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Happy first day of Summer everyone!
Here's a sneak peek at the latest Screaming Mimis ad, with both backdrop and palette loosely inspired by the work of mid-century abstract artist (and founding editor of Artforum magazine) Arthur Secunda:
whose awe-inspiring torn paper collages Jeff and I spotted for the first time at the Palm Springs Art Museum and have been in love with ever since.
Those perfect desert colors, dusky pinks, soft sands, and silvery shadows, are so dreamy and so elusive that I probably have thousands of swatches in my color libraries, so it was especially fun to sift through them all to try to capture the ever-so-fleeting tones of magic hour in the high desert!
Summer adventure wise, in what has now become basically an annual tradition of life-imitating-art-imitating-imaginary-adventures we were actually semi-coincidentally packing up the wagon and setting sail for the high deserts of Eastern Oregon pretty much the minute after I dashed the ad off to print...
On the itinerary: teepee camping, tumbleweed spotting, bird watching, scout guide assisted campfire building, sandy picnics, ghost towns, petrified forests, and, at the very top of our sightseeing list, the Painted Hills at the John Day Fossil Beds. Every section of the park has a different color winding through the landscape, from the aqua blue craters that looked like the surface of the moon to soft rolling pink and green hills that looked like something out of a 1920s German fairytale, to my personal favorite, the tiny psychedelic pink, orange, and lilac volcanic mountain-scapes that were almost too otherworldly to comprehend:
I'm so beyond obsessed with even the very idea of the lavender rhyolitic lava in that last shot that I still can't stop thinking about it, and we took a mini detour at every roadside rock shoppe in hopes of finding a tiny souvenir. Instead, we ended up with a bit of a geology bug, big chunks of pyrite, rose quartz and petrified wood cluttering up every surface of the house, and giant boulders of all of the above at the top of our wishlist for future landscaping plans. Oops.
We're already hatching plans for another high desert adventure later in the summer, in hopes of finding both the hot springs and the wild horses that eluded us this time around and taking so, so many more pictures of pretty, pretty rocks!
As always, there are oh so many more photos over at Instagram, along with the usual rotation of pottery adventures, cat portraits and new plant friends!
We've had a few little strings of perfect days so far, complete with botanical garden picnics, iced chai and short sleeves, but now that it's officially real life Springtime, the weather in Portland, as it is wont to do, has reset to freezing rain and hail. Siiigh. Soo I'm spending the day tucked away indoors, warm and cozy, drawing cats, cats, cats for a cute upcoming project, which reminds me that if we're not acquainted on 
quite possibly the worlds cutest feral Persian kitten, from the lovely 
A few months later we decided that she might like a little brother, and adopted this tiny creature, Wolfi:
As the proud owner of what may be the tiniest catpaws in the world and weighing in at all of seven pounds, we thought he may have been a teacup kitten, but he's been getting bigger and bigger ever since. He was also semi-feral, and found in the same neighborhood as Uschi, so we were hoping they might be acquainted from their street cat days and be fast friends. It's taken them a while, but they now have a couple of ridiculously cute cat friend rituals, from birdwatching together on the windowsills to their daily mid-morning paw holding catnap:
Also part of our new extended family, approximately one million tiny cactus and succulents just waking up from their winter hibernation and growing out of their pots:
I enrolled in a ceramics program last Fall, and I think it's safe to say at this point that I'm completely obsessed. The first semester focused on the wheel, so we now have these mini vignettes of tiny hand thrown pottery all over the house, including some super awkward early glazing experiments, but these are probably some of my favorites, made just after our trip to Palm Springs, in an attempt to create teeny tiny replicas of the amazing giant white stoneware planters we spotted outside of practically every mid-century municipal building in Southern California!
Happy waning days of Fall everyone!
We saw a million giant trees, veered off on every scenic highway and byway, and hiked through a million ancient forests and fern lined canyons. A few of our absolute favorite spots in the 
