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!

If you want to feel happy, just head to the Farmer’s Market at the Ferry Building.  You will be surrounded by beautiful fresh produce and heavenly scents.  It’s not a frenetic-I-need-to-procure-now kind of market, but rather a take-your-time-to-touch-smell-and-taste kind of market. Lots of tasting!

Let’s just start with tomatoes, because Ellen and I LOVE tomatoes.  When I took French in high school (not sure why I did that in West Texas, but nevertheless I did) I wrote a little story about a character named Thomas Tomate.  I think he would have loved to have known all of these interesting tomates amies (tomato friends).

Above:  Colors in the market … colors for a kitchen collection?  Hmmmm.

Below:  More colors in the market … colors for a baby girl collection?  Hmmmm.

We ended our fun morning at the Market with THE BEST sandwich that I have ever eaten: a porchetta sandwich at the Roli Roti stand.  We wondered why the line was forming at 10 a.m. for lunch.  And then we knew!

The first indication that this was to be a great sandwich was when I watched the master carver use my sandwich bread to sop up the fatty pork juices from the carving of the previous sandwich. This was an excellent start! Then, after he put the tender white pork on the bread, he chopped up the crispy outer fat of the pork and placed it on top, then he slathered the rich caramelized onion reduction across the top and added some light airy greens and a sprinkle of sea salt.  And, all the while, our friendly chef smiled and chatted and seemed to get to know every person ordering.  Maybe it was because we had been standing in line for an hour, or maybe it was because we were on vacation and footloose and fancy-free … but that porchetta sandwich was an amazing work of culinary art!  It was pure heaven.

(I wish I could show you a pretty picture of the final masterpiece, but we accidentally ate it before we could take a picture of it.  Next time.)

Ellen took me to Chez Panisse for dinner and I was in heaven!  The reason a visit to this restaurant is so particularly momentous for us is that I bought the book, Fanny at Chez Panisse, when it first came out and we used to read it with the girls all the time.  The story is told by Alice Waters from the perspective of her 7-year-old daughter, Fanny, who grows up surrounded by life in a busy restaurant.  She describes the path food takes from farm to market to kitchen to table, and the book even includes lots of great recipes. Another reason we often chose this book is that while Fanny was growing up surrounded by the spoons and whisks of her busy family business, our girls were growing up surrounded by the paints and brushes of Cathy Heck Studio, so Fanny’s life seemed as crazy as ours.

It’s been a few years since we enjoyed the story together, but the food tasted as delicious as we had imagined curled up behind the pages of the book.  This was our great dinner:

We had some time to spare before our lovely dinner at Chez Panisse (more on that later), so we poked around an area of Berkeley called the Gourmet Ghetto. Here are just a few of our favorite stops:
The Holistic Hound is a doggy boutique worthy of the fanciest of canines, so we felt it necessary to procure Neville’s first collar here. Our prerequisite was that it had to match the carolina-blue tag that Margaret had picked out for him. Happily, we found a fashionable argyle collar, which seemed to be the perfect coordinate. The minute we arrived home from California, we dressed him in his new collar. Since he has been living in his birthday suit for four months, he was not very pleased and found the new accessory extremely bothersome. But, once he realized how handsome he was, he posed for us wearing his new bling!

Twig & Fig Ellen and I are lovers of letterpress, so just peeking through this window was like looking into a candy shop. We had to go in and appreciate all things printed, admiring the deep indentations that the letterpress images make into the soft-press papers. Before we left, we happily bought this fun fat book called The Printmaking Bible. The pages are filled with every tool, technique and tip for printmaking today … well, maybe not potato prints, but still.

Love At First Bite was a delightful shop full of tasty baked goods and some nifty gifts for chefs young and old. We loved these cute aprons for little epicureans. (You can read more about Love At First Bite in our Cupcakery Study.)

Then it was time for dinner, so we will have to visit this delicious neighborhood next trip for Gourmet Ghetto, Part 2. And, next time, we’ll try to do a better job sampling the many foodie finds for you since there are approximately 40 restaurants and purveyors of fine foods in this 3-4 block neighborhood! Tough job but we’re happy to oblige.

I completely understand the urge to say “Hey, let’s go get an ice cream cone,” or “I’ll meet you for a latte,” but it never really occurred to me to suddenly think, “Hey, I could sure go for a cupcake,” …. until now! With cupcakeries popping up all over America, I think I might soon, find myself driving the kids home, and saying, “Hey everybody, who wants a cupcake?!”

I also think I just love to say the word, “cupcakery” … and I’m really not even sure if it’s a real word. Nevertheless, we recently had the opportunity to visit two such cupcakeries and you can learn a little bit about them here, just in case you find yourself hankering for a cupcake when you least expect it in Austin or Berkeley!

Love At First Bite Berkeley, California
Sweet scents drew us into this lovely little shop tucked away in the heart of the “Gourmet Ghetto.” Since the summer weather in Berkeley was freezing by Texas standards, just the idea of a warm cupcake sounded comforting. We particularly liked that they offered little miniature versions so that when we lusted for a great big cupcake, we could reel ourselves in and save some calories for the next stop in this neighborhood of foodie heaven.

Hey Cupcake! Austin, Texas
Sweet scents drew us over to this bright shiny airstream in the heart of the South Congress District of Austin (SOCO). Since we mistakenly chose the middle of a 104-degree day to stop by, we were delighted with the pink parasols provided for hungry customers while waiting in line. Miniature cupcakes were not offered here, because, well, we were in Texas, where everything is big, even the cupcakes!

Well, we had a great day yesterday. We climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls, the highest waterfall in North America! They say you have to be wary of bears if you are camping in Yosemite – stashing your food in a box that hangs high in a tree so that bears can’t eat it. For this reason, you can understand my concern when I saw this large brown bear sunning himself on a rock only a few feet from my husband on the edge of the falls…

Thankfully – when I took a closer look with the binoculars, I saw that it was the harmless and cuddly Little Forest species of brown bear, so I didn’t worry anymore…