House Art Journal

Growing up Italian, one part of the fabric of my life which I assumed that everyone else knew about was antipasto , "food served before the pasta." What I knew as antipasto, most Americans refer to as appetizers. But the food that was served before a festive meal at my relatives' homes seldom resembled canapes or stuffed mushrooms, nor was it simply chips and pretzels. I look back on the ritual now and realize that the antipasto course taught me how to serve a feast that didn't revolve around starches and sugars, and how to keep kids from being excessively "sugared up" during holidays. At my mother's home on Thanksgiving Day, eating begins at noon and continues into the night. During the morning, someone (usually my tireless Aunt Pam) spends a few hours cutting up every conceivable kind of raw vegetable and arranging them on a silver platter: zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, celery, bok choy, squash, broccoli, cauliflower. Then at noon the antipasto course...

I quilt, but not elaborately. For some reason, given today's frenetic lifestyle and the perennial lack of time to do most good and worthy things, I can't ever see myself attempting one of those elaborate quilt patterns where you spend hours cutting up shapes and then more hours sewing them back together. I love how they look, but not enough to actually try to make one. It just doesn't make sense for me, on some fundamental level. (Please understand I have no philosophical objection to anyone else doing it, though!) But quilts made of simple squares make sense to me: because I do still occasionally sew, and I know what it's like to find a small amount of material and to sit and drink in its beauty, and long for enough of it to cover an entire bed. Hence, when you have a large amount of small bits of beloved material, sewing them into a quilt large enough to cover your bed makes all the sense in the world. I made this quilt of favorite bits from an upholstery shop (blessi...

Before it gets closer to Christmas, I wanted to post this special request: Last year for Christmas, we collected teddy bears for our Christmas tree in memory of our son Joshua who died. Joshua's family nickname was "Teddy Bear" and so we decided that for Christmas, we would decorate our tree with quality teddy bears. We gave some of them as gifts to any children who visited us during Christmas. And after Christmas, we donated them to a good cause: I gave them to a disaster-relief nurse who is taking them to expectant mothers in Africa. This year, I am looking into making a donation of the bears to our local hospital and emergency services. So I am searching for medium or smaller-size brown or beige teddy bears (please no white or pastel or colored! These are "boy" bears :) ), either new or good-as-new (they can definitely be "played with" and "handled" but they probably shouldn't be in such bad condition that a thrift store would refuse t...

We had an interesting All Saint's Day, starting when I came upstairs and found broken drop-ceiling tiles on our girls' room floor. "Um, Mom... could we take down our ceiling?" my daughters asked. Apparently it had been bothering them as much as it has been bothering us. Drop ceilings can be very nice in their own way, but they certainly can look out of place in a farmhouse bedroom. So my husband and I said yes. And after I made them cover their furniture with bedsheets, the girls went to town I had to help them, of course, but with the help of a hammer and claw, it only took about two hours, including piling all the tiles in the garage and putting the twisted metal frames into the truck to go to the metal recycling factory and vaccumming the room. And now the ceiling looks like this: Ascetically, it doesn't look great, though I feel at last like there's "breathing room" in their little bedroom, whose ceiling always felt cramped to me. But a few sheet...

When a baby has a birthday in our family, there's certain things I like to do to celebrate. While I'm not a "no-sugar" mom, I definitely am interested in limiting my two-year-old's intake of celebratory sucrose, just so that the day after birthday day is not a sick day. :) And while I love presents as much as the next birthday person, it never seems right to burden a baby with big presents on a birthday. So here's roughly what I do for a toddler birthday, particularly one where there is no party outside of a family party: I buy balloons. One big mylar balloon for a one-year old, or two balloons for a two-year-old. The balloons aren't decoration: they're presents. If you don't know what I mean, watch a baby with a balloon sometime and you'll understand that these fascinating items are actually transient, disposable toys that give delight for a day or two, then vanish, just like a birthday. Another great birthday treat is croissants: I bought my ...