We recently discovered a paint-your-own-pottery studio here in Berkeley’s “Potter’s Ghetto.”  Brushstrokes is a great place to go on a rainy day – or in our case, a Monday evening, when it’s pretty quiet and they waive the studio fee if you bring contributions to the Alameda County Food Bank.  The delayed gratification of painting a piece in dusty un-revealed colors, waiting a week, and then meeting your new now-shiny creation makes the whole experience very satisfying.

If you have any hand-painted creations you’re proud of, we’d love to see some other favorite cereal bowls and coffee mugs out there!  Just send us pictures here – we’re looking forward to it!

Over Spring Break, my sister, Jules, and I were trying to recreate one particularly fabulous day last year when the two of us roamed the city at 6am, drank hot chocolate by the bay, and sat watching the dynamics of sea lion society for over an hour at Pier 39.  This time, we took the waterfront walk from the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf and back, and then wandered up Market St. just in time to catch several gallery receptions at 49 Geary.  The sun was out and everything was in focus.  We ate paper-wrapped In-N-Out burgers that we just managed to order before a tour group of fifty French-speaking fifth-graders took over the restaurant, contemplated several knock-off purses and bags, and generally enjoyed the hours of sisterly QT that the 2.5 mile walk laid out for us.

Below, you can see Jules outside of the Thursday farmer’s market, and behind her, the line for those pork sandwiches, the deliciousness of which my mom has already described.

49 Geary is always a great place to stop if you are in the mood for a lot of art, fast.  I enjoyed going with Jules, who has been writing a lot of art criticism lately.  Our favorite show was in the smaller exhibition room of Stephen Wirtz Gallery, in which some of Castaneda and Reiman’s collaborative works on sheetrock were displayed.

It was a great day.  I hope we’ll get to try to recreate it again next year.

On 4th street, not far from some excellent and eclectic shopping, past a few pothole-ridden intersections and a warehouse or two, shines this little beauty of a storefront: Color and Loom.  A persistent ten-foot rainbow in the concrete jungle, this family-owned Berkeley find is fun to pass when driving through some dreary neighborhoods and has a lot to offer if you are interested in customizing your home textiles.

Inside, ladders line the walls with samples of hand woven and embroidered fabrics – designed by the couple who own the shop, Laura and Kiran Singh, and manufactured in India.  Both partners have backgrounds in textile design and weaving and the sample fabrics are pleasingly displayed.

Though there is not much to buy if you are not interested in getting new drapes or a duvet, it’s still fun to look around thinking, “If I had an amazingly cool house with which I could do anything, which of these…”

I’ve been wanting to take the Jelly Belly factory tour ever since we passed it the first time on I80 between Berkeley and Davis.  This past weekend, we finally made it.

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos on the tour, which disappointed me, as I had been looking forward to capturing vast vats of shining cinnamon beans, but I can definitely say that we learned a few things we hadn’t known before.  For example, when you walk in, it is hard to determine if the mascot of the candy company is a big red bean, or President Ronald Reagan.  Eventually, one finds out that the former president is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the popularity of Jelly Belly jellybeans in the United States, having made them the candy of choice in both the California governor’s mansion, and later, in the White House.  They must have had at least five different jellybean mosaic portraits of him displayed prominently next to Washington, Lincoln, Franklin, and Monroe (Marilyn, not James in this case).

Here are two of them, and one I was particularly drawn to of young Queen Elizabeth:

Throughout the tour, at different stopping points, they give each member of the group a single bean. This is a particularly effective way to make everyone salivate for a bag by the end, and as I nursed my second bean, a bubblegum-flavored uncured morsel of sugar and cornstarch, I remembered learning about fasting at church in Connecticut.  Our Sunday-school teacher told us that while amateurs will rush for a hamburger after a several-day fast, her brother, who had apparently become quite good at it, would spend his first post-fast hours cherishing a single raisin.

I must admit that I was far more in tune to the subtleties of the three beans they gave us on the tour than the many we ate (way too fast) after we were released and able to purchase a two pound bag of Belly Flops, which are the beans that are rejected from the conveyor belt for being either too big, too small, deformed, or discolored.  (I have compiled a little collection of the more extreme examples from our bag above.)

And that, my friends, is a sweet way to spend a rainy weekend in California.

In her early years, my sister Jules had an incredible gift for finding those tiny little hidden objects in the pages of I Spy books. I was more of a Little House on the Prairie girl myself, but I remember spending many hours with Jules looking through those spreads of things – so many things – and wondering, where on earth did the people who made these books find all that stuff?

Well, they definitely could have found them at Creative Reuse a Goodwill-like donation and purchase shop on Telegraph in Oakland, where you can donate your old art materials and get a great deal on…well…stuff.

Yes, boxes and baskets and bins of shells, corks, bottles, crayons, caps, candles, stoppers, beakers, and anything else that might have been donated by someone who – for whatever reason – had a few extra boxes of, say, cards that say “this product is organic.”

I went down there hoping to pick up a stockpile of backing cardboard, but I think that Creative Reuse is a place you have to go without any hopes or expectations – like a garage sale, really.  Because you may not find your cardboard, but you will certainly stand there wondering, “What could I possibly do with ten pounds of corks and an old cassette box?”

Any ideas?

I promised I’d get back to it, so here’s my ode to Stonemountain & Daughter, the cozy little fabric store on Shattuck in Berkeley, CA.

Nowhere else can you find an entire shelf of cotton organized by the theme “mushrooms.”  Though it may not have the quantity of your local Jo-Ann store, Stonemountain and Daughter carries a tastefully selected assortment of high-quality fabrics with a sophisticated (and yet still fun) design sense. You can find all the Amy Butler, Anna Maria Horner, and Moda, as well as Japanese fabrics, batiks, and African fabric. This is definitely the place to be if you are in search of quilting materials. It is also the place to go if you are interested in taking a sewing or knitting class, as they have group classes scheduled frequently in their upstairs sewing/sale room.

Worth stopping by, even if you just want to be inspired by the color-coded bolts and yards of patterns.

In the Bay Area?  Need some Fresh Opo, Bitter Melon, or Sinqua? Never heard of Opo, Bitter Melon, or Sinqua?  It matters not! Pacific East Mall has everything the East Asian ex-pat might need to make a dinner of comfort food, and everything the corn-fed American might need to liven up the palate (or, in our case, to make enough sushi for ten people for the price of two.)

This enormous mall in the heart of the east bay has restaurants with menus written only in Chinese, a tea shop, a Japanese candy shop, a manga shop, and several herbal pharmacies. The grocery store inside, Ranch 99 Market, sells a lot of vegetables I have yet to try, preserved duck eggs, bean paste bread rolls, but no coffee (lots of tea though). Definitely worth the trip if you are in the mood to spice things up in the kitchen, or just want to stock up on moon cakes.

I BARTed into the city a few days ago to meet with some artists who are participating in the San Francisco Open Studios with me this month, and I arrived just early enough to make a quick stop by Britex Frabrics – a four-story color-coded Mecca for San Francisco’s textilephiles. The place was packed at 5pm, and the people were nearly as colorful as the bolts; I saw two blue goatees. How often can I say that? and I live in Berkeley…

Here are a few saturated images for you: (from left clockwise) the shelved solids on the first floor of Britex, some silks on sale, a window display on Britex’s first floor (oh so Anthropologie), and of course, while it’s on the mind, the S.F. Anthropologie (I love the open, two-level plan).

Many thanks to Louisa Stegmann for making this a destination point! (We passed by together a few weeks ago when it was closed, and Louisa, with her costume-designer past, already knew of the wonders within.)

Britex, by the way, seems to be the place if you want to do something amazing with cloth: costumes, tailored suits, wedding dresses, etc… If you’re in the Bay Area and are leaning more towards the softy, quilty, homey experience I would recommend Stonemountain & Daughter Fabrics…but that’s another post!

When we went to Fisherman’s Wharf to be tourists with about 5,000 other people with the same idea … we found a great carousel.  And our two sixteen-year-olds couldn’t wait to have a brush with childhood, followed by some cotton candy of course! (below: another carousel freshly painted in the studio a few years ago for a baby book collection)

If you go to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, you just have to go see the sea lions on Pier 39 because that is what you do.
Is it crowded?  Yes.  Is it smelly?  Yes.  Is it mesmerizing?  Yes, yes.

We have been to see our sea lion friends three different times.  And, each time we go, we think we can’t possibly last more than a few minutes and end up staying an hour.  We find ourselves in a sea-lion-watching stupor.  We start recognizing human-like personalities and we even start naming them … for example, on this trip, we couldn’t take our eyes off one huge guy … let‘s call him Brutus … who thought he owned the main pier.  One very persistent smaller sea lion kept trying and trying to jump up into Brutus’ domain, but he finally had to give up and swim away, and I could almost hear him muttering, “Brutus, you are not the boss of me!”

I did learn that I might have been a tiny bit misleading in one of my illustrations.  It turns out that one of the differences between seals and sea lions is that sea lions have little external ear flaps … and seals are ear-flapless (although they can hear!) … so when I created this illustration for an alphabet board book of a seal sailing on a sailboat, I should have left off his little ear flaps.  I hope I have not mislead any little toddlers who have aspirations of becoming marine biologists!  And my apologies to any seals who had the chance to read my book!