Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day whether Hallmark created it or not is one of my favorite holidays. No pressure or anything, but I think you can really express yourself and your love in many beautiful ways on a day dedicated to vitamins L,O,V and E.
It's a good day to think about the nature of love, to give yourself a little love, to send a little compassion out into the world, to give someone special something special, to get drunk with your friends and wish for things.
For the next fourteen days, let's try to focus on ways to send a little love every which way but loose. I'm focused on a lot of things these days, namely getting ready for these tradeshows, leaving for Paris, getting my linesheets and lookbook done, adding the finishing touches to my new collection, calling stores, and the orders that are starting to come in for Valentine's Day, amongst other things like feeding my cats, calling my parents, watching the finale of Top Chef. But isn't it more fun to think about Valentine's Day ideas? Let's do that for the next 14 days starting today:

Just Make Something
I am romantic.
Every year I make my husband a Valentine. He keeps them all which is romantic of him.
I made this one for him when we were in India. It's a love garden.
The back. My biologically incorrect rendering of a human heart in a valentine-shaped horned she-heart.


The middle.

Still Life

I'm thinking about how to shoot my Fall 2007 pictures. I'm way behind schedule on that adventure. This newest of the new collections ( I just got back from the metal studio and working on it) is based on my childhood ideas of Bonnie and Clyde. These are pieces I'd like to see a modern day Bonnie Parker wear for when she's on the lamb but more on that later. I have some big ideas for the shoot which I won't be able to make happen--this involves an old rusted out jalopy, wolves and suitcases full of money in a snowy forest. Then I have my back-up small ideas, set-ups involving old coins on a wooden table, an old style leather satchel, bonbons hanging over the side-soft lens-rosy feel.
In the meantime, This January tableau on my mantel set my color palette for this wintry collection. I think the white cottony looking stuff --I can't stop looking at it-it's full of small seeds and it keeps falling apart and clinging to the cats---is actually what happens to Rose of Sharon in the winter, when it's confused and thinks it's Spring and then realizes, "No, it's winter for real".
And, non-sequiter, this is a close-up of the picture on the proper left. That's my mom and my uncle when they were little kids, somewhere in Germany.
And my father in the army. I swiped this one last time I visited them, so I haven't framed it yet!

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday Jen. Girl, you'll be a woman soon.

Henri and Me

We went to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the ICP in Manhattan yesterday. All pictures from his Scrapbook, in chronological order, hence the title of the show "Scrapbook".
If I could make a wish right now, it would be for the pieces I'm working on now
to posses that same roguish grace as a Bresson photo, a holy-looking asymmetry, imperfect, poetic, of the people. Right now my new pieces are gaining their momentum from thoughts of Bonnie and Clyde. Long story. I'll tell it tomorrow. But this show is exquisite.

Spring 2007

I designed Spring 2007 back in September 2006 which always feels weird. I'm a very immediate person. I titled the collection "Il Etait Une Fois Dans Le Fôret" or "Once Upon a Time In the Forest". I was thinking of my favorite old fairytales set in the forest, the kind my German grandmother, my Oma used to tell. Germans like their fairytales grizzly, and that's how I remember her versions of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks. These were stories but I think she used to tell them in a way that let me know she'd never let that stuff happen to me--if I was a good girl I guess. Anyway, it was these memories of those fairytales and the idea that some of the elements I used in the jewelry were things one might find along the path of the forest if one were a major player in the story-like Gretel or Red or Goldi. Maybe these things would protect you or help you find your way. Or maybe they were just the things you find, like a pine cone or a nice rock that would comfort you if you kept them.
Anyway here are some previews of my favorites and some of the favorites of the shops that bought them at the Le Showroom tradefair in Paris in October. You can find them on my site (this is my first pug of the blog), Bonbon Oiseau.

I'm designing Fall/Winter 2007 now. It seems funny.

Ode to Mark Bittman

I've been reading "The Soul of a Chef" by Michael Ruhlman all morning while my cat, Icky drinks out of the toilet. I catch her doing it now and then and consider it a gentle reminder that she is an indeed an animal. I don't stop her but instead, I am excited by all that I can do on a Saturday in which I can do whatever I want. I break out the laptop and check out the video section of the NY Times on-line. I've just discovered the Video feature of the Times site since I got a new fast laptop for Christmas. Hooked. That's some good stuff, stuff I now save for when I have "some time".
What I find today makes this Saturday a good Saturday, an accomplished Saturday: A video of Times food writer, Mark Bittman learning to make scones at Tartine, a bakery in the Mission district of San Francisco.

I love Mark Bittman and now I love him more after seeing him in this clip, a New Yorker in San Francisco. Mark is wearing this great white-striped navy blue French Navy Shirt. He's sparkly. He's going to have a good time even if the owner, who's teaching him to make her scones, is kind of dry toast. But I like the fact that she means business. There are all kinds of chefs. Personality is second to spirit.
Sidenote: I have a special kind of love for Mark Bittman's column, "The Minimalist" in the Wednesday food section. I always want to cook all of his recipes and it's a rare day when I don't find them compelling. Our palates have a kinship. In my opinion, if an American household owns one cookbook let it be his How to Cook Everything. It's the New Settlement Cookbook, the Joy of Cooking of the oughts. Now that I've seen him in action, I'm hooked the way I'm hooked on Anthony Bourdain's and his show on the Travel Channel, No Reservations.

And back to the video!
Tartine looks Frencher than France, a place I'd go back to San Francisco for, wait in line just to look at the beautiful good goodies they put out in the case. It's glamorous looking stuff. Even the scones look sexy. And scones are hardly ever sexy. I'm much more a "cooker" than a "baker" but my executive decision is to buy the sexy looking Tartine Cookbook to see what I can rock.

Good day for a Blog

I normally tell friends and business acquaintances I am a very busy person, and would never have time to maintain a blog, but today seemed like a good day to start one. Most of my favorite people and designers and many people I've never met seem to have blogs these days, so why not? They must be busy people too. Let's at least try, ok?
The title comes from an email I got yesterday from my good friend Jen. Our old mutual friend Dr. Larry signed off an email that way to her: "I love you and your destiny is stone golden." He's not around anymore as in the "not alive" sense, but he was an innovative thinker, an admirer of "the arts" and "the nature" was an all around life-liver. Those are traits I can really get behind. Jen wrote, "You should sign off all your Bonbon emails like that"
She's so right.
This blog is for Dr. Larry and all the lovely people and things I know and don't know, who will inspire me at some point to make this blog about something.