Well, the New Urban Arts zine swap is approaching, and I sideswiped myself into working on a zine about how to make bread. So I’ve been doing that for the last little while. I’ve never laid out a document consisting mainly of blocks of text before, so I’ve been constantly referring to Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, which Andrew lent me a while ago. It’s great — if I’d gone to school for graphic design I probably would have found out about it years ago — but I am delighted now to discover the many opportunities for distraction and nerding-out that exist within its covers…

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the computer, which is all right, but I am pretty ready to go back to actually drawing. The bread zine is going to be photocopied on good paper, possibly with a screenprint of some kind on the cover: 24 small pages of just one recipe for delicious homemade bread, that you can vary and adjust to your own taste, usable even by someone who’s never baked anything before. If you want a copy, let me know!

Additionally, I got a large fan, making summer a little sweeter:

(which happens to be the same model fan that inspired this project… hmm, I just realized I never put up any images of how that turned out…)

. . . Andrew brought me a giant jar of the burdock-root kimchi we started earlier in the spring. He and I made some more drawings, including, just yesterday, this one:

(a detail)

. . . and, I picked hundreds of green beans from my garden and made dilly beans, about which I can only say, home canning, though complicated, is easier than it looks, try it, try it, try it!

geographical expansion news: If you’re in or around Portland, Maine, you can now go look at and caress some of my posters and postcards at Eli Phant, a ‘handmade stuff store’ run by old friends, that just opened on the eastern end of Congress St!

I’ve been reading Lilah’s blog…

…and I’ve been really psyched about Mickey’s comics. All right!

These things were making me happy around the end of May / beginning of June, I wanted to post them then, but various stuff like work & family visits got in the way.

[sweet potato & parsnip curry with rice; cilantro, green onions, and homemade yogurt on top. this bowl, one of my favorites, was made by awesome friend & ceramicist & artist Joan Wyand!]

[I found this stuck into the busted retaining wall in front of our house, another variant of blackletter font is on the back]

[these were found within days and blocks of each other, along Manton Ave.]

[succulents & cacti growing in their newly large pots — the third-from-left cactus has a tiny flower on it]

[and, last but not least, in my community garden plot, front to back: green beans, a mystery squash that thought it was a bean, chard, kale, radishes, asparagus! hooray!]