Finland, where she makes beautiful, functional objects from seasonally foraged, natural materials like pussy willow, used to make the shoes and purse pictured above. Rapinoja considers her work as an extension of her environmental activism, drawing us closer to nature […]

Estero Americano Floods

I rode my bike to scout the Estero Americano over the weekend, the body of water dividing Western Marin and Sonoma counties. Almost exactly a year ago I made my first post on this weblog after a paddle on the Estero to explore the availability of sea grasses like bulrush for a furniture-making experiment. I’ve […]

The Week in Bloom

Lilac (Syringa vulgaris) The Sap Moon of March and a stretch of sunny days have conspired to launch a timely Spring, with more plants budding, blooming and leafing than I was able to count, beginning just after the Vernal Equinox. Here are several from on and around our property at about 700′ elevation, Latitude: 38.40222
Longitude: […]

Elm

My favorite woods have three letter names- elm, oak, ash and fir. These names have been so repeated over the centuries, they have been polished smooth like river stones- extra syllables or letters are superfluous to their meaning. The trees themselves are thought to have magical origins, with deep roots in the collective consciousness, and […]