Grown in Detroit

Trailer 'Grown in Detroit' from Mascha Poppenk on Vimeo.

The other night we watched Mascha & Manfred Poppenk's wonderful documentary, Grown in Detroit, and I can't tell you how much I loved it.

It's about Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women, a public high school for pregnant teens and teen moms, and the school's urban farm. In a city where almost 30% of the land is vacant (enough area to fit the city of Boston or San Francisco) this school is teaching these teen moms how to use that land and profit from it. The students grow all sorts of crops from apples to tomatoes, make apple cider, raise goats and bees. They sell their crops at Eastern Market, the city's weekly farmers market.

Through their work on the farm the students learn about the importance of healthy food for themselves and their children and are empowered by knowing, no matter what, as long as there is land, they can provide that food by growing it.

The film was recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival and won the Documentary Feature Jury Award at the Austin Film Festival as well as numerous other awards.

You can write the filmmakers to watch the film online mail@filmmij.nl

happy halloween

We are having a couple friends over this Halloween to eat pizza, drink beer, pass out candy and play board games and I can't wait.

It's supposed to cool down (poor trick or treaters :( ) so maybe we'll even have a fire in the fireplace.

Have a good weekend!

good fences make good neighbors

Our house came with a cheap vinyl/chain link combo fence. (ugly!) After living with it for a couple of years we decided to put in a new one. And now it's finally done!
(Steven's parents bought us that tree during their visit to celebrate Steven's birthday. It's a Cherokee Brave dogwood, and I cannot wait until it blooms in spring!)

Looking at the photos, I'm a little bit afraid that it looks unfriendly and that our neighbors will think we don't like them, but I love it anyway.
We took out a whole bunch of arborvitae (and gave them to neighbors- it's not hard to give away free trees.) which really opened up the backyard. It looks twice as big!

We wanted to keep the fence full height (6 feet) across the driveway, but didn't want to have to open a 6' x 6' gate every time we came home.

So we put in a little hobbit door (that's what I have been calling it.)

Please excuse the construction mess- I couldn't wait to take pictures.

Besides, Ollie likes to use the piles of dirt as perches to get a better view.

Now, all that's left to do is to tear down the garage (isn't it hideous?) and replace it with a garden shed. (hint, hint!)

jack-o-lantern

now that's a scary pumpkin!

check out jeweler Eddie Borgo's how to on style.com

color

Green boots, pink helmet? Perfect.
via The Sartorialist

fly away

this is just about the most amazing/stressful video I have ever seen. And as my friend Jen pointed out, you never actually see them land.
yikes!

walk on by

Because of all the excitement we've had the past few weeks, for Steven's birthday we decided to take it easy.

After work we took the dogs for a walk down by Whitmore Lake. (which, as far as I can tell, is a river.)

And after the doggies had the best time two pooches ever had and were completely worn out, we took them home and went out to dinner.

The guy who played Ross Geller on Friends was sitting at the table next to ours, and it was a little weird to see a famous person in Ann Arbor.

Maybe he's in town to check out the school of paleontology?

carpet

While we were at Dutch Design week, we saw the work of Kiki van Eijk and I fell more than a little bit in love with her carpets.



I'll take one of each, please.

I also liked her Knick Knack pots.

And drooled over her tables of fabrics.

gone south

One of the perils of home ownership is that a house comes with neighbors. We are extremely lucky in this regard because almost all of our neighbors are delightful, friendly, fun and well, neighborly- but I did say "almost all" there, didn't I?

Our next door neighbors are snowbirds- they go south for the winter- and left for Florida this morning. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to the next 8 months.

Go Yard

On Sunday, our friends Amy and Mark went with us to see our friends Greg Tom, Ben Teague, and Laith Karmo exhibition, Go Yard.

They used an alternative space in a retail building to put on a great show.

Congratulations, guys!

birthday boy!

Today is Steven's birthday! I got up this morning and made him some buttermilk pancakes for breakfast and topped them off with some of my homemade raspberry jam.

(did you know you can make buttermilk by adding a tablespoon of vinegar to milk and letting it sit for a few minutes? Until this morning I didn't, but now I do :) )

Happy birthday, old man! I love you.

mash up

Eclectic Method - A John Hughes Production from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

This makes me want to dance like Molly Ringwald circa 1985.
Have a good weekend!

cream of the crop

If you have wondered what the creamiest, most delicious side dish in the world is, wonder no longer! It's parsnip puree with sauteed Brussels sprouts. (from the garden, of course. I may have pulled it out, but we still have a whole mess of stuff to eat!)

Growing up, one of my favorite foods in the world was mashed potatoes, but after having this I might be ready to trade them in for parsnip puree.

Recipe here. (originally from Gourmet. sigh.)

my pumpkin

When our nephews were visiting a couple weeks ago, we went pumpkin picking.
3 year old Declan was very serious about making sure that he found the right one and lined them all up just to make sure.

shuttered

We're back home from our whirlwind trip, but there are more things I want to share from the Netherlands, so I'm going to keep posting things over the next few days.

One of the reasons I love the Lloyd Hotel is because of all the design eye candy in the interiors. Not just the spaces, but the objects as well.

This Droog rag chair is just hanging out in a hallway and it's a lot more fun to see it there than it is to see it at Moss with a big ole "do not touch sign on it". (I understand why they don't want you to touch it- that's a $5,500 pile of rags- but it's still a lot less fun.)

But better than getting to touch the things I have seen before, is seeing new things. One thing that I especially liked were these felt window treatments.

They are backed with a stiff material (I'm not sure what) and hinged like shutters.

And they are lovely.

around our necks

I felt like crying and throwing up looking at Chris Jordan's horrifically beautiful photographs of albatross chicks on the Midway, but couldn't stop looking at them either.

From his website: "These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent."

see more from this series and his incredible Running the Numbers series here.

Book 'em, Danno

They published a big fat book about the Ceramics and Architecture project we were a part of, to go along with the exhibition.

Our work is on pages 93-97 if you ever come across it.

(What the heck is, "book 'em, Danno" from? And does it make me culturally ignorant that I don't know?)

RIP

It was seeing her work at the Art Institute in Chicago that first made me want to work in ceramics.

Rest in peace Ruth Duckworth.

why the caged bird sings

I love this swing by Nathan Wierink and Tineke Beunders that we saw in Eindhoven.
I don't think that I could stop myself from singing like a canary while swinging in it.

new work

You know when someone whose work you have always loved does something new and you get all excited and giddy about it and it starts you thinking about doing something new with your own work- even if you can't quite figure out what yet?

Well, that's how I felt when I saw these photos of our dear friend Jill Oberman's new work.

Gorgeous, isn't it?

waffler

More from Dutch Design Week: In the cafe across from the exhibition hall there is this giant Medieval looking waffle making contraption.

It's very impressive.

However, the waffles it makes are not. They're somehow burnt and pasty, and just kind of tasteless all at the same time.

Can't really blame them. Eindhoven is famous for its design school, not it's culinary one. Besides, Steven ate them anyway.

And the space was amazing.

Speaking of waffles, have I ever posted Steven's waffle recipe?

I should. (if only because then he'll have to make me some.) Steven makes great waffles..