What I've Been Working On

These box necklaces aren't up on my website yet, but I've already sold a couple of them at shows. The first one took me about 9 hours to make. Since then, I've got it down to about 2-3 hours. Still need to get faster! Next up, a matching ring? Still unnamed.... suggestions welcome!

Astoria, 27th Ave

A tree growing right through this little shop! I peeked inside and saw the trunk inside the building. They just cut a hole in the ceiling and patched the roof up around the trunk. LOVE IT!
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Gantry Park, 3:42pm

Sunshine......
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My Kind of Town

A picture perfect weekend in Chicago. Who knew the beachfront was so freaking gorgeous? Or that it would be a 30-second walk from the friend's condo I was crashing at?



On Division St, in front of a Polish Bar. My Polish friend had been teasing me about having gone to Zakopane, Poland. So we had to take this pic.



At Renegade. Another cloudless, gorgeous day. Elsie Q and I were rejoicing over the weather and having a great time chatting with shoppers.


My display got a bit of a facelift: I covered my neck displays in cool textured paper and coated them in modge podge. And it worked! The displays definitely looked much nicer and more unique.

For Real?

So I had to walk through a residential neighborhood to get to a hiking trailhead. And I passed this house.

And the stuffed animals sitting around the table were definitely not the work of some cute little kiddie engaged in a jumbo version of tea party. No, those things were part of the decor!
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NJ Transit

Goin hiking
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Yeow

Lately I'm noticing that my weird affinity for industrial light fixtures is being replaced by a weird affinity for antiquated weapons. More specifically, I've gotten hooked (excuse the pun) on harpoons used back in the day by whalers. I've spent most of the day sketching out some harpoons of my own and trying to imagine how to translate them into jewelry.

Amtrak 10:41 AM

Lil C hard at work.
Bored.
Syracuse here we come!
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Chocolate Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip

In New York in the summer, I relish my front balcony, breakfasts at Grand Cafe, outdoor concerts, and long walks along the East River. But there is one thing i miss, something that is a staple of my childhood summers that is near-impossible to find here: ice cream. We have Mister Softee trucks here, but that doesn't even come close to fitting the bill for me. There presence is erratic, and the ice cream is dinky and sub par. And we have lots of Baskin Robbin/Dunkin Donuts combo shops. They sell a bunch of flavors, some questionable to say the least. But for some reason, I have no desire to get my cone inside a chaotic Dunkin Donuts. I don't want my ice cream mingling with donuts and coolatas and lattes. I want to stand in front of a tiny ice cream shop and stare up at a big board with listings of multiple flavors and have my ice cream passed to me through a window. That to me is the definition of how to enjoy ice cream in the summer.

Last night, my urge for this experience got the best of me, and after a little time with Google, i discovered that Astoria does in fact have an ice cream store that fits these requirements. So tonight I rounded up my roommate and my brother and we walked over to 38th Street. The sun had set. Kids were playing on the sidewalk. Broadway was hopping. When we made it to Uncle Louies Ice Cream, the front looked dark and for a moment I feared that my dream was about to go unrealized. But as we lingered in front of the store, the woman working inside switched on the outside light, and there it was: the window for passing ice cream cones and shakes and sundaes over to happy customers. The big board with the long list of flavors. Inside, i could see freezers filled with buckets of ice cream. Sure, the price was double what i would have paid back in my hometown. And I ignored the fact that the woman behind the counter wiped her nose on the back of her hand before she scooped my cone. And there was no soft-serve machine to be found. None of that mattered. We picked our flavors, our cones were filled, and we meandered down the sidewalk happily licking our ice cream.

It was delicious.

Strange and intriguing.... My one-time favorite band Counting Crows are on tour with Michael Franti from Spearhead, who I also totally love. I was at a festival a few years back and Franti joined in on this game of hacky sack with a bunch of hippie kids who were playing in front of our tent. I just liked the vibe about him -- even though he was at the show to headline, he wasn't chilling out backstage in a trailer, he was on the festival grounds just hanging out.

Regardless, Counting Crows have been way too whiny for the past few albums and I really haven't listened to anything they've put out in the last 7 or 8 years. Still, I think it's pretty safe to say that August and Everything After is one of the best modern folk rock albums ever released. Too bad it was a progressive downhill from there...

But some of the clips of Counting Crows performing with Michael Franti look and sound pretty cool:

Our lady of the open road

On the road with weasel and our new dashboard ornament
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My Beachy Paradise

Love my job!

Renegade in action

Crazy exhausting really fun.

Today shopping for fabric in the wholesale district, and breakfast picnic at the beach

Now elsie q and I are heading up the coast. Tonight we stopped in a huge mexican grocery store to pick up dinner and I was mesmerized with all the brands and products I'd never seen before. We have small specialty ethnic grocery stores in nyc, but nothing like this place!
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Exhausted. Feeling kinda spacey and daydream-y. Today was Renegade LA day 2. The second day of two-day shows can be rough sometimes. You're a little crankier than the day before. A little slower on your feet.

Chatted with lots of sellers and started to feel a strange kinship with some. Many are, like us, headed for san fran next weekend. Everyone is feeling the stress of the importance of these shows. I felt reassured that the economy is affecting many of us. And further reassured that my crazy life is not quite so crazy, cuz I'm around a bunch of people doing things much the same way. Sigh.

Night.
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Post Renegade celebration

Its my birthday! We survived renegade day 1! We're in LA! Celebrating with a delish post show dinner.
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Countdown

It's three pm, and everything is a mess. I have black silicone dust from my polishing wheel all over my face and up my nostrils. My hair is greasy and shaggy. My room has been segregated into sections devoted to various piles: to pack, to ship, to give to Collin, to put away, to wash.... I've kept the blinds down all day to help me ignore the fact that it's a beautiful sunny day and I'm inside, finishing up whatever bits and pieces I can before the marathon of jewelry shows that start this weekend.

I leave for LA in about 12 hours. Still don't have the address of the girls Elsie Q and I are staying with, but I'll wait a little longer before I start to panic about that.

For now, it's a trip to the post office, the bank, grab some snacks for the flight (lest I spend $10 on a bag of pretzels and a magazine in the airport newstand) throw all my crap into my biggest suitcase (but carefully keeping it under 50lbs) and get on a plane for the second in a series of round trip flights I've taken this week.

I try to be excited, happy and grateful that my job allows me this kind of life, but at the same time, i can't help but panic. There is no expense account for this kind of "business travel" and no one to blame but myself if I screw things up. Suffice to say, a lot is on the line right now. Fingers crossed.

xoxo K

The view from Emerald Isle

Ahhhhh......