Everything is just continuing as it was.

I like having a pine tree in my apartment, but its presence this year has meant the opposite of work - its existence in our living room has been of symbol of regret to every invitation and chore for more than 2 weeks over the holidays.  So with everyone now on flights back over the ocean, we chucked this lovely baum to the curb.  I'm ready to fall back into planning and playing out the next 6-8 months.  Something that is a daily routine in this house.

Unfortunately, some sort of horrible haze has my body in a phlegm-y grip and my will to be productive isn't winning.  I did, however, start to fill THIS place up!  The 2 minutes of daylight Berlin currently experiences makes taking proper pictures difficult, but I'll try again tomorrow.

Oh yeah, I'm working on putting together a series of workshops for artists of useful bookbinding techniques.  These will be small group classes where people will get a chance to experiment with some techniques and materials from making a portfolio folder to binding loose sheets and making your own sketchbooks.  Fun stuff!  If this is something that interests you or if you know someone who might be into this, comment below or send me a message!

My Binding Side

Sometimes I like to do a lot of this:

My life in Nadja occupies most of the year so I set a goal by applying to a big market each year.  This last weekend we hopped a train and spent just 24 hours in Hamburg for Hello-Handmade.  I have to give some big ups to A for helping me haul my heavy cases around town and spend an entire day with crafty types.  Selling is the hardest part of the process for me and there is no way for me not to feel awkward doing so.

I generally like to do this online, but I should mention that my other life takes over the next weeks and my various shops will be closed until I return to Berlin mid-November.  If you see something you'd like to know more about, let me know!

Happy (belated) Birthday Mom/Sarah/Baba & Pop/Alex/Deda

After about a year of planning, my six siblings and I threw a surprise birthday party for our parents.  It wasn't an easy soiree to pull together with all of us spread out up and down the east coast and me so far away.  Besides that, the guest list included members of our family and old friends spread out along both coasts!  However, these expressions, caught blurrily by my niece Maggie, made it worthwhile.

A couple other highlights caught by Maggie in the moments that followed....

nice ride

This hasn't exactly been the summer of leisure Aidan and I planned so today we shirked our duties to all of our other projects and took a nice 25 (or so) km ride around the city.  

Our only real destination was the bauhaus-archiv to see an exhibition that closes very soon on the work of Benita Koch-Otte. There were maybe a dozen woven pieces, and lots of really beautiful designs on paper which made me wish more of them got made into proper textiles.  I'd seen a lot of her designs on various websites, but I guess like all art, it's best seen up close and for real so if you're in Berlin and this is up your alley, check it out while you can. 

On our way there we passed my favorite building in Berlin:

We left the Archiv and rode up the Lankwehrkanal to Rosa Luxemburg's memorial and then down to one or our favorite riding spots.  A perfect day!

slime work

Getting back to work today in my little corner meant stringing up a line and coating a whole bunch of washi paper in konnyaku starch!  I guess most people who use it try to get as much wrinkly texture as possible into their paper, but as my plans require strong and flat-ish paper, I was a little gentler in my wringing.  I got my little tub magic-paper-strengthening starch at The Paper Place in Toronto.  

From slimy balls to majestic sheets.  Soon to be embroidered and worked into book covers!

unlike me

I have a habit of doing things that go against my instincts. Getting up on stage is one of them. Running public and/or interactive projects like The Wunderkabinet and now, The Lesen Lounge is another.

I'm shy and I'm awkward and interacting with strangers kind of freaks me out. Thank goodness for the incredibly generous help - particularly from Ina, Cati, and Aidan - I've gotten to pull it all together, but when it comes down to it, the responsibility to explain myself to the confused masses falls on me. Geographically, this also means I do it in mangled English-German.

Anxieties aside, I'm pretty excited to be pulling out The Lesen Lounge for the first time this Sunday. I've decided to unveil the finished bike trailer/library box after the Sunday outing, but here's a 'before' paint, 'after' construction picture:

It'll be going out regularly - as long as the sun is shining - over the next months. If you live in Berlin you should come and visit. To find out when and where we'll be, check our website!

a new toy and some rain

I have so much to work on these days that the storms and rain this last week only serve as an excuse to not leave the house. Today, a lack of food in the fridge - and fear of atrophy - forced me out.
I walked from our place to the Turkish Market along the water, through a quickly disappearing no-man's-land. All the rain these last weeks has made everything so green, and flowers are sprouting up out of the sandy soil. I didn't have my camera with me so I took out my newly upgraded ipod (with camera) - a birthday gift from Aidan - to fool around with along my walk. It's not a terribly great camera, but also not a terribly terrible one. And, my listening is uninterrupted as I fiddle with other functions.
It's a little difficult to imagine how the picture will look large as you fiddle with neat little editing tools, and I think I may have gone a little overboard with edge-fading and filters.

Parks, Kultur, Difficulties

Since first hearing about Kulturpark and what they hoped to do with Spreepark, idling and slowly being stolen away by people (I presume) hoping to add some Berlin cachet to their apartments, I was totally onboard and even contributed to their Kickstarter campaign. Then came the inevitable walls of bureaucracy and when they opened the park to the public this weekend, this is what we encountered along a (literally) red-taped perimeter around a few bier stands and food stalls:

What was operational during the weekend was the old train tour around the perimeter of the entire park. It was surreal and oddly unsafe feeling - particularly - as we moved over the florescent water of a decaying ride and through a pitch-dark tunnel that smelled pungently of rot.

I do hope some their big plans come to fruition. I went exploring the park early one morning a few years ago with my friend, Jill, and what I saw from the train this weekend proves that the park's vacancy is leading to it very slowly being lost.
Further reading, or what the park was like in the summer of 2009: http://papermademepoor.blogspot.de/2009/07/early-morning-amusement.html

Solo

A few nights ago, Aidan began a solo tour with A-Sun Amissa. It started with a really great show here, in Berlin, at West Germany. I wish I could share audio from the entire night here, on the blog. It was super great. Between sets, Helge dj'd a perfect mix and Aidan played in a super trio with Erik Skodvin & Andrea Belfi. Really only the third time - ever - the three of them played together, it was truly great and they've got to get that shit recorded. Seriously.
Aidan being on the road, I'm left at home to work and (grudgingly) make my own coffee. It's tough getting motivated when the workaholic I share my space with isn't around to make me feel guilty about loafing around, but I'm working on the foundations of what will be The Wunderkabinet's big project of the year. I've pared down from constant exhibitions to accommodate for tours and a trip back to Canada this summer. I'd also like to go as nuts as possible where the kabinet is concerned so focussing on one big project right now is the way to go. More on that later.
For now, I'm working through an immediate to-do list of things long overdue. Alright, I'm also crocheting myself a cape while watching episodes of Downton Abbey. This is the first thing I've ever crocheted using an actual pattern and it's a big project! It will be about hip length with arm slits and button-up. I thought I'd try to chronicle my progress:

Not so much at the moment, but more to come.

Domo arigato

We went to Japan.

We toured with a really great band - that we also made a little collaborative tour cd with - called Vampillia. Not only is Vampillia a great band and NOT TO BE MISSED should they come to your town, they are hosts like no other and just very swell people. We came home to a frozen Berlin.

A small obsession with little trees.

I've spent a lot of time staring out of car, train, and aeroplane windows, and it might be my years spent in the middle of Ontario forests with my family nostalgically catching up with me, but I've got hundreds of photos that I took from these cars, trains and aeroplanes of northern European forests. I love the way birch trees look in the snow and clumps pine trees look from the air. I even bought a giant piece of locally woven linen in Tallinn, Estonia last winter after I was inspired by the landscape of wintery Finland as we flew over it and wanted to embroider what I saw. Well, that or the icy water that clogged up the small channel that separates Finland and Estonia. I can't decide so that chunk of fabric remains in a box.

Instead, I've been doing a lot of this.

I sold a couple these before I could even photograph them - my own fault for archival laziness - but, I kind of love the way they're turning out so there'll be many more.

So Much Road

Sometimes so much happens between the posts I make here that I find it a little overwhelming to 'update'. Sometimes I'd rather just go for a bike ride than unload my camera. I've really only done one thing since that September post, but it has left me with a million pictures I need to sort, an apartment to clean, and mountains of laundry. AND, I'm not quite finished.

This last tour had us criss-crossing Germany, in Belgium, The Netherlands, France, The United Kingdom, Norway, Latvia, and Lithuania. Next week we're off to Greece, Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, and Hungary. Oh, and we'll be spending part of the first week of December on the island of Madeira. Our schedule has been a little mental, with just enough time in Berlin between trips for a nap in our own bed and a bowl of Aidan's comforting gruel. At this point, I would be wallowing in my fatigue had these last weeks not been very good. [knocking on wood] Also, I'm pretty excited as the rest of our time on the road this year has us going to places we've never been.

Here's just a few pictures from a few of those places...

in order: Kavka - Antwerp, Belgium; Kafe Kult - Munich, Germany; walking around old Nürnberg, Germany; Frappant - Hamburg, Germany; old fort ruins on the Baltic in Liepaja, Latvia; mossy ground swallowing me up in Durbe, Latvia; Durbe, Lativa; Aidan rehearsing with his Latvian band in 400 year old church; a piece of medieval Lithuania outside the cathedral in Vilnius