My Afternoon, in a Picture

This is one of the reasons I love being able to work from home.

A Malicious Wind and Reworking My Apples and Pears

Our weeping willow tree died, did I tell you? I think on Twitter I did. It was a couple of weeks ago, when the Mistral came blowing down on us and wreaked the havoc it normally does. I have ceased getting headaches every time that wind comes, but I still don't like it. I think there is something just a tad bit evil about the Mistral...

Anyway, killed our weeping willow it did, made it break its trunk down near the roots. It is one of those weeping willows with curly branches, if you know the variety, a saule pleureur tortueux. It is a beautiful tree. Was. Was a beautiful tree.

Most of it will be for the fireplace this winter, but those branches are just too graceful to not do anything with. I took some for myself, and plan to do many things with them, like cover them with lace and make fabric flowers to attach to them.

I've also taken some to make twigs for my reworked Pearfect Pears and Apples of My Eye. These new versions of two of my classic fruits are prettier, I think, and more affordable; my homage to an innocent tree felled by a bad, bad wind. I hope you like them.

What's Cooking?

Or rather, who is cooking?

Oh , yes, this is another thing to add to my current creative obsessions. I have always liked cooking - I am an unhappy girl if I don't have my hot, home-cooked meal at night - but lately, and I must admit it started from having watched a few episodes of Masterchef and thinking "I wanna join this cooking show!", I have been taken by the idea that I must improve my techniques and widen my culinary repertoire.

So Saturday, the husband came home with a gift for me, a tome of a recipe book called Saveurs de France, and Sunday morning I was hunting for ingredients. Now, I had never really followed recipes before, having learned to cook by picking up bits and pieces of technique here and there, so Sunday night was a whole new experience in measuring out orange juice in deciliters and butter in grams for me.

The result was - and I am not just tooting my own horn here, I swear - quite good! Husband says he thinks now that the recipe book is actually a gift for him. Cheeky man.

Here then, in pictures, are last night's Legumes Confits Aux Olives et Au Roquefort or Vegetables Confit (how do we say this in English?!) in Olives and Roquefort Cheese, which I chose because I never knew that vegetables and roquefort mixed,

and Magret de Canard Sauce à l'Orange or Duck Breast in Orange Sauce, which was served with white rice.


Recipe books rock, I now think. They make you discover combinations of flavors you had never tried before. Quite exciting. Tonight, after a dinner of something a little more ordinary, I'm going to plunge back into that recipe book to see what I'll cook up next.

On the Way to the Post Office, I Saw This

Because of all the things that I need to do and the multitude of tasks I often have to leave undone, I sometimes forget - no, I often forget - to look. Just look.

I realized this yesterday, when on my to the post office, I decided I had had enough of contemplating pavement and saw this. Everyday, ordinary beauty, that's for sure, but beauty nonetheless.

Look. Another thing to put on my to-do list.

Apple Season Again

This is what I am currently working on:And this is what I received in the mail from Sonia, winner of my Alphabet Apple giveaway. She drew the apple on a thank-you card, and I am so delighted that I have decided to frame the card and hang it on our hallway. Sonia is a happy discovery for me. When I want to procrastinate, I've been going to her blog to look at her beautiful photos, and I have put on my to-do list to, when I find the time, read through her natural-dyeing blog. I made experiments with natural dyeing years ago, using linden leaves and some berries, and this blog is making me want to try it again. I hope you enjoy discovering Sonia's works as much as I am.

Photography Confession

Part of the reason I have been filling the shop with vintage goods is a strange one: I have been bitten by the photography bug! (Another part of the reason is that since my early 20s I've thought that owning a vintage shop was a very cool job, and another part is a business decision that I'll be talking about another day.)

Taking photos for the shop has never really been one my favorite things to do. It was just a necessity, so I put my apples and pears in a lightbox, clicked on the camera button, and considered my job done. Now, things have changed. The other night, I put myself to sleep thinking of the perfect way to style vintage music sheets; and last night I was up until 2 a.m. editing photos, and this after a particularly trying day with a very cranky still-sick-and-at-the-same-time sprouting-a-tooth spring roll!

I think it is this mysterious beauty I have always found in old objects that is pushing me to improve my photography skills. I want to convey this warm kind of tingly excitement that feels itchy in the chest (do you ever get that?) that I get whenever I find a vintage object I love.

I want to take photography courses! I want to learn some Photoshop! I want to learn to style for magazines! And I know this is also just me having trouble controlling my creative exuberance :D

With this post are photos of vintage objects that, because of their form, I found particularly hard to photograph. You're welcome to tell me what you think.

My Weekend Epiphany

It was quite calm, this weekend of mine. We stayed home for the most part, as for the first time ever in her 12 and a half months on this planet, the spring roll got sick. Nothing major, just a cold, but still, we decided to keep her in.

Saturday afternoon, the spring roll was bored, so I strapped her into her bike (the kind that maman pushes from behind), and we took a walk. We ran into an acquaintance that I had not seen for a very long time. During our brief talk, she let drop that that night she was going to party at this very hip, very in club. I knew from the way she slipped that detail in when it had no connection at all to what we had been talking about, and also from knowing that she was just the kind of girl for whom these things are important, that it was her way of letting me know that she herself was now also very hip and very in.

On the walk back home, pushing the spring roll who was happily chanting "do-doh-doh," I remembered when I was also a bit like that. Just a bit, I swear, but because of my job and perhaps my youth, to a certain extent I also defined myself by where I got invited to and by who I hung out with when I got there. I felt very glad that I had left all that way behind.

Here then, in pictures, is a little summary of my not-at-all hip weekend existence:

Real pears, not just fabric-and-stuffing ones,
do occasionally make an appearance in my life.

A troubled nap for the sick little girl.

I spent a couple of hours taking photos of our latest vintage finds.

The old-bread basket needs emptying, yes it does...