Leather Memory Album

 

I made this for a retiring Carleton College Music professor.  I took a big piece of leather to my favorite letterpress guy who does work for both colleges (St. Olaf and Carleton), so he had the college seal. He letterpressed the Carleton seal on the leather, with which I then covered the boards of the album. Unfortunately, the picture of the seal is on my external hard drive (with all of my photos from the last 6 years that Doug dropped and has promised to take to somebody to retrieve my photos and 10,000 music CDs...), so you'll just have to imagine how beautiful the letterpressed leather looks. Then I lined the boards with that pretty black stringy paper, and added a fly sheet with torn pieces of music in it. The album is filled with letters to Phillip from former students and colleagues. I was just commissioned to make another for another prof retiring in the spring. Should be fun!

Lefse

 

Start with a ball of potato dough. I use the instant potato flake recipe - not for the purist, but I think it's super-tasty and super-easy, and it rolls out nice and thin and makes a soft lefse. It's quite delightful.

Here you see my lefse griddle and turning stick. My dad had carved one and made the hilt look like a Norwegian sword, but this is stylishly effective, too. You pick up the thin, flat dough with the stick and lay it on the griddle.

In the middle of making lefse, I looked out the window and saw and eagle (crow above it) in our huge cottonwood tree. Then saw the horses running down the hill.

Anniversary in Paris

 Doug and I took a spontaneous, romantic 15th anniversary trip to Paris in 2003.
We left the kids with various family and friends (thank you again), and had a charmed, perfect trip abroad.
  Flipping through this old French textbook, I noticed lots of photos and sections about places we saw and ate and experienced. So I combined textbook photos with our photos, and it's a fun memory book.

Even some pop-ups!

 Here's tiny photos of us on the little boat sailing up and down the map of the Seine.

 There was a section in the French text about French-speaking places other than France. Here is a page about Quebec, with a picture of Chateau Frontenac, where we spent our honeymoon! So I dug up a couple of pictures from 1988.

Another peek-a-boo page.

We loved the Cluny

Mushroom Quiche!

O my goodness, this was tasty - mushroom and swiss! And it looks so pretty on my starburst plate.

Does anyone make leftover pie crust anymore? I still love it - sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, bake till lightly browned. (Often, however, I bake till burned and then say "Doh!" when I smell it.

Altered Book

 Home to Texas

One spring break, the kids really wanted to swim. We live in MN. We can't swim outdoors until the middle of June. So we decided to throw them in the van and drive to Texas till we found a beach. (We made a lovely detour to Austin first to see an old college friend), but drove all the way to Corpus Christie - good god. I will tell you I don't ever have the need to visit Texas again. I wish Austin weren't there, because I like that, and we liked the River Walk in San Antonio. So the kids got their beach time and we even drove the 1/2 hour south of Corpus to cross into Mexico so the kids could say they'd been to a third country (the US being their first, Canada the 2nd, and now Mexico for an hour).

To pretend that I had a good time (I can't stand beaches, full sun, or Texas, or the states we had to drive through to get there), I created a photo album in this funny Western thrift store find: Home to Texas.

It had hilarious character names, like Dork Wallace (that's now an insult in our family, as in: "YOU'RE a Dork Wallace!"), and Austin Crabb, Ace Pease, Spang Cooper, Bucko Sollars.

Minding Our Own Business

I grab these books with picture endsheets (and this one even has the book jacket!) whenever I find them. This one I ripped out the text block and rebound with my own letterpressed lined blank pages.  A long time ago I was trying to figure out how to make hand bound journals with lined pages. All I could find to purchase online were single sheets. To do a sewn book, you need large sheets of paper to fold down to make a "signature". You sew several signatures together then attach your book covers.
Anyway, I couldn't find any large sheets of lined paper, so I had a print shop make a die of lines and then I befriended this great guy in Northfield, MN who had letterpresses. I spent an evening with him printing big sheets of my lined paper. He was so good at perfecting the print - he took a lot of time adjusting the height of the die so that it would make an even print. I love watching someone who is really really good at what they do.

Hogwarts Puppets

My son Jack and I (well, mostly I) made these for his class. He had to make some kind of art project related to a book he'd read.

Food

 I like pie. I like to make pie. I make the best crust ever made. This is an apple pie. It was amazing.

Kids only ever want chocolate chip cookies. I just use the recipe on the bag of chips. My mother could never follow a recipe. She would always do something hideous like substitute apple sauce for sugar.

 The O'Hara family Peach Pie recipe. A cup of cream and a lot of sugar. Heaven.

 We use the Joy of Cooking Hollandaise Sauce recipe for our Eggs Benedict, which has become a breakfast-in-bed tradition for family birthdays.

Jack's so happy to be woken up to breakfast in bed. OK, maybe he was more happy about the package.

Little Books

I love little. I still have a couple of little things from childhood (a 1/2" Scottie dog magnet, a little doll, some tiny animals, a tiny pencil from the Milwaukee Journal...). So, of course I like to make tiny books. Here are a few samples - a couple are wedding invitations. And there are a couple pages from a photo album of a trip to Paris, complete with pop-up Eiffel Tower.