A glimpse of my studio

I always love seeing people's writing desks or mail art stations, so I thought I would share mine again. Same desk, same lamp, same mail cubby, but this is the first time I've shown the set up in our current house!

 Lots of horse pictures on the walls, the top painting is by my grandmother. I'm finally organizing my wooden mail cubby a little. Now two of the slots have labels!! "Thank you's" and "Check Envelopes"

I like the sloping ceiling and how it makes it feel cozy. I don't pack stuff in on the walls like this anywhere else in the house, but I love having all these photos and artwork around me while I make mail.

 two of my grandmother's paintings

 a photo of my cat growing up, Cotton, who lived to be 18! And a sketch that I did of him lying on my legs about 6 years ago...

We were right inside the barn, looking out at my horse Windsong, and the mules, the same perspective as this photo, except the cat was in my lap.

A Joanna Newsom (musician) themed postcard I received from a swap I ran on swap-bot. I just loved this.

Do you hang a lot of things in your mail spot?

The chair is kind of ugly, but it's very comfortable. I've heard it's easy to reupholster things if you have a staple gun, so maybe a that's a project for the future.

The room also functions as a guest bedroom, and I try to keep the bed pretty clear of mail flotsam, because a certain someone likes to sleep there.

Outgoing mail

Some outgoing mail:

For Christmas I received a fat book of origami paper. You can see four sheets of it in the above photo. I'm using it for writing paper, because I'm not very good at origami! I think that's what the giver intended it for anyway. :) I love choosing several papers in the same color scheme to write a letter on. I frequently start a letter using a notecard or occasionally a postcard, and then continue with more sheets of paper. Do you do this as well? What kind of paper do you use? I've bought a lot of graph paper in different patterns from the I.D.E.A. store and I frequently use that.

This paper underneath the "Hello" was wrapping paper that I'm reusing for stationery. My mother-in-law always has the best selection of wrapping paper! She gets those books of it where you tear out the pages. Have you seen those? Lots of beautiful ornate patterns.

Envelope from a Weimaraner calender and the left triangular piece of paper is from my old Arthur Rackham calendar. I just love his work. I'm using up every scrap from that calendar!

Incoming

lovely bright circle mail from Taradactyl

 I just love this stamp of one of South Africa's national parks. Beautiful! I just bought a sheet of the new U.S. National Parks, which are absolutely wonderful! The one of Assateague is my favorite, of course, since I grew up about 30 minutes away. My second favorite is the painting of Bandelier National Monument.

More bright mail! This time from Donovan Beeson of the L.W.A. This envelope is made of vellum, or a vellum-like material and when the sun shines through it or on it, it gets even brighter, almost neon.

And a lovely letter from Hannah, who lives super close to me! It's fun talking about the places around town that we go to.

Mostly calendar envelopes

I've been making a lot of envelopes from old calendars that I've had laying around for YEARS and want to use up.

Arthur Rackham, one of my favorites

Wildlife calendar

and a William Wegman Weimaraner calendar.

And finally a Talking Heads envelope, not from a calendar.

Pineapple Rum Cream Pie

I'm definitely obsessed with pie.  This pie I just kind of made up on the spot because I really wanted to make a pie, and I didn't want to go shopping. We had a pineapple that was very ripe and needed to be eaten, and not much else. 

Ever since my discovery of the two layer pie-- something on the bottom and then fresh fruit on top, it's so easy to think up new pies. Also I keep getting pie books out from the library.  Right now I have out The Perfect Pie by Susan Purdy and A Year of Pies by Ashley English. The Perfect Pie is really cool because there is a section at the back of pie and tart recipes, but there are also pretty hefty sections of crust recipes and what I'm going to call Pie Component recipes. In that section there is a recipe for Pastry Cream or Crème Pâtissière. So I made that and added a tablespoon of dark rum since I was going for a Caribbean feel with the pineapple.  For the crust, we had run out of graham crackers, so I used some lemon snap cookies that I had bought to experiment with.

I really liked this pie.  Sometimes it tasted like it had bananas or coconut in it. I'm not sure if that was just power of imagination or what. The phantom coconut feeling definitely came from the consistency of the crust; I've had crusts made with some shredded coconut and it felt very similar.

This was a great summer pie. The crust bakes for about 10 minutes and the pastry cream cooks on the stove top again for about 10 minutes, so there's not much to heat up your kitchen.

Pie Pie Pie Pie Pie!!

I think I've been making at least a pie a week for a month or so now. It really keeps me sane. Something to look forward to. This one is a honey pie from the United States of Pie book by Adrienne Kane. But the crust is one I made from a recipe from the Four and Twenty Blackbirds book, a recipe with apple cider vinegar in the crust. 

It was super delicious, but I was a little unhappy with the crust because it sank and didn't hold the nice crimps I made. The recipe didn't say to bake the crust at all before putting in the filling, but I might do that a bit next time.

This was the pie coming right out of the oven:

It was so puffed up! It deflates after you take it out, but by that time I was too excited about eating it to remember to take another picture.

In the past weeks I've also made a pie of my own creation that I call Yellow Submarine pie- a bottom layer of lemon curd covered with fresh blueberries mixed in a tiny amount of homemade blueberry jam. It was super tart, which I like, but I think it might be even better later in the season when blueberries are sweeter and the pie would be a bit more balanced.

(We are always eating the pie at night and the lighting isn't as good for pretty pictures unfortunately, but I just love that first picture of the two bowls of ingredients!)


I also made two different grapefruit pies for a friend's birthday party. One with a graham cracker crust and grapefruit curd mixed with whipped cream, and then a few slices of fresh grapefruit laid on top.

The second one was a bit of an experiment. I'd read recipes for Lemon Shaker Pie and really wanted to try that, but I also was excited to try it with grapefruits. So never having had the original, I decided to just go for it with grapefruit. I followed the Lemon Shaker Pie recipe from the United States of Pie book.  In this recipe you slice the entire citrus fruit super thin and let it sit in sugar overnight so that the rind and pith soften and lose some of their bitterness. Then you mix that with some eggs and a few other ingredients for the pie filling.

Here it is before being baked:

I hadn't made a double crust pie in a long time, so that was exciting too. Crust is the best!

Okay, and finally the terrible rushed picture in the car on the way to the party of the pies and a bowl of whipped cream! haha

I was so happy with how these turned out. The grapefruit curd/whipped cream pie completely disappeared at the party. It was a huge hit, and most of the Grapefruit Shaker pie was gone too.

Outgoing Mail Art

I finally got back into the groove and started responding to my large pile of received mail. Here are a few envelopes I sent.