beautiful drive to Vermont and back

Monday was Presidents Day, so Mike had the day off from work and we made a kind of impulse decision to drive over to Vermont and buy some butternut wood! We needed some more butternut wood to finish our kitchen shelving project, and we were surprised to discover that none of the local hardwood lumber yards sells butternut! Turns out it’s not that popular. Mike took a look around the internet and found a place in Marshfield, VT called Vermont Wildwoods, that sells salvaged butternut wood – we didn’t realize that, sadly, butternut trees are suffering a blight that’s killing them off pretty quickly (similar to Dutch Elm disease that killed all the elm trees a few decades back). Vermont Wildwoods sells “irregular” butternut wood cut from the fallen and disease-killed trees, paying loggers to leave the healthy trees intact and instead salvage the wood from the fallen trees. The wood from these trees has interesting and irregular grain patterns, and the whole concept seems pretty cool. So, unable to work in the wood-shop since we’d run out of usable wood, we decided to take the day off and go fetch some more wood from Vermont. The trip was four hours heading due west, through Crawford Notch and the White Mountain National Forest, into the hills of Vermont. It was perfect and sunny out, and we got to check out lots of snowy peaks, cute little tourist towns, busy ski slopes, old farm houses and winding country roads along the way.
The guy from Vermont Wildwoods was super nice and helpful, letting us pick through a huge stack of butternut lumber to find the right planks for our job. It seems like he normally works with builders on big-scale architectural projects so he did a nice favor in letting us show up (on a holiday!) and dig through his wood for this little small-potatoes project. We took plenty of time to pick just the right pieces. My parents let us borrow their truck for the trip, so we had room to carry all the wood home. Now we’ve got this huge stack of wood waiting to be planed down, glued, sanded, cut up and assembled into our kitchen shelving!

our new wood!

yum.

I’ve been making granola bars for snacking on our morning dog walks. They’re surprisingly easy to make and quite a nice consistency, not as crumbly as I’d feared.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Use an 8×8 inch or 9×9 inch baking pan and cut a strip of parchment paper as wide as the pan and longer than the pan, enough so it hangs over both edges, this will come in handy later. Lightly grease the pan and the parchment paper.

In a large bowl, mix together all this stuff:
1/2 cup oat flour (to make this you just put oats thru food processor for a minute or two)
1-1/2 cups rolled oats
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup dried cranberries
1 cup extruded dates, chopped in food processor
2/3 cups raisins
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup peanuts, crushed in food processor (measure first, then chop)
3/4 cup pumpkin seeds
3/4 cup slivered almonds
(you can switch up the nuts and seeds and berries, basically anything seems to work as long as you keep the total quantity about the same)

Then, in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, mix together all this stuff:
2 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp butter
2 tbsp molasses
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup honey
2 tbsp water

Pour the sauce over the oat mixture and stir everything until it’s thoroughly mixed. Pour it into the baking pan and use the back of a spoon to really smush it in, making one big flat compact block. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 mins. Then cool in the pan for a while (set it on a wire rack to cool, if you have one), then pull on the parchment paper to lift out the whole block and set paper and granola chunk on a cooling rack for a while longer. At first it will be soft and crumbly, so let it sit until it’s entirely cool and sets up firmly. Then use a sharp knife to slice it into bars! I like to use smallish bars, if they’re big they can be kind of hard to bite.

chairs. boston museum of fine arts

Took a trip to Boston with the family this week. Really excited about all the inspiring design, applied art, folk art, and colonial era wallpaper in the new Art of the Americas wing.

awesome new custom Holiday cards on Hello Lucky

Today is a very special day! Hello Lucky has just released their new custom Holiday card shop, and they are featuring five new designs by Morris & Essex, made especially for Hello Lucky.

These cards are pretty cool, because you can upload your own photo of yourself and your adorable family or pets or what-have-you, and your own personal greeting message. Your photo will be placed inside my lovely border, with a delightful holiday design on the flip side. So you get an adorable photo and a stylish seasonal greeting card, all in one.

This was really fun to work on and I am so incredibly honored to collaborate with the venerable Hello Lucky, whose fantastic stationery I have long admired.

So, in celebration of this exciting new collaboration, today I am teaming up with Hello Lucky to give away a $100 gift certificate to Hello Lucky, which one very lucky reader can use to buy anything from the marvelous Hello Lucky shop! There are a few ways enter for the giveaway:

•go to twitter and re-tweet this post
•go to the Morris & Essex facebook page and “Like” us!
•go to the Morris & Essex facebook page and “Like” today’s post about the Hello Lucky giveaway.

don’t forget to share the news with anyone else who’d love to win! There will be one entry for each re-tweet, one entry for each person who likes today’s facebook post, plus one entry for every new facebook fan. The winner will be announced here on my blog, and on the Morris & Essex facebook page, on Wednesday November 9th. Good luck!

“Rustic Snowflakes” holiday cards on Hello Lucky

fun Woodland stationery items, designed by Morris & Essex for Galison Press

The way we worked together was that they picked out their favorite designs from my website, and tweaked them a bit to fit their design formats, and they also asked me to generate some new design elements (such as the hand-written script on book spines and packaging). So it’s a little bit funny to see my familiar designs in a new and different format, but it was so much fun to do this, and the finished products look wonderful! I’m so thankful for this awesome experience and really excited that my designs are widely available, at a great price point, and finding their way into lots of new hands.

fun Woodland stationery items, designed by Morris & Essex for Galison Press

first test print

I’ve been working away on a new Thank You card design. I sketched it up on paper, then copied it into Illustrator to fine-tune, printed it out and traced it onto a block of linoleum which I carved up for printing. Next week I’m hoping to do a full edition on the letterpress, I’m thinking of a dark red ink. I will post finished photos when the time comes!

carving away!

salvation army paintings.

I really really wanted to buy both of these but I was on a budget so I had to pick just one. You’ll have to come visit our house to find out which one I got!