Check them all out in our shop!

Up first… is our three things line! Inspired originally by Omay Khayyam (A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou), it pairs three things together (the third one is always you). There’s one for nearly every occasion!

There are 8 designs total, and they are available in our online store and also on Etsy.

Kicking off the show, again, is our little booth. Remember the booth building tale from last year? Well, I’m pleased to report that the plywood walls weathered a year in storage happily and with no damage. So, we pulled them out and decided to give them a fresh coat of paint. But not just any paint. An ombré paint job. Ombré  refers to gradual tonal/color changes, it’s a fancy french word and my current interior design trend crush. What better place to indulge in a trend and follow a crush then a temporary booth display? Here today, gone tomorrow!

Let’s get down to business. Here is the before and after:

…I threw in last year’s gray chalkboard paint for good measure too. Well, what do you think?!? I LOVE it!

Let me start at the beginning. I searched the internet high and low for an “how to paint an ombre wall” post. Nada. At least not without glazes and a bunch of other nonsense. Nope, I wanted to keep it plain and simple.

So, I pulled together a test panel. Three cans of spray paint and one piece of plywood…

One layer at a time. Light to dark. It was actually surprisingly easy to achieve what I was looking for.

For the larger scale, however (our walls are 8 feet x 10 feet x 8 feet tall), we decided to use our paint sprayer. Matt’s always looking for an excuse to use that thing. It’s not an airless sprayer (although we have one of those) it’s one that you use with an air compressor to run it. It can do a very fine mist and the clean up is much easier than the airless.

These are how the walls looked fresh out of storage:

To begin with, I rolled the undercoat (the light turquoise):

Already looking happy and bright!

Then we lined them up on the bocce court:

And sprayed a little bit at a time.

It was very noisy, and involved a lot of “a little more here” and “a little less there” kibitzing from me (official art director, of course).

Layer upon layer (thin coats):

And then:

Voilà! It was done.

The entire project took us one Sunday afternoon. Not bad at all!

That is the tale… (a sequel) of a girl and her booth. Stay tuned next for a crate building recap and then the big new product line-up for 2012!!

We may be crazy-busy, but life marches on. Here are some snatches of our spring.

{ Why take just a bike ride when you could take a PIRATE bike ride? Yarrr. }

{ Printing. Printing. Printing. Pretty much all we do nowadays, it seems. }

{ Pressure washing a polypropylene rug is like pure magic. Now you see the algae… now you don’t. }

{ If we have a spare moment, we play bocce ball with the kids in the early evening. }

{ It can be hotly contested at times. }

{ Testing out our stationery show booth colors for this year. Do you see… ombré? }

{ When you’re hungry, you’re hungry. Even if it means eating a cold pancake. }

{ What? No sand in the sandbox yet? Who cares!! }

{ Lots of growing things. }

{ Candyland Victory!! }

{ At the risk of being redundant: strawberries. Grown two blocks from our house. Sigh. I love Spring. }

Some planning and elbow grease took it from useless and gray…

To this…

a charming raised-bed vegetable garden paradise. I am SO happy with how it came out! Before I get into the details, let’s look at it from the other end of the walkway.

From this…

To this…

It’s an understatement to say I love my new garden. I REALLY love it. So much. CAPS, Bold, Italic, you name it, it can’t begin to express my joy about a wormy, soily garden spot to call my own.

I have planned to do something with our little side yard space ever since we bought the home in 2008. But it wasn’t high on the list of priorities (read: it was actually dead last), so it languished in its gray-gravelness for four years. Oh, and that gravel? Useful for keeping down weeds, but A) very ugly, B) very sharp and impossible to walk on barefoot, C) very sharp and impossible to use our handtruck for orders to and from the shop and D) very, very ugly. Wait, did I say that already?

Chico is a fantastic place to garden. Plants love our just hot enough summers and tomatoes are to die for. Plus the soil around our house is simply fantastic stuff.

At some point during the past four years I realized that side yard gets full sun. All day long. It may have been the sun beating in our master bedroom windows from sun up to sun down that clued me in on that part.

Well, full sun = vegetable heaven! But was it wide enough to plant vegetables and put in a hand truck pathway? Well, we were determined to make it work!

First, I found some salvage brick on craigslist. In its former life it had been part of a lumber mill in Oroville, California, which burned down more than 50 years ago. Some guy had stacked it all neatly in his backyard and was selling it bit by bit. I loved the craggy edges and real white mortar (not paint!) and history of the bricks. Plus, they were cheaper per brick than buying new. Score!

We didn’t lay the path or build the raised beds ourselves, as it’s been far too busy around here at Wild Ink Press to DIY something that big! Instead, I planned out every last bit on the computer and we bought all the supplies then a local landscaper came and installed it for us. This saved $$$ instead of having someone else plan out the yard, and made it doable and seemed to be a good balance of saving money vs. losing time. I laid out the brick in a herringbone pattern (which if you know me, you know I love herringbone and chevron! Exhibit A: master bedroom floor) and I think it just adds a little extra special happiness to the pathway.

Along the sides of the path we planted a creeping thyme ground cover…

It grew in so quickly and is so lush and green! I love the stuff.

The raised beds I designed are 2 feet by 8 feet and 2 feet by 7 feet, depending on the box. They line the path on the sunny side and there are six beds total. In between the beds we put citrus trees in containers:

They seem to be very happy in their sunny spots!

Next up was planting…

11 tomato plants, 1 zucchini, 1 yellow squash, 1 cucumber, 4 eggplant, 4 lettuce, carrots, 1 red bell pepper, 1 jalapeno, 6 strawberries, cilantro, basil, oregano, chives, sage, parsley, mint, thyme, rosemary…

So far they are all so, so happy in this little garden. This is my first real vegetable garden, so I’ll let you know how they grow!

Cameron and Lance have their own garden bed which they planted themselves. I’ll let you know how that one grows too! It was great to be able to hand them their own shovels and say “go dig in your bed” as I planted in mine. And Cam comes out every day to check on his strawberries.

One last shot of the sun setting on this happy side yard:

Hope you’re having a fantastic Monday! Before and after of the rest of our backyard is coming up next!!

It’s the small things.

We started with these farm fresh eggs (plus a few white ones from the grocery store):

We baked them for 30 minutes in a 350F oven – did you know this is a FAR superior method to boiling? No cracking, and perfect centers every time! Thanks, Alton!

When they were done, we plunged them in an ice bath…

…to keep the yolks from turning green.

Then we set up our egg dying shop. Water, vinegar and food coloring – all things we had around the house:

Cameron and I dipped and waited and then re-dipped and calculated…

Oh, and he’s a little camera-shy today. But not Mister Doggy, who was popping in front of the camera at every shot…

Hey there, D.D.!

In no time we had this lovely variety of colors (do note how many are shades of green… attempting to create John Deere Green, ahem, Cameron’s influence):

So, we used markers and basically doodled.

We’ll do a little egg hunt on Sunday after celebrating the Resurrection – which is, of course, the real meaning of Easter.

Hope you have a wonderful Easter weekend!

PS You can check out last year’s egg art right here.

But, here we are, and here is another instagram round-up!

{ Blossoming trees in our side yard. I LOVE Spring. }

{ Random self portrait with hefeweizen. Celebrating our temporary escape from our children. }

{ Matt Tennis – Sherry Connoisseur Extraordinaire. }

{ Another random self-portrait. This time as an undercover agent, clearly. }

{ How chocolatey is YOUR chocolate? }

{ The Perfect Picnic. No, really. }

{ People watching. }

{ I probably have 50 bath time photos of this child. #cutereverytime }

{ Doctor out of town and the worst case of vertigo I’ve ever had = Prompt Care visit. Prompt? 4 hours fast. Prognosis? Inner ear infection. Yuck. }

{ A new character has joined the slowly-expanding Toy Story posse: Woody, Buzz, Potato Head, Army guys, and now.. Rex. }

{ Rain or shine, we go to downtown Farmer’s market! This is what we look like on rainy days. }

That’s pretty much the wrap.

Once we moved to Chico, I was super anxious to find equally fun little drives nearby. It’s been a bit harder. Chico is fantastic, but it’s kind of far from everything. Lake Almanor is awesome, but it’s an hour and a half away, and there are other equally long distances to see cool things (as in it now takes 3.5 hours to get to San Francisco, hardly an easy day trip).

But we have found some neat little trips! There is hiking around Oroville and you definitely can’t miss the fall color-chase up Honey Run Road, or the wildflowers at Table Mountain in the spring.

And this little gem you should not miss: in a little town called Vina, California there is a cloistered Monastery with an attached winery – The Abbey of New Clairvaux. It’s quiet, charming, and only 25 minutes outside of Chico.

Where else would be so low-key that you can take two small boys in to your free wine-tasting?

The wine is actually quite good, grown and cultivated by the trappist monks on the property. (Let’s face it, I also just like the way “trappist monks” sounds – very romantic and European.)

Outside the winery, you can visit the Sacred Stones project…

Being careful not to bother the cloistered monks, of course. The sacred stones is a chapel being rebuilt of stones originally from Ovila, Spain, brought over here by William Randolph Hearst and then left languishing since the 1930s in the Bay Area. They are now slowly but surely being turned back into a chapter house:

The finished and unfinished combine to make the beautiful, at least in my book.

Small boy meets tall doorway…

Beautiful walnut orchards surround the quiet spot.

I love the glassless windows….

What are your local weekend drives? Any haunts near Chico you’d recommend?

Have a happy weekend!

PS These photos are from the archives – taken last April on the day of our 9th anniversary. Which means we are due for another little trip out there soon.