Sometimes it’s fun to take a vacation in your own hometown.  Lucky for us, two weekends this summer brought our cousins to Austin, so we just put on our tennies and gimme caps and went on a road trip … across town.

Our first Austin-y thing to do was walk around the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail. The trail  around the lake is surrounded by shady trees and the path has that wonderful crunchy sound as one walks on the crushed granite.  Plus, this trail offers the best people-watching and dog watching in town. In fact, we saw several dogs that looked like the possible grown-up versions of Neville, our new puppy, whose lineage is unknown.  We inquired of several dog-walking owners about the breeds of their dogs and we are now pretty sure that Neville might be a Collie-Lab-Rottweiler-Shepherd mix … maybe that would be a Colab-rotshep?

This is Barton Springs!  It is FREEZING … which feels really great on a hot summer day.  Here are the cousins s-l-o-w-l-y inching into the icy water.  Barton Springs is famous for the nude sunbathers that have relaxed there through the years, but we didn’t see any, and even if we had, I would have had to crop them out of my pictures since this blog is rated G.

This is the Zilker Zephyr!  We have happy memories of bringing the girls to ride this miniature train when they were little.  It’s a pleasant 3-mile circle, and I can even remember riding it with my grandparents when I was young!  This 50-year old line is truly the little engine that could!

Here is a brand new set of nursery art that we just added to our group of ever growing nursery art canvases.  This group is called Little Train and there are six canvases from which to choose, including a red polka-dotted caboose.  All aboard!

The last time Julianna and I used sidewalk chalk was at least a decade ago, but as you might guess, the art form hasn’t changed all that much…

I was lucky enough to be able to visit my sister Jules in Virginia this past weekend, and we had a blast.  It was a good old-fashioned vacation for me: the beach, the bay, more McDonald’s than usual – AND a sidewalk chalk contest in Gloucester, VA.

Jules and I saw the sign for “Chalk Fest ’09″ in the Old Dominion art department as she was giving me a tour and we thought, “What the heck!” (By the way, they have some amazingly cool letterpressed posters all over the place in there – one of their professors apparently just letterpresses announcements all the time…how fine is that!)

We woke up bright and early on Saturday and headed out to Gloucester, which appears to be everything you could want from small town America. (The festival took place on Main Street, of course.)  Julianna had had the foresight to drive us to the Dollar Tree the night before to pick up some sponges for grinding color in between the cracks in the cement – and since Chalk Fest happened to be held on asphalt, this was extremely helpful!  We set to work on this year’s theme “A Village View” at about 10 and didn’t stop – but for a boyscout-cooked hot-dog break – until 3, when all chalks had to be dropped.  Then we wandered Main Street for an hour sipping particularly saturated Italian sodas from the local cafe until the judge’s votes were in.  And we won first!  It was a bit surreal.  And very fun.  And very – well, sisterly.

So, if you’re feeling inspired, just go dig out that old bucket of chalk that I know is hiding somewhere between a dusty hose and Christmas decorations in the garage. Remedy the taupe-ness of the driveway!

How very fun to be featured again in the online children’s design magazine Tot Trends! As you can see, Cathy Heck Nursery Art is front and center in the article about cool new products for a modern nursery’s decor.

And we’re making “room to grow” here at the studio as we speak:  There are new collections in the works, and ideas galore about different products that we can’t wait to try out on the site. We’ve also just updated the Noah 2 of a Kind nursery art collection to match the fabric collection that is being produced by Springs and sold in Jo-Ann stores.

Click here to see the article and enjoy 25% off any order at Cathy Heck Nursery Art!

Happy Trending.

This simple idea has changed my team mom life.  For years, I have been doing my momly duty of signing up for a snack day.  And, for years, I have spent way too much time standing in front of the fruit section of my grocery store wondering exactly how much I should buy for one team of active girl athletes.  And, for years, I have provided enough healthy snackage for TEN teams.  I would supply large vats of strawberries or grapes or oranges and they would be passed around during halftime.  When the still-abundant large vats of leftover fruit came back to the sidelines, after 20 sets of game-day hands had been digging into the containers, it was hard to imagine really saving it for family and friends.
Finally, one of my fellow moms suggested that we provide all of our snacks in individual snack bags with exactly two orange quarters and about 10 grapes.  Simple, yet brilliant.  No waste and no wasted time in grocery store indecision.  Hallelujah … I am free from the burden of quantity overestimation. Fellow team moms, enjoy!

I think today is a good day to start another category here at the Studio Scrapbook: Something Lovely – for those precious moments when coincidence (or tireless labor paired with coincidence) arranges the elements of this earth in such a way that for a moment, we are able to witness something that is just     simply     lovely.  For example, this morning, I looked over my left shoulder in the direction of a sound from outside, and this was the way the light, the cactus, and the curtain had decided to arrange themselves:

and I had to look back a few more times.

May you also find something lovely today.

It rained in Austin, Texas.  After a long, hot and dry 68-day drought, it really, really rained. When I heard an unfamiliar tapping sound outside, I looked over my shoulder and saw these blue daze soaking in the tap, tap, tapping of real raindrops.  Everyone around here is so excited about the cool wet rain … you might think this little studio duck is presenting a “D is for Duck,” but actually,  he is saying that D is for the delicious, delectable, and divine downpour that finally came our way.

It was delightful!

Here’s to the camera-toting, bike-riding, land-manning, funnyman we love so much on his 50th birthday.  (He’s also the one we call to save us when Ellen has accidentally trashed critical html files or is for any reason sinking in a quicksand of unfamiliar code…)

We love you Uncle Doug!

Enjoy the ride!

I guess I’ve still got Baby Expo on my mind – walking around the neighborhood, baby clothes on the line keep reminding me of all of those tiny onesies!

I love trade shows!  There’s so much to see and so many ideas generated and so many connections made. It makes me even more certain that I would have adored a World’s Fair – back when there were such things.

My mom and I are 100% rejuvenated and ready to leap into our next collection. We were particularly enamored with ideas involving applique, which you can see here on one of our fleece blankets. Stitches and fabrics, here we come!

We have just returned from ABC Baby Expo in Las Vegas!  Unfortunately, no non-media cameras were allowed inside, so you will just have to imagine the hundreds of cute onesies, the thousands of new pacifiers, the millions of new blankies, and the trillions of new nursing bras.  But we did have our camera with us after the show, so here we are seeing Las Vegas for the very first time.  Wow, it’s sparkly!

After we walked aisles and aisles of baby gear, we decided that we couldn’t leave Las Vegas without seeing The Strip.  It was a neon extravaganza, a Disneyland for grownups.  We took the monorail down to the MGM Grand, bought a tee shirt with a lion for Margaret, and then decided that we had to see the fountains at the Bellagio (Oceans 11 and all) … They were spectacular.  The pond from which they sprung was more like a lake, and they “danced” to the music … I mean they really danced.  We watched one “fountain show” set to opera, and then we were lucky enough to end our fountain viewing with Frank Sinatra’s “Luck Be A Lady Tonight.” A perfect end to a night in Vegas!