March 31, 2010

Spring Buds

Some images of spring from our little jaunt to the park last weekend.

Nature - spring buds 2

Nature - spring buds 3

I love that Lara is traipsing around in the background of this image of the beautiful flowering trees. I think actually that Misha was trying to take a picture of her, but our low-tech camera doesn't know how to focus on the middle distance.

Nature - spring buds 1

That pale blue highlight on the right is Misha, chasing after Lara. I love that detail.

March 28, 2010

Cookbook for Baba

For my grandma Lena's birthday this year, the whole family collectively put together a book of her recipes. For me, almost every bite that comes out of her kitchen packs the memory punch of Proust's madeleine, so you can imagine my delight at finally having a key to all mythologies, as it were.

I put the book together using Blurb, which has a very nice, though slow, free proprietary software for doing layout. Now the book is all set (and can even be bought online). Here are a few screenshots:


And here are my favorite doodles Misha drew for illustrating pages that didn't have photographs:





I colored them in on Photoshop after scanning them in. Isn't that sheep really cute?

March 26, 2010

Defended!

It's official - I'm going to graduate with a PhD in English and Comparative Literature in May!



Here is my newly-defended monster, Speculative Ethics: Victorian Finance and Experimental Moral Landscapes in the Mid-Century Novels of Oliphant, Trollope, Thackeray and Dickens. Oh yeah, baby.

March 22, 2010

10 in the Horticulture Garden

10 months old today, having fun in the sunny summery grass yesterday

Baby Ruth calling his shot



studying the man-made



studying nature



sitting in his new one-leg-forward one-leg-back impossible yoga pose



(tomorrow, evidence that we were there too)

March 20, 2010

Little Kitchen, Girlified

A totally cute Little Kitchen from Mandy:

Little Kitchen - Mandy

And how freakin' awesome are those twirly burners on the stove (in the inset)? Can I maybe get some of those for my adult kitchen?

March 15, 2010

Fashion Show

Here are the finished dresses!

brown shirt & pink skirt to dress

peach shirt to dress

Like most mediocre designers I benefit more from the adorableness of my model than from the skill of my sewing. But I'll take it!

March 13, 2010

Works in Progress

So my main complaint lately is that there Just Aren't Enough hours in the day. Either that or my brain has slowed significantly. So I decided, rather than waiting to finish these thingamadoos before showing them to you, might as well do a progress report. Everyone likes seeing things in progress, right? Right?

Ahem. We begin with this loverly Anthropologie top that is cute and made out of this super-soft material.



It has now been altered like so:



On the docket: finish the sleeves by gathering them at the bottom and maybe adding some brown jersey ruffles there as well. Any thoughts?

We move on to these two thingies: a beloved overall dress that is now too short and a never-worn top that is also too short. What to do?



Sew them together, of course! And also throw in a tiny tank top for Jakey (made out of random jersey scraps I found in my cloth collection).



In the near future: adding the overall straps as appliques to the shoulders of the brown top to visually connect the top and bottom together better. Also maybe an applique of some sort for the little tank.

March 12, 2010

Back from Blog Break!

(That title was brought to you by the letter B.)

Hmm... Sorry about that unannounced little disappearance! I feel like most people who blog fall off the wagon every now and again, and that's probably a good thing.

We've had some de-lovely weather here in Philly of late, which is excellent for a best-friend trip to the zoo.



I love this little gazelle moment.





No offense to our furred, feathered, or finned friends, but at this point the animals tend to be secondary to the fun of running around in the sunshine.

March 2, 2010

Jake in the Box



Misha put him in there this time, but he spent the rest of the weekend trying to crawl back in by himself.



My two boys.

Lara, meanwhile, had a blast of a time all by herself with her grandparents in New York! Marionettes, film festivals, ice cream, subways, restaurants... it's not very surprising that she had no desire to come back to boring old Philly.