I heard Brandi Shearer for the first time a few weeks ago when she played at SPACE in Evanston, IL. Her easy banter with the crowd and amazing, effortless vocals caught my attention & I’ve been playing her music relentlessly ever since. If you get a chance to see her live, don’t miss it- she’s even better in person than recorded.
We found an AMAZING bike shop last spring, The Bike Rack, in St. Charles, Illinois. In addition to selling traditional bikes, Hal Honeyman will fit and offer advice to help kids with special needs find a bike that works for them. Hal began adapting bikes for his own son, Jacob, and now adapts traditional bikes with such specialty items such as extra wide tires and belted seats, and also offers adaptive bikes and tandems.
Look at the red beauty Kyle got at The Bike Rack!
To find out more about The Bike Rack, Creative Mobility & Hal Honeyman, check out this YouTube video:
Jill Brazel, photographer extraordinaire & amazing person, has an article on the Canon site this month. Check out Jill’s article here.
You can see more of Jill’s work on her website, JillBrazel.com
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I announced to the whole family at dinner, “I love this can opener so much, I’m going to marry it!”
The seven-year-old, laughed himself right off the chair he was sitting on. He half believed me because he was there when I opened three cans a mere 30 minutes ago. We really needed just one, but it was so much fun to watch the little mouse of a can opener wiggle around the top, unassisted by a human hand, that we just had to try it again and again.
I haven’t yet thrown out the manual can openers I used to fight with. Their days are numbered.
One Touch Can Opener – $19.99 Bed Bath and Beyond
I was a guest blogger today on Meredith Sinclair’s VERY popular blog/vlog, Hoo-dee-Hoo. Check out the short piece I wrote on my attempts to help children find ways to connect with a special needs child, especially mine.
You can find Meredith, the effervescent, funny, calm-in-the-storm we’d all like to be, by clicking on the link below.
Can’t wait to get back in the studio…
I’m so excited about the black nightstand! It’s an old, beat up, Haywood Wakefield that I’m reworking. Studs, skulls & bones- my goth 7-year-old has called dibs. I’m dreaming of sugar skulls and jolly rogers.
The little brown table with the pink medallion is almost finished- just working on the final polyurethane coat. That will be showing up on my website & in my Etsy shop soon.
Yup, mud season in Chicago. From now until the hot, hot days of summer we’ll be jumping in puddles, squishing through soggy sod, and finding mud smushed in carpets, clumped on hardwood floors and smeared on doors, windows and on the inside of ears. How does it get there? We don’t know, but we’re sure it has something to do with little boys…
I know it seems early here in Chicago. We have snow, and we’ll probably have more, perhaps even one of those winter storms that hint at a snow day.
But today it feels like SPRING. Birds are singing their return, the sun is shining & the sky is the bluest blue, a blue we don’t remember through all those gray winter skies.
And look, there’s proof! Here’s what we found in the yard today:
Vintage-Twisted started in my dining room, while my middle guy, Kyle was recuperating from his second big eyelid reconstruction surgery. We were going to be home for a whole month, yes, that’s right, 30 days, with no one outside of our immediate family coming in and Kyle and I weren’t going out. There were two issues: high risk of infection and ripped stitches from a rambunctious six-year-old’s daily living. So we had to stay close, isolated and quiet.
What would keep Kyle interested for hours at a time, and me, too?
Here’s our solution:
I love the name I chose- Vintage for the salvaged wooden pieces I collect, & Twisted for the changes I make to them.
On hearing the name of my new venture, a friend laughed, “Perfect- you’re kinda vintage, and kinda twisted, just perfect.”
Now, what kind of friend is that?
Vintage-Twisted 