winter at home

it's cold here! while all my northern-hemisphere friends are hooting and hollering about their sweaty carefree summers, we're bundled up in sweaters, hovering over the gas heater and staying indoors, snuggling with the pups to keep warm. we did a ton of traveling during the summer and fall, and now we've used up all of our vacation time and travel budget so we'll be at home for the rest of the year, and right now it feels nice to be at home, nesting and working in the studio and knitting up a storm. I'm trying to knit a blanket to keep me warm on the couch, hopefully I might even finish it before summer comes! aside from knitting and watching tons of movies, these are fun things we've been up to recently:

• using my handsome new red silicone(!) mini-muffin tins to bake cupcakes and muffins. apple-carrot-chocolate chip muffins were the best so far.

• discovered a cute place called La Castorera right around the corner from our house (thank you Dirk for bringing us there), it's an upstairs space with a nice old-time vibe in the bar and they have bands and music and project movies on Wednesdays, I hope we'll be back there again soon.

• started yoga classes. they're small classes with a nice teacher named Ines who lives in our neighborhood. we use a lot of equipment: pillows and nylon straps and wood blocks and stuff. in that aspect it's different from any other yoga classes I've taken before, but we also did lots of normal yoga stuff. seems great so far, I love being in a small class and getting more personal instruction.

• had a fun dinner with Annie & Matt and friends at a cute and very informal "closed-door restaurant" in Almagro called "Donde Me Trajiste" (where have you brought me?). The food was really not exciting but the whole experience is fun, it's like being invited to dinner at a friend's house, the hosts serve you dinner in their own home. It's a pretty, historic PH house with a bit of a hippie onda, and they perform live music for you while you eat. The "house band" did some fun tango music and later a solo artist played some traditional Argentine folklorico music. Also they served us a delicious mystery cocktail which had pear and basil in it, appropriately called "Que le pusiste?" (what did you put in it?) because they wouldn't reveal what else was in it.

• had a great bike-riding Saturday, rode over to Chacarita and bought tons of fresh veggies & super awesome cheeses at the organic farmer's market El Galpon and then took a break at home, warmed up and did a bit of knitting, then biked over to MALBA, the modern art museum, and looked at the art. Mike had never been to MALBA before! they had a good exhibit of Argentine art from the 1990's, I liked a lot of the work although it did seem weird (given the title of the show) that most of the pieces I liked were made in 2003-2008. Had submarinos (hot milk with a bar of chocolate: you drop the chocolate in and mix it up until it turns into hot chocolate) and pain-au-chocolat and a game of cards in the museum cafe. Perplexingly, a museum guard knocked on the glass wall and scolded us for playing cards in the museum cafe! wtf? we ignored him and kept playing until our submarinos were gone and biked back home, then cooked a delicious pot of hot & sour soup with our farmers-market veggies.

• knitting and more knitting. i made this hat for a craft swap, and now i am working on a slightly-more-subdued version of this blanket (using solid-colored blocks rather than striped blocks, if that makes any sense). I'll upload a picture soon.

• I've been making some new designs for wedding invitations. I've gotten lots of inquiries about custom work for weddings, but I find that mostly people like to "shop" from a variety of available options, rather than inventing something totally new from scratch. So I'm putting together a repertoire of wedding invitations, I'll keep adding more as I have time.

• starting a new website/blog to post pattern and textile designs. This is still in the idea phase, and it's a collaborative project with my friend Julia. the idea is we'll both post pattern/textile designs, sketches, etc. For years I've been wanting to assemble/develop a real portfolio of textile and repeat designs so hopefully this will be an incentive to start pulling them together and developing more work in this vein. I'll post a link as soon as we have something to share!

bike ride to tigre!!

For at least a year and a half, Mike and Leandro and I have been talking about taking a bike-ride to Tigre some weekend. Tigre is my Coney Island in Buenos Aires, one of my favorite places in Argentina, a neighborhood/city north of the Capital Federal, a weekend amusement town on the muddy brown river delta that includes a zillion green, overgrown islands, lots of old victorian mansions, humble weekend cottages, boats of all kinds, an amusement park, a casino, a giant busy market, a grand old museum in a former gentleman's club, and a festive, nautical, fantasy-land air that ranges from dirty, creepy and dilapidated to expensive and fabulous.

So Saturday was the perfect hot spring day and we finally did it!! We guess that the ride was 25 or 30 miles one-way (mike's bike odometer broke after 15 miles), though that included some rambles and detours to see some sights along the way. It was definitely the longest bike-ride i have ever done! but it made me want to do more.

Leandro was an amazing tour-guide, and named all the neighborhoods and landmarks for us as we rode through, took us to see the giant towers at the riverside in Olivos, guided us through some busy traffic on the avenues and some beautiful shady lanes in the fancy neighborhoods. I definitely would've been terrified to do this ride on my own, but with Mike and Leandro i felt more or less invincible. I put sunscreen on my nose (and Mike's nose) but didn't put it on my back and shoulders, so by the time we got to Tigre I was not only sore and tired from riding but completely sunburned to a crisp and sick from sun-poisoning. oops. It was an awesome trip though, an amazing way to start the spring, a perfect day in the sunshine with friends. And how satisfying to finally go through with the plan! when we got to Tigre we dragged our tired butts to the riverside and had a fabulous picnic of stuffed olives and fancy cheeses on the lawn in front of the museum, until the guard came and kicked us off. Barbaro.

Afterwards we were too tired to ride back home so we took our bikes home on the bike train!

Troy, New York

Next stop on our journey was Troy, New York. we got a cheap flight from Detroit to Albany (via DC... changing my tally to 7 airports, 5 flights, and 2 train stations inside of 5 days!) we stayed with Andrew and Vickie at their famous house on 9th street in Troy. The house was large and exciting, as promised. It was totally a fixer-upper and Andrew and Vickie have been lovingly renovating it over the past year.

I have much nostalgia for the days when Andrew was my roommate in Brooklyn so it was great to be back in AndrewSpace, a mental and physical place filled with lots of bike parts and lots of action and fun and colors and ideas and good food. For instance, when we arrived, Andrew was putting the finishing touches on a back-yard shed which he had conceived and constructed entirely from scrap wood in the course of two days! without measuring anything. I helped out painting its doors bright red.

Then we made a bonfire in the fire-pit and roasted some vegetables and a lot of people came over for dinner in the Yarden, it was lots of fun!

We also went to visit The Sanctuary for Independent Media, an amazing media venue inside of an old church, a beautiful and inspiring space. And we met Andrew's friend Branda and her daughter Masha and their tiny amazing dog Rosefang and went out for a canoe trip on the Hudson River and Erie Canal and took a bike ride in the rain.
While in troy, we also ran into Jason Steven Murphy, a friend from high school who happens to be getting married this weekend! (congratulations!), and visited Cat Mazza and Jim Finn, who we'd met in Buenos Aires when Jim had a retrospective of his film work showing at the BAFICI Film Festival. Cat showed us her amazing knitting studio, filled with knitting projects by herself and other artists, a collection of knitting patterns and literature and a Brother bulky knitting machine, among other interesting objects. Cat told us about one of her current projects, Stitch for Senate, and gave us each a ball of yarn and a set of needles to participate in the project by knitting our very own helmet-liner for a US senator.
Also, on our second day in Troy, fellow former 708 Greene roommateAngie appeared just in time for the cook-out! It was just like old times. Angie is amazing.
It was sad to say good-bye to everyone and everything in Troy, but we had to head to Maine on Friday morning. We'd planned to take the greyhound bus but we were incredibly fortunate to get a ride to Boston with Cat and Jim, and another ride from Boston to Maine with Andrew and Vickie's roommate Sarah and her friend Brendan. Sarah is a musician and author who was really nice and interesting and great company for the ride. We stopped in Ipswitch for fried clams along the way.

bike

new red bike!
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis

I got a new bike!!! I thought I would get a used road bike but I couldn't find one single used bike for sale, nor any road bikes! They only make cruisers here I guess. So I picked the cutest one I could find! Biking is scary here, scarier than in New York. Too many cars. Night-time is the best time for joy rides.