Tadah!  Our new collection is born:  we are proud to introduce Welcome Home Noah, published by the wonderful folks at C.R. Gibson.  I just received my samples, and they are beautiful!  We want to celebrate with a giveaway of three brand new pieces to one lucky winner next Friday.  (See photos and learn more at end of the post.)  The photo above shows our samples piled around the studio.  The baby books and several other pieces are covered in soft fabric and embellished with silky embroidery thread, which matches the artwork perfectly.  This is my fifth Noah’s Ark themed baby book collection.  I think the reason I receive so many requests for Noah’s Ark designs for babies is that the giver can feel as though he or she is giving a little blessing to a precious new child.

We designed this group to work perfectly for both boys and girls.  And, if you think the covers are pretty, wait until you peek inside.  The interior pages are so inviting that you will want to fill in every page … but lucky for you, a few wonderful years will need to pass before you record the First Day of Kindergarten page.  The picture below shows one of my favorite pages, the Family Tree.  New parents can fill it in before the new baby even arrives, which is a very good idea, since very soon their time will not be their own … for about the next 20 years!

We created unique patterns for each bordered page and lots of illustrations to help you tell the new story that is about to unfold.

One of my favorite coordinating products is the One-Year Calendar with Stickers.  I loved this product when I had new babies and I was trying to juggle work and motherhood, because the important happenings of each day were limited to one little square.  I could handle one square of info a day and I actually had a fairly thorough record of all those important milestones.  My idea was that later I could refer to it when I had a bit more time to fill in the baby book … I’m still waiting for that bit more time, but, at least I know I have all the info ready to go, one little square at a time.  And until you get around to finalizing that baby book, the Calendar is an excellent story-telling venue … when Julianna was little, she used to ask me to read to her right out of her calendar.  It’s usually a pretty satisfying read, with passages like, “Today, you were amazing.” and “Wow, you said your first word.  You are brilliant.”  I recommend this for an excellent self-esteem builder. Hey, I wonder if there is a calendar about me?

We hope you enjoy our new baby collection with your new baby or a special little one you are about to know.  You can find Welcome Home Noah online at C.R. Gibson.

To celebrate the birth of our new baby collection, we are giving away three new Welcome Home Noah products this week.  The winner will receive a bound Baby Book signed by the artist (that would be me), a First-Year Calendar with Stickers and a Grandma’s Brag Book!  Just add your comment to the comment box below, and we will pick a random winner on Friday, March 12.

Click here for the Blog Hop List….

I love my book club.  When the meeting is at my house, I get all themey, and plan the menu around the book we are reading.  We just finished Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and today, I am happy to share my Coast-of-Maine-themed book club dinner, plus some Book Club Cuisine Toppers I designed for you to use on your own Book Club fare.  They can be used for any book.  For example, I served Basket of Trips Blueberry Crisps from the kitchen of Olive Kitteridge.  But, if you were reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett, you might serve Minny Jackson’s Best Fried Chicken from the kitchen of Celia Foote.

Notice I used the words “you might serve” instead of “you might cook” … this is because, if you are like me, you might be speed-reading your last chapter on the day the meeting is to take place at your house.  For this reason, clever procuring of your thematic refreshments might be the only way to go.  In fact, if you listen to audible books, as I do, you can listen to your last pages while driving to your favorite food market.  How’s that for multi-tasking?

Here is a link to the printable Book Club Cuisine Toppers I made for you, a very easy DIY project you can make while listening to the end of your story.  They are constructed in the same manner as these Birthday Toppers.  Just cut one out, paste to a piece of card stock, tape a skewer to the back, and then tape it to a second piece of card stock to cover the skewer.  I added a raffia bow just because.  The fun part is creating the names for your dishes.  See below for some of the catchy cuisine titles I included in our menu.  (Well, they seemed catchy at the time.)  And I have included a link to the blueberry crisps that, in fact, I actually did make from scratch.  Thank goodness for fail-proof Alton Brown.

I decided to go with a seafood menu since the story takes place in a small town in Maine, combined with a few dishes of olives, in honor of our main character’s name.  I also wanted to offer a hearty fare because I knew Olive Kitteridge, who loved to eat, would have wanted it that way.  Due to some tight deadlines, I knew I could-not-would-not be able to actually make seafood anything, so I used my excellent hunting-gathering skills and came up with a book club dinner menu which might have been prepared in Crosby, Maine, but was easily gathered in Austin, Texas.  The perfect accent was provided by Mother Nature who gave us a very unusual blanket of snow on the day of our meeting, so we could even have a real fire in the fireplace without turning on the air conditioner.

This was our menu … feel free to steal any of these apropos titles if you are reading Olive K.  For appetizers, I served Olive’s Abrasive Yet Tender Olives from Whole Foods and Mother of the Groom Shrimp Appetizer from Central Market.

For dinner, we enjoyed Olive’s Clam Chowdah (an interesting-sounding title when uttered with my Texas twang) from Whole Foods.  I added some Half & Half to make it a little less thick.  I garnished it with some freshly ground black pepper and some chives.  Schoolteacher Salad with Maine Blueberries and Olive’s Big and Blunt Baguette (with Butter, of course) rounded out the main course.

After a lively discussion, individual ramekins of Basket of Trips Blueberry Crisps came out, which I actually made from a great and easy recipe by Alton Brown.  Here is a link to the recipe and to a little video that I found very handy when wondering if the “crushed ginger snaps” should be chunkety or crumbledy.  (It turns out they should be chunkety.)  I mixed half ginger snaps with half shortbread cookies for my cookie portion of the crisp, but you can make any kind of mix you choose.  The Maine blueberry mix was made with half blueberries and half raspberries, and, since it is winter, our Maine blueberries were actually from Chile. The nuts I chose were pecans (to lightly toast before adding).  I can also report that the recipe for the topping was more than enough and I have a large amount of the crumble left in my freezer, which I plan to pop onto any fruit any time we have a hankering for a fruit crisp.

So there you go. Happy reading with a Maine menu to match.
P.S. If you have a good book that your book club has enjoyed, please let us know in our comment section.  We are always looking for a tasty new read.

While all of you Austinites were having an early spring snow day, in Berkeley, we were saturated and spilling over with snails.

I don’t know why Andrius and I always decide to take long hikes only when it’s raining, but it has definitely become our M.O. Last weekend, we went down to Point Isabel dog park to check out the bay and imagine who all the different dogs would be if they were humans with occupations (lots of detectives, bouncers, and dowager socialites), but the trip ended up turning into a semi-scientific study of the hundreds of snails that had been chased up onto the asphalt and anise shrubs along the trail.  We documented four main phenotypes: plaid-shelled gooey yellow ones, green-shelled shy black ones, brown-shelled sticky brown ones, and one pink-shelled clear-bodied albino one.

These are pretty well-documented in the camera, but as I came to write this post, I decided that they were not cute enough for this, the cuddliest of blogs – so you will have to use your imagination.

If we had been really hard-core, we could have feasted on escargots…   maybe next time…

Here are some photos of the wet beginnings of spring on the Bay:

Me, hoping I don’t get tetanus from this beautiful, yet very rusty rock.

Something out of a Monet.

It was magical.

My original plan for this week was to send you a hint of Spring.  Each year, one day in February, when I drive up our hill, there is my little Flowering Quince bush, suddenly in full bloom, all by himself (or herself) … no other flowers in sight.  I always have a tiny private smile, and think, “There you are, you first brave sign of spring.” I would have never guessed that I might be sending this “Spring is Coming” picture surrounded by ice crystals.  So, happy winter, happy spring!

And many thanks to all of you who entered the contest.  We will be having several more in the next few months to celebrate the arrival of Welcome Home Noah in stores, so please stay tuned for more chances to win.  Thanks also to the online random number generator which decided our winner – you saved us on paper and scissors and a hat.

This is Jewish Penicillin with a Greek accent made by an Episcopalian. I prescribe it to anyone who catches a cold. Over the holidays, the poor pitiful patient was me … I caught a dastardly cold, and then, I passed it on to all of my fellow family members. (And, I promise, I was taking precautions to cough into my elbow and everything!) But, alas, our family cold passed from sister to dad to sister. Once I was perky again, however, and my youngest gal was a sniffly mess, I put on my Dr. Mom scrubs and went to work on my sure-fire cure for the common cold: Cathy’s Feel Better Chicken Soup. Secret ingredient: Lemon.

When we lived in New York, a friend from Greece served us Greek Chicken Soup. It was very comforting, as chicken soup should be, but more so, its lemony accent gave it a wonderful flavor, as well as adding a nice shot of Vitamin C to supplement its curative powers. A few years later, I bought the cookbook, New York Cookbook by Molly O’Neill, which was full of great recipes from the neighborhood chefs of New York. And, lo and behold, there was an entire chapter on the chicken soups of New York City, from Jewish delis to family recipes … one of which was Katherine Polyzo’s Avgolemono, a Greek classic. I gave it a try, and sure enough, it was exactly the same as the Greek chicken soup we had loved. And we have been making it ever since, especially when someone catches a cold. Or, an alergy. Or, even a sneeze.

When I am preparing this for grown-ups, I use every ingredient in the recipe, but when I am making this for younger patients, I occasionally receive some complaints about the green things … and the orange things.  So, in order to get some healthy broth into the tummies of your littlest patients, I recommend this: Prepare the soup using all of the vegetables in the recipe, (extracting all the great taste and the vitamins from the vegetables) and then just take them out before serving your little ones.  Everyone is happy.
Click here to download a free downloadable recipe page.  You can collect them and put them in your own recipe binder, or try this one we created for Tapestry by C.R. Gibson.

Not only will this soothing soup make your patients feel better, but it is a great gift for under-the-weather friends, or even just a “Yep, it’s still winter” present for someone you love. I filled my Feel Better Fast basket with two jars of magic chicken soup, and the ingredients for my other cold cure: hot tea with lemon and honey.  Feel free to add a mindless movie or two.  (My nostalgic memories of some oddly happy sick days wouldn’t be complete without a few episodes of Bewitched.)  Finally, throw in a few oranges for Vitamin C and color, and, now, you can just pop on your red riding hood and run it over to granny’s.

It’s our blog birthday!  And, we are celebrating by saying thank you with our first Giveaway.  Please comment at the end of this post and we will choose a winner this Tuesday, February 23,  to receive a birthday present from us: a signed 9×9 framed print from our Noah’s Ark Two of a Kind collection, a one-of-a-kind gift for a little one you know and love.  (photo at end of post)

At this time last year, we started this blog so that we could connect more easily with all the moms and grandmoms (and dads and grandads) who were buying products from our baby collections.  And now we have over 1,000 new friends (that we know of).  It is so much fun to hear from a new mom who can’t wait to start entering her baby’s milestones in one of our baby books, or to hear from a grandfather who is helping his daughter decorate a room for a grandbaby-to-be.  Okay, okay, you’re right … we also use the blog to brag about Neville, our new rescue pup, who is the newest baby around our house, although in dog years, he is already a first grader.

We have enjoyed sharing new Cathy Heck products with you, while at the same time giving you a little glimspe into the amusing life in the studio. We like to show you our inspiration, and we love to hear about yours.  We are especially proud when our studio tales inspire a budding new artist to stretch her wings and fly.  We have also taken great pleasure in sharing some of our favorite finds in Austin and Berkeley, and hope you will be able to enjoy some of our local discoveries.  If you know of others we should try, tell us.  We’ll try to visit, especially if it involves the tasting of food!

This year brought the launch of our new site, Cathy Heck Nursery Art, from which anyone can help to create baby’s first artwork. The site is interactive.  It is so much fun to spell a baby’s new name with a group of canvases, choosing from cute characters and coordinating patterns, The canvases are archival giclée prints which we print right here in our Austin studio.  And, recently, we added the opportunity to order all of the designs printed on archival fine art paper, framed or unframed.  Go see!

Another fun milestone for this year was the creation of a beautiful new baby book collection for C.R. Gibson.  It is called Noah’s Ark Welcome Home, and it really does feel like a big warm welcome-home hug.  The products will be hitting the stores this month.  You will see much more about this adorable collection soon, but here is a sneak peek.

So, happy new blogosphere year to all of our new (and old) friends and please keep in touch.  We love to hear about the projects that you are creating using Cathy Heck products.  Send us your stories and pictures.
And don’t forget to comment at the end of this post so that you can win your Cathy Heck Studio Blog Birthday present.  See a photo below before we tie a birthday bow around it.

Add your blog link to the blog hop.

On Saturday, we had just squeaked out an emergency deadline and Jim was about to run it to the last FedEx drop-off opportunity for the weekend.  I gave a sigh of relief as I watched a mailing tube full o’ new art head out the door under Jim’s arm.  I dropped down into a chair by the window, when what should I spy out of the window pane?  Margaret and Jim peering curiously into our car.  Uh-oh, dead battery at deadline time … that’s not good … but more importantly, what is Margaret wearing?  A prom dress?  Yes, it is.  What else would you wear for a battery-jumping lesson?  Yep, the dad-side of Jim’s duties had overtaken the studio-delivery-man side, and even though a FedEx cut-off time was looming, he just had to give his new-driver daughter a little lesson: How to Jump a Battery.  And, even though his gal was in the middle of repurposing last year‘s prom dress for a let’s-get-dressed-up-for-dinner evening with friends, there was no time like the present for a car maintenance lesson.  Fortunately for all, it was a quick lesson, and our package made it out in time, and more amazingly, her white dress remained white!  The good news is that if she and I are ever together when the battery dies, I’m sure she will know how to fix it better than I do … even if we’re all dressed up.

May your day be filled with lots of LOVE!

Shhhh. This is a secret.  Don’t tell Margaret, but this will be her surprise on Valentine’s morning.  Every year on Valentine’s Day, the girls wake up to some kind of totally-decadent non-healthy, sugar-filled surprise … a little bit like Christmas stockings, only all red and pink.  This year, we only have one girl at home, and she will actually be playing in a soccer tournament on Valentine’s weekend, so when she gets home from all that sweaty fun, this pile of sugar will be waiting for her. (Makes your teeth ache just looking at it, doesn’t it?)

You might like to create a similar present for your favorite little Valentines this year.  Big Valentines love it, too!  This is a very EASY project, with a nice big wow effect for the recipient.  With the little Love Note Flags that fly over each muffin tin, you can make it very personalized.  You can even make it healthy, with tins full of granola, nuts and fruit … naaahh.  Just go for the gusto.  It’s Valentine’s Day!

Click here for super easy instructions.