pinterest

Oof. It's hard to know when these gaps in posts will happen. I have a ton of inspiring images to share with you, as well as some recipes, but in the last few weeks I've taken a class at the Center for the Book, a weekly extended ed class at the California College of Art, gotten really busy at my full-time job, been volunteering frequently at the Center as well, blogging for the Center, getting into Pinterest (above, more below), and had literally half-a-dozen house-guests  all while trying to keep drawing and working on my portfolio. I've been prioritizing my art blog, and will continue to do so, but I am also going to queue up some posts for this blog whenever I can. While I'm still cooking a lot, working full-time means that I'm not usually around when there's the best light in my kitchen (about 10 AM in my opinion) for photographing food, so I don't have much. I've taken some photos -- a wilted spinach salad, my favorite tofu dish, some of my favorite snack and comfort foods -- but the light is no good and some of them are even blurry, so I'll have to wait to share those recipes until I have better pictures. In the meantime, I am working on a post rounding up my favorite recipes from around the internet lately (but this too is more time-intensive than tumbling or posting my favorite artwork, so I don't know when that will be either).

But back to this post! If you're on Pinterest, check me out! There is definitely some overlap with my tumblr and with this blog, but there is also lots of other things that don't quite fit, or that I'm simply using to organize my thoughts for projects or my daydreams for super-unaffordable products.

San Francisco Center for the Book Blog

First of all, I'm sorry for those of you who subscribe to both this and my art blog, because you'll be getting almost perfectly duplicate posts about this.  Duplicate posts like these will happen only very rarely, when the content of the two blogs overlap. 

For the last few months I've been volunteering at the wonderful San Francisco Center for the Book. And recently, I've started contributing to their new blog! So far I've been posting about my favorite book art and artists. Many of my planned and past posts touch on work that explores the relationship between analog books and digital media or e-books. Other posts are simply appreciating and ruminating on some of the beautiful work that book artists have created. Other posts so far have been about events, workshops, and classes held by or connected to the Center. Definitely check out the blog! You can also see all the posts I've made so far. 

watercolor ceramics

Love these watercolor ceramics from PALAiS XIII. Would love to feel like I'm part of watercolor world.

Via bloesem.

Meta Wraber

I've been following the work of Meta Wraber since her wonderful work appeared on They Draw and Cook. I absolutely love her sketchy, folksy watercolors, bright colors, and idiosyncratic line work. Definitely check out her blog for more lovely drawings of animals, food, people, landscapes, and more. 

They Draw and Cook favorite illustations

They Draw and Cook is a fun blog posting illustrated recipes by artists and illustrators from all over the world. I originally learned about it via notcot. My own recipe is up on their blog now, as well as on my art blog. These are some of my favorites. 

Above, Marmalade Flapjacks by Matt Dawson. (See the original post for a full-size, legible version!) I love how all the arms end up showing all of the steps at once. (Also, the helper bees!) 

Vegetable Stock by Nate Padavick. Beautiful colors and specimen-like arrangement. 

Meatballs by Kevin Valente. I had lots of favorites, and tried to pick only vegan or vegan-izable ones, but the combination of watercolor and graphite and the perspective of the road and the text and the speech bubbles were all just too wonderful for me to exclude this one. (Just pretend that there aren't 3 kinds of meat, including veal, in this recipe, and look at the pretty picture.) 

Fly off the Plate Pancakes by Erin Watson. Another fun and dynamic composition. This is one of the few pieces in this project that really challenges the space, by creating its own frame and then bursting out of it. (They're all the same size because those were the submission rules -- some of them will be part of a book.) 

A Well-Salted Salad with a Little Vinegar and Good Olive Oil by Bozena Wojtaszek. This one is all textile and thread! How awesome is that. I would love to have a whole soft book of lovely recipes (especially for salad!).

The Original Spaghetti, Garlic, Oil and Chili Pepper by Sara Lecca. A fun combination of textures and images. The illustration of the guy eating spaghetti is so animated, and so like eating spaghetti.

Spring Garden Soup by Meta Wraber. I just adore this expressive, evocative style of watercolor. And we all know I'm a sucker for interesting handwriting. The brushstrokes and lines and colors are all fantastic.

cozy holiday preparation

I love this picture (found via frolic); I love all the colors and patterns and how it illustrates the coziness of holiday preparation.

I'm definitely going to make some vegan cardamom bread this week.

Posting is going to get more consistent again after the new year. I've had a busy last few weeks, and now I'm sick, so blogging is taking a back seat. I'm excited to see where A Billion Tastes and Tunes goes next year! I've been intermittent with my posting and with my ideas for where this blog is going, but I've always had fun posting to it.

in-between clutter and unrealistic sparseness (unrealistic for me, anyway!)

After my post on attainably-cluttered rooms and my post on sparse, white spaces, I found a few more cluttered and cluttered-ish or in-between spaces that I love. 

Above is one of my favorite interior decor pictures ever, via the style files. (It was also one of my very first tumblr posts.) It has color! Plants! Flowers! Porcelain! Rustic wood! Sunlight! Slanty ceilings! Pots and pans and things hanging! 

From Meryl Smith's feature on the Selby. This is some clutter I can seriously relate to! All the specimens and natural items on the walls really make this room for me. 

The above and remaining pictures are from Ann Wood's sneak peak on design sponge. I love Ann Wood's work a lot (I post her work and in progress pictures all the time on my tumblr) so it's a treat to see what her place looks like. I love how much like her work her apartment is, especially that decaying curtain in the picture above. 

plants make all houses beautiful

I have this idea that potted plants make rooms like awesome, and can overcome clutter and other setbacks just by being alive and green. So here's some more interior decor pictures, of rooms with plants. 

The above picture is via design sponge.

Besides the plants and all the light from these windows, I also really like all the baskets and textures in this picture, via seenandsaid. 

Another plant-filled room via seenandsaid. 

I think this is a great example of how much power plants have for me, because other than the beautiful windows and the plants, I don't really like this room! By Petra Bindel, via sfgirlbybay. 

The above and remaining photos are from Nicolette Camille's sneak peak on design sponge. She's a florist, so there are plants aplenty! One of my favorite things about this series of photos is that, other than the huge amount of plantlife in the last photo, these are photos I love but are still somewhat attainable for me. A lot of my furniture and belongings are already in the same style that I love in these pictures, which is promising! 

cluttered and beautiful spaces

In my post about the Society, Inc., I talked about how I tend to love interior design pictures of huge, sunlit, white spaces sparsely decorated with minimal furniture and a few splashes of color. I will probably never have a place like this -- I just own too much stuff. And now I'm about to move into a tiny bedroom in a teensy-tiny apartment, where I don't have a living room to dump to my extra things like bookcases and knicknacks, let alone a separate studio to put my art supplies. 

So this post is devoted to beautiful pictures of cluttered spaces, with emphasis on workspaces. 

Above: photo by Jeremy Levine Design on flickr, posted on Pitch Design Union. I found it on cmongirl's tumblr. This is still a bigger room than my bedroom, so I have no hope of this much open space (even if I had only a bed and a dresser). It's not exactly "cluttered," but not exactly sparse, either.  I love the wall shelves to keep surfaces clear, the tons of stuff under the desk areas, and the stacks of books.

Kitchen clutter! Someday I'll have a kitchen with more than one unit of counterspace (not including where a dish drainer would go) but that day is not now. 

Picture above via Hello Neëst !. 

This sewing shed belongs to Artemis of Tales of a Junkaholic. I think this picture shows pretty much the entire shed. As I'm planning my new teeny bedroom, I'm appreciating elements like the cute, compact baskets and other storage she's using.

Picture from designsponeshop flickr, discovered via please sir. It's hard to see just how cluttered this space is in terms of furniture, but I love all of the color, pattern, fabrics, and textures. 

Another one I mostly like for the clutter on the walls, via the steampunk home. I don't think I could pull this sort of thing off in my place, though. For one thing, I think having walls this cluttered, in addition to my necessarily cluttered furniture, would make everything claustrophobic. 

Another workspace cluttered with baskets, books, and wall adornments. This one is by Angie Cao, via tea for joy. 

linkspam, what I've been up to, and sorry for the absence

heirloom cherry tomatoes, my favorite tomatoes at the moment

Sorry for the lag in posting for the past week. I'm finally getting my move across the country together! More on that as it develops. 

I've been cooking and drawing in the last week, so look out for recipes here (pesto, coming up soon, is pictured below) and new work on my art blog in the next few days. 

Today I killed a ton of time with candybar, software that lets you change icons on your mac. At first it was because 1) I'd just read (and downloaded) this gorgeous post from Jessica Hische about the dock icon set she made, and 2) the new itunes icon is hideous. Next, I was browsing iconfactory, where I found this cute Doctor Who icon set (can anyone who has watched Doctor Who and owned a mac possibly convince me that a TARDIS icon is not completely perfect for my time machine backups?). I also found these pretty steampunk icons (though I'm not quite sure what to do with them... I love that trashcan, but will I ever recognize it as a trashcan?) plus this other, HUGE set of still more steampunky icons (it's somewhat more hit or miss, but there are so many that I found a lot I loved. the hideous itunes icon is now replaced by a gramophone). And finally, tons of amazing and gorgeous icons by PixelPress, which I found on a notcot link. 

I've been collecting other links, too. I looked up book arts in the San Francisco bay area: Bay Area Book Arts; San Francisco Bay Area Book Arts; and the zine library at Rock Paper Scissors. Also miscellaneous links: I seriously think that all of these animals are cute, especially that amazing star-nosed mole;  Smashing Magazine's new list of great wordpress themes; advice from Frank Chimero on his tumblr, which has already been linked approximately everywhere, and a corollary reading list which is linked slightly fewer places; this cool diy project for storage "books" on design*sponge; these perfect gingko-leaf shaped post-its, which I found on myaloysius.tumblr.com, which is the tumblr of a polar bear's tale, which I've already reblogged a ton on my own tumblr. 

Whew! That was a lot of links. Here's some pesto, recipe post forthcoming: 

arugula and baby spinach carbon emissions can be as bad as beef

photo via nettsu on flickr

I was so sad when I read this article on boing boing about how bad arugula and baby spinach can be for the environment! Basically, if you don't live near where it's grown, and especially if you live far away and buy it out of season and/or greenhouse grown, the carbon footprint of these delicious, delicious greens is as bad as that of beef (what beef, precisely, it doesn't say). I only learned my love of arugula recently. Fortunately it's in season right now, I don't live crazily far from where it's grown, and when I move to San Francisco I'll grow my own (though I'm cringing thinking of all the baby spinach I bought in winter when I lived in New York). It'll be rad. I'll also grow my own tomatoes so I can food-process up some homemade, extra-spicy salsa whenever I please. Okay Bay Area? Get ready for some arugula salads and rad, homemade, heirloom tomato salsa. 

first food processor experience: vegan yumyum tomato basil cream pasta

I used my food processor for the first time ever on this delicious super quick tomato basil cream pasta. (The photo is by vegan yum yum as well, she has a gorgeous flickr account with photos of her food.) And you guys? I love having a food processor. This is one of those things that before I had a food processor, was not super quick. (It still would've been delicious.) 

pasta with vegan sausage and greens

I had some Italian-sausage-style tofurkey sausages leftover from when my father decided he wanted to grill me something meat-like, so I whipped up a vegan version of this quick dinner recipe from the kitchn, simply substituting the vegan sausage for the meat sausage and leaving out the parmesan. Next time I think I'll try a bit of nutritional yeast as well. 

clothes from shopruche.com

Contemplating this cherbourg dress. Not quite my ideal white linen day dress, but it's made of beautiful material and has large pockets. 

Love this gorgeous easy weekend white linen blazer! If only it were a dress...

I've been wanting some bright, cadmium red shoes like these restricted scrabble oxfords, but they're currently out of stock in my size. Waiting for them to come back in stock will give me a while to decide, I suppose. 

shopruche.com discovered via lushlee.