Published: August 31st, 2010

The air in Montana was so crisp and pure, it was impossible not to feel great. A more frivolous take might be that the state boasts the best climate for good hair and no makeup. Which doesn’t explain why I lost more than six games of pool to my eight-year-old nephew, but at least the pictures convey how much fun we all had.
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Published: August 31st, 2010

Time to Forage for Sticks to Make This Clock!
This rough-hewn but somehow quite elegant timekeeper adorned our cabin at The Ranch at Rock Creek. I want to believe I could start collecting nice sticks now, and chop them to the appropriate lengths and glue them together at just the right angles to create something similar, but perhaps that’s a bit…ambitious. Maybe e-Bay will come to the rescue, and I will scour yard sales in wooded locales.
In any case, something so woodsy and craft-y would lend a city apartment a nice dose of sylvan magic!
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Published: August 28th, 2010

Killer Fashion
Of course we all want to avoid needing first aid. But cuts and scrapes happen, dude, so prepare to treat them glamourously. And without Hello Kitty. Cynthia Rowley designed these for Band-Aid, and I might wear one without a bloodletting.
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Published: August 25th, 2010

Grape Expectations
We didn’t notice it when we first moved in. The front of our building was really leafy that September, but I thought the foliage was ivy of some sort. That winter, our neighbors told us to cut down the big, ugly, dilapidated brown stalk they said was a dead grapevine. We didn’t listen, and last summer were rewarded when it came back to life and produced dozens of bunches of grapes. Same thing this year.
We abandoned our delusions of becoming Manhattan’s first vineyard when a flavor-chemist identified the unmistakable scent of methyl anthranilate: they’re Concord grapes. So, we stick to jelly, and hopefully this year, my pal Johnny Iuzzini will come over and make some granita.

The Best Grape Jelly There Is
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Published: August 25th, 2010

Read 'Em and Wear
This isn’t a delicious pile of candy; it’s a necklace of beads handmade from strips of magazine pages! (And a gift from my super-sweet friends at Micato Safaris. They know Kenya better than anyone so it’s no wonder they discovered such a treasure.)
Fair-trade workers in Kenya craft the beads by cutting a thin strip from a colorful page, rolling it tightly from end to end and sealing with a daub of glue, then soaking it in varnish. They’re so intriguingly beautiful, and if you look closely, you can see text from long-ago stories. The company is called Acacia Creations (not a polished site, but it tells the story and lists retailers) and the artisans share in the profits.
Surely a lovelier end for reading materials than as fishwrap. And it suits the Western-Boho-native vibe upon us for fall.
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