It Takes a Life (or, My Brother is an Artist)

(please note: I have yet to research how to do watermarks. if you love any of these images, contact my brother Jesse at leppjessearnold@gmail.com for permission to use them)

There are a couple of people I know who are artists. Not on the side, not having pretensions to art, not as an aspiration to a lifestyle, not as a job. It is who they are, living and breathing.

My brother Jesse is one of them.

Jesse writing out the info for his works before the opening

Growing up, he always doodled, always sketched, but has come to painting only just recently, and it's where he's found his voice.

He started to paint a year and a half ago, and has no training other than practice, passion, an excellent eye for composition and colour, and the little local "working with oils" course I gave him as a Christmas present last year. When I dream about being rich (idly, unfortunately :) among other things, I dream about being able to give him a studio and supplies, and shoving him in there with the imperative to "go, paint". He brings beauty to the world.

from the opening at the OPIRGBrock Infoshop

He has a wonderful sense of place. There are some artists who create idea art and whose art can only exist in public places. I once saw, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a large installation (a word I'm getting a little tired of, honestly) of cheesies under boulders. Pieces like that are most definitely art - I love the public opportunity for interaction that these provide. It provoked much discussion amongst the people I was with, it was a statement of the human impact on environment and how we interact with our surroundings, and I still think about it.

But it wouldn't fit in my living room and I didn't want to take it home with me.

pieces I would like to take home with me

We all have vertical spaces in our homes and we like to put things on them to look at. Some of them are prints, some are photos, some you can see the brushstrokes - the fingerprints of the person who did them. Mr. S. and I have things on our walls, from friends and strangers, that still take my breath away or make me smile every time I walk down the hall or sit in our living room, even though they've been up there for years. And that's the power of good art - art that speaks to you.

"The Dreamers"

That's what Jesse is good at. His work is humane. It is grounded in what he sees around him and how he sees it. When I asked him about a particular piece and why he did it that way, he said very simply "because that's what it looks like there". Here's the painting:

"Approaching Dusk" Rodman Hall, St. Catharines, Ontario

I love it.

There is a show of his work in a small community centre in St. Catharines, Ontario for the month of May. It's at the OPIRG Brock Infoshop, 10 Summer Street, St. Catharines, Ontario. They are open Monday to Thursday from 10am - 4pm.

"God's Love," a hailstorm, Stewart Road farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario

Thank you Milica, Kasia, and Lisa for helping organise and set up, and Safiya for being cute

The opening was last night. It was exciting and I'm excited for him, for this first opportunity for his work to be in one place, to be accessible. He is generous and has a sense of humour about the whole thing - two of the paintings actually were gifts to two friends, but they wanted to give them back to him to be hung with the others. So Jesse let them each set the prices on those two pieces (which of course they set really high 'cause they don't want anyone else to buy them :)

"Logged"
this painting is for sale, at a price set by Jesse, not covetous friends :)

If you're in the area, please drop by, take a look, and sign his book. Or, if you're interested in any of his work, please feel free to contact him:

Jesse Lepp
leppjessearnold@gmail.com
inkwichsupplement.blogspot.com

My brother, the artist.

The Litterless Lunch and Food Fit for a...

King? Queen? Sultan? A hungry kid and her mom.

Today is Wednesday, which means we have lunch at Sultan's after swimming lessons at the community centre. We are fortunate to have an amazing network of community centres in Toronto which provide an astonishing array of classes for large and small for very little money. We are also fortunate to have people like Tamara and Samer who provide the yummiest falafel ever, not to mention homemade lentil soup, vegetables with garlic sauce, and other delectable handmade Jordanian food (vegan and gluten-free not even on purpose!)....mmmmm.....it's only 8:45 in the morning and yet I crave already.....that's Tamara walking away in the picture below, protesting the picture :-)


Safiya has been taking classes at this particular community centre for a couple of years, so it is a ritual and delight to walk in at lunchtime. She orders "the usual" and has started being in charge of the money, and we chat with Tamara and Samer and watch Danforth Avenue life pass by, usually playing "I Spy" as we eat.


That white sauce on the vegetables is the garlic sauce. It's basically just garlic and oil blended together. Soooooo good.


This Wednesday ritual has also provided me with an opportunity to practice and perfect the litterless lunch. We try to eat mostly at home, but it would be foolish to pass up good Toronto food and the opportunity to support our small restauranteurs, so I always carry our water bottle and cutlery roll with us. And now, I've added a couple of tiffins (got them here, but I'm sure there are many places to get them) and, on Wednesdays, a lug-a-mug (Tamara makes Safiya a special sweet black tea with fresh mint that we savour on the way home). At Sultan's they gladly fill up the tiffens instead of the foam one-use dishes that are offered, as do most restaurants if you ask nicely and just emphasize that you're weird that way :-) Or, even better, with a smile say that you're trying out the first "R"; the reduce one. Most of the time no explanation is necessary, which is great.


The tiffins took a while to take, as with any new habit, but they're perfect for picnics, which we will be doing a lot more of as the weather gets warmer, and, also important, leftovers from restaurants, even ones that are sit-down with china (apparently if you have kids, you have left-overs :-) I don't know the energy input required to make these, but they're light, unbreakable, I can pass them down to Safiya, and they're better by leaps and bounds than recycling, which also requires high energy input and doesn't always happen as it's supposed to. Sometimes the recycling thing seems to me to be just a salve on the eco-conscious, kind of like buying indulgences were to the church in the Middle Ages.

So, if you're in Toronto, say hi to Tamara and Samer at Sultan's, which is at the north-east corner of Main Street and Danforth Avenue. And bring your tiffin :-)

It All Started with the Maple Syrup

A couple of days ago I was picking up emergency maple syrup from the grocery store close to us (emergency as in, we're going to have pancakes for breakfast tomorrow :-) and I gasped (yes, out loud) when I saw the price.

It had been $8.99 for 500mL. It was now $10.99. That's in the space of a month or so. I asked the clerk about it and she said "Yeah, it's gone up, eh? They said there was a reason - I can't remember what it was, but they said there was a good reason." Yes, it's called high oil prices.

Food price rises only happen to other people, right? Like a lot (most?) people we kind of keep a watch on how much we spend on food, and we kind of have some debt, not including the mortgage. What happens when the money that needs to go to that debt now has to be diverted to food? We're not there yet, but it's not hard for me to see that path, and I can imagine that some people (especially our neighbours to the south) are already there.

And I'd like to introduce you to our $9.50 bowl of peas:


Please note, I am not complaining, because sweet freshly shelled peas straight from the farmer is foods for the gods. We live literally in the middle of the largest city in Canada, and this farmer travels about 100km to bring fresh food to the market. I am not going to begrudge her/him $9.50 for a four quart of peas (which yielded about 4 cups shelled - hard to tell, we ate as we went along :-). My grandmother would be shocked, and I grew up on a farm, so it hurts a little, but did I grow my own peas? no.

But what happens when the cost for that farmer to get here keeps rising? My confession is that a lot of this creates for me some anxiety and a vague sense of unease. Hence the very cheery food posts lately glossing over all that ;-) Actually, it is exactly why there's been a bit more food posts around here. Lately my focus has been my fledgling business, planning to sew more for us, and really buckling down and learning to plan ahead with food and trying to make everything at home. Instead of ordering pizza on a day when Mama and Mr. S. ain't got the energy, I'd like to be able to take something out of the freezer or shelf. That requires planning and budgeting; more than I realised.

So, we made our own jam because not only does it taste waaaaay better, but it costs (and will cost if you figure what jam might cost in a year - ha!) slightly less than buying it. And I love having jam....for the year. And learning skills. Because that's what's important, right Napoleon Dynamite? Skills?


She started off really enthusiastic and then that predictably waned. Safiya's almost four and it makes me glad to see that she doesn't view anything (yet) as a chore. We'll see when she gets older.

I wonder what food will cost then.

Scenes from Away and a Pleasant Surprise Which Leads to a Little Reading

Two incidents gladdened my heart while I was out of town, like blossoms brought forth from the branch above. The first occurred in my favourite bakery/cafe The Pie Plate. During lunch bits and pieces of the conversation next to us drifted over (it's a small place in a small town). I heard the words "off-grid" and "sustainable" and "yurt". When a book was pulled out on yurts, I couldn't resist interrupting (i.e. blurting across the table): "that is sooo cool!" Conversation ensued, and I found myself meeting others who were of a like mind with regards to sustainable living. This was highly surprising, given the conservative nature of my hometown environs.


The second was even more delightful. I had the chance to catch up with an old friend and her new husband over dinner. Now this friend is probably the sweetest person I've ever met, so I knew dinner would be enjoyable regardless (and my Mom was babysitting so yay! adult conversation!) I hadn't met her husband yet and it had been a couple of years since she and I spent time together, so at first we exchanged autobiographies and caught up as people do. And then over the course of the evening one thing led to another and someone said "peak oil" and there was a pause and an inward gasp and each of us realised that we weren't the only crazy ones in the room.

And then the conversation really got going. And it was good. The great thing about it is that, on the surface, you would never think it to look at this couple. Which sounds superficial, but I'm not going to apologize. They are lovely, professional, upper-middle class, church-going folk from a fairly conservative town. That is the limited description that a passer-by would get. If they were off-grid vegans, well.....

So, peak-everything is everyone's concern. Isn't that nice?

And they were kind enough to lend me Jane Jacobs' book Dark Age Ahead (here's an interview with her by Jim Kunstler). That to top off the ridiculous number of books I got from the library, after having gone through Sharon's list of books, the "best books about nearly everything".


The librarian left a message at our house asking if i could please come and pick up the box of books that were being held for me. When I picked them up, she merrily asked me to show her pictures of my garden when it's done.

What a nice idea! But the real question is, does she want pictures of the composting toilet as well? :-)

These Fingers Were Built for Googling...

I have yet to get my hands on some hemp, and I don't have enough room in our yard to grow some (although I've got a lovely stinging nettle in the back somewhere...)

There are many organisations out there with good summeries and articles of interest regarding hemp. Just go for a Google-walk. But make sure you remember to come back.....I mean, sometimes it never ends, does it?

Last year at the International Straw Bale Building Conference (we had to go, I mean, how often does Canada get to host that, and practically in our backyard? Obviously it was worth dragging Safiya, who was 2, out camping in October......actually, it really was worth it - it was wonderful. But I digress.....) I had the opportunity to hold (o.k., fondle) some hemp felt. It was lovely, thick stuff, and craft projects whizzed through my head as I stood there. The farmer had started up a couple of years ago, and was still experimenting with the processing. When I mentioned making fabric, he reacted as if I'd asked to go to the moon. There was no capacity and no interest, he said.

So, we can grow it (well!) and we can cut it, but getting from A to C?

First, capacity. It seems that the only mill in Canada that was trying to process hemp for fibre, Fibrex Quebec, is no longer around. The Canadian National Resource Council seems to have entered into a partnership with Hemptown Clothing to manufacture hemp fabric, but I haven't found where the actual mill is...yet.

The fun part of it is that growing hemp in Canada is actually regulated by Health Canada, under the auspices of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, so I imagine that things are a little bit more complicated than for the average farmer, eh? (Here's a good primer on growing industrial hemp in Ontario, just in case you get a hankering for a new endeavour, you know, in your spare time....)

Those politics waaaay aside, what about interest? What about demand? And here my links fail me. Is this where we as crafters, independent designers, artists, can get things rolling? (No pun intended! There's no THC in hemp :-) We want consumers to support local talent, local designers, which is fantastic. When will it be important enough to us that most of the raw materials that we use come locally made and only a few exotics, such as cotton (ha!), are available at a premium? Granted, you cannot produce fabric on principle alone. It has to be of good quality, or no one will buy it. I think it would be slightly terrifying to be the first to try to mill hemp fabric in Canada (risk! cost! both things I'm not very good at). And I'll freely admit that one of the reasons that I personally use recycled goods is cost.

However, I'm on the brink. When my polyester thread runs out, I think I'll switch to organic cotton (Locally produced machine-ready thread? Whoah.....one step at a time here). When my stash of white cotton and linen runs out? If I can't find second-hand, it might be fun to order some hemp. I just wish it were from my backyard. Sometimes the view from the brink looks a bit bleak, sometimes it looks hopeful.

Hopefully this teeter-totter lands somewhere soft.....like a pile of hemp.

This is Not Hemp

On our way home from camping, we stopped in at the Rose Haven Farm Store. The owner, Linda Swaine, was at a trade show and had thus taken all her best locally made, naturally dyed wool with her, and all her hemp, much to my dismay. But I did find this:


For me, this is practically the holy grail of my nascent fiber journey. When I was a girl, I read the fairy tale The Wild Swans over and over again and marvelled at making cloth from a weed. That fascination suddenly came back to me as I was meandering through the All Fiber Arts Library a while back and found some articles on stinging nettle. And then this! Poor Mr. S. had to endure a two-hour drive back to Toronto, me babbling on about textiles and mills and he with no escape.

Now that it's in my eager hands, I'm not sure what to do with it. It's fairly friable, and smells a bit of coal-tar (I wonder how they processed it?). While I was in the shop, I had a good chat with the lovely, very knowledgeable woman who was minding the shop about wool and local goods and mills and production. The end point being that if a small farmer wants their wool processed without the usual chemicals, the mill charges a premium for doing this "special order" separately, thus driving up the price of the end product and making it hard for the organic or "natural" farmer to make a living as people are generally not yet ready to pay the price for such yarn.

This seems to be the case for so many things. Chemicals are subsidized, the conventional ways are ingrained, oil is still cheap and so local markets are saturated with cheaply made, massed produced items. Holding hands with these obstacles is the lack of a deeply rooted fibre industry in Canada, such as linen in France or silk in China. I am unfortunately not familiar with First Nations' fibre history, and the rest of us are a couple generations' of immigrants, each bringing with them different fibre traditions.

Wouldn't it be lovely? A dirt-to-fabric source of pride? Wool we can do, and there are still wool mills in Canada, but mostly not in Ontario. (Although I did find Belle Vallee Wools, for example - and it seems they're doing it the old ways...) We don't have the climate for flax and linen except in Quebec. Cotton's right out. So....nettle and hemp, anybody?

Oh yes, hemp.....

A Tale of Two Days (The Vents They Are A-Blowin' Or, Feeling Sorry For Oneself)

Yesterday the day started off clear. Clean house, food for the day, zipped up with Safiya on the bike to the post office to mail a congrats-on-the-baby package to an acquaintance and an Etsy order, picked up peanut-butter-chocolate soy ice-cream (mmmmm) on the way back. The weather was super hot and muggy so we just shlepped around. Sitting around on the cool playroom floor, we reverse engineered the one smock that Safiya has; the one from Katharine. It was fun (never done it before!) - we made a pattern - Safiya helped by drawing all over the pattern with white tailor's chalk....


Safiya's great-grandfather on Mr. S.'s side was a well-respected tailor - a very good one, apparently, so her pose above makes me smile....so natural...

Then in the afternoon we took a large sheet and a basket and foraged for white mulberries down the street. That little slice of a summer's day, with Safiya shaking the branches of this huge mulberry tree, laughing, is one of those family-slide-slipping-through-your-memory-moments that will stay with me until I'm old and (much more) grey...


We ended off still hot and muggy, no relief, but a good day (the night was a bit too hot for the babe to sleep, but eventually she was in that sound sleep that mamas only dream about...)

Today started off late because of a late night. Dishes to put away. Still hot and muggy, but a bit better. We did have fun going to the farmers' market:


Seriously, way more practical than a stroller :-) But then, then I pushed it. Tried to sew and play. Tried to sew some more. And twiddle with Etsy. And take some photos. Crafty greedy guts I was, but there was something else...Some kind of feeling about "why is it that I've found something that I love to do at exactly the time in my life when it's probably the most difficult to do it?" and, I quote, "Safiya, getting frustrated doesn't actually help you do what you want to do" Upon hearing those words come out of my mouth....well....

I'd like to say that I took it down a notch. It happened, kind of. She had a blast filling up beanbags with buckwheat hulls (child labour - ha!), climbing all over my back as I pretended to be a mountain, some reading....but there was also t.v. and more t.v., too hot and unmotivated to walk to the park, and this day has left me feeling a bit guilty, a bit isolated, and in the middle of it, like I wanted to roar...

One day there's that I-can-do-anything feeling and today finger-tied-and-frustrated....

And really the only difference between the two days? Just me....


So tonight I'm going to sit here with the rabbits and embroider a little on this smock...in the knowledge that that rhythm calms the soul...

Define "A Little While" and I Don't Know About This Whole No Nap Thing....

Yikes! It's Thursday already! How did that happen?
I'll tell you how that happened - no naps. This changes things entirely, especially craft-wise. Nap-time is that sacred hour-ish where I get to doodle (have you ever tried to doodle on your own with an almost-three-year-old? no? really? 'cause once you've been hoodwinked into drawing every baby animal in existence and then their mamas, and then their babos, and then their grannies....so I'll save you the trouble - it's futile. Fun, but futile), peruse a few blogs, write this blog, organise ribbons, move fabric around, daydream about projects, actually do projects, all that stuff that feeds on uninterruptedness and solitary-ness....All the stuff that feeds me.....Now it's Thursday and there have been a million things to say, emails to write, seams to sew, embroidery and....

Well, there's always a way around things, or through, or with, or not, or AND

So, the Good News Round-Up, then (and Some Randomness):

:: I won something! You know how people say they never win things? Well, with me it's actually true, but on Tuesday I won a beautiful purse from chrysanthemum! Just for saying hi! Her blog is full of great writing, great craftiness, and great aesthetic, so I can't wait to see the bag "in person" :-) ::

:: Speaking of winning things, the mistake stories so far are a delight! (See the just previous post.) If you're lurking, please come out of the wood-work or from under the knitting and say hi! If you don't have a story, that's alright, because then we can all gang up on you and get you to tell us how never to make a mistake again, which would be an awesome time-saver, really....o.k., I promise no stories is cool too - we won't bug you - just say hi! ::

:: The Big Carrot (see this post to find out why I'm so happy about this) labelled their bulk section finally, with stickers put on the Canadian-grown items. Yay! It's a start! ::

:: Has it been a little while yet? I may have unwittingly spoken an untruth when I said I wasn't going to do any more craft fairs for "a little while". BECKY, who runs the monthly Good Catch Craft Fair, invited me (!) to have a table at the fair on August 18th. Actually, she invited me last week, I've been holding out....I've been a bit flabbergasted and soooooo verrrry excited I thought if I held out it wouldn't be so lame how unabashedly excited I am to have been invited to this, but lo and behold....nope, didn't work! And it was kind of soon (as in immediately) after I said I wasn't going to do any for a little while.......BECKY's so sweet I couldn't resist :-) ::

i'm soooooo embarassed - i just realised that i called Becky Jen when i originally posted this - oh-good-golly-my-face-is-so-red, especially since she IS really nice and that was just so thoughtless - sorry Becky!

:: It's Safiya's 3rd birthday at the end of the month! Yippee! For some reason this seems like the new year to me. You know how the school year was always really the New Year and New Year's was just an excuse for a party? Well, Safiya's birthday is my New Year. She's already discovered one of the presents I was working on (see the above picture), so naturally I have to make some other surprise presents ;-) ::

:: If you see in the comments below, I had my first comment in another language. Cool, I thought, Spanish! (duh!) Went to Babel Fish, cut and pasted the text....so....not Spanish! My triumphant look at how easy this was vanished into bewilderment.....thank goodness it was Portuguese, but I'm thinking of randomly translating stuff like that 'cause the results are pretty fun and apparently I have not enough things to do in the day.....::

:: Safiya and I watched a thundershower today ::


And that's all for today!