Notes on Paris in Springtime

Paris: my first time. Paris was blue skies. Paris was walking. Paris was picnics. Paris was long stretches of time spent with friends whom you live near but never spend enough time with. Paris was apartments with fabulous floor tiles and romantic exteriors. Paris was tiny apartments with plumbing problems and ancient floorboards.

Paris was in bloom -- with birds, with flowers, with the spirit of springtime, with the light, the magic, the romance of the movies. It's a place you know from reputation, like New York, like when the travelers we met on a bridge on New Year's Eve in Istanbul proclaimed they knew Manhattan from The Devil Wears Prada. You know Paris too, from Hemingway and Orwell and Truffaut and Godard and Rohmer and it's what you expect: 3 Euro wine and quick rainstorms followed by intense sun and a place where cigarettes remain forever sexy.

New Collections by MAV + SCB!

(All photos by Ryan Shimala of More & Co.)

New collections by MAV + SCB are out on 3191. MAV made smocks, tanks, sleeveless silky tops with a loose vintage cut + perhaps my favorite of all: sweet polka dot hand-sewn handkerchiefs. I've been wearing my new pieces all week and wearing fabrics this luscious feels damn nice. SCB made a collection of linens for home, with awesome leather embossed 3191 tags. Psyched to have one of these coming to my home as well.

(And, to top it all off, the 3191 Quarterly, Issue 11, is also out too).

*Thanks, Ryan, MAV, CDR, SCB, Betsy, Andrew, Jacob, Karen Gelardi for including me in this shoot!

Postcard from Maine, Part II

Hanging out with a dear friend who's 39-weeks pregnant and her big fluffy polar bear dog, strolling around Fort Williams in the post-storm late afternoon sunshine, reluctant to get in the car to head back home. When we finally do part, it's knowing the baby will be there by the next time we return, everything will be a beginning again.

We're the last customers into a small Italian deli with a postage-stamp-sized wine store. The chatty guy at the counter makes us piping hot chicken parm subs with drippy cheese that's impossible to eat in a car. We park next to a tiny triangular park, somewhere in South Portland, 20 feet from a USPS drop-off point and finish our sandwiches as the sun heads towards setting and people drive by, dropping letters in the mailbox without getting out of their cars.

Postcard from Maine, Part I

Just back from a gorgeous and always-too-quick weekend in Maine. Spring is full throttle. Lots of good time with good people: MAV asked met to be in the photoshoot of her new Beauty & Use collection (coming out this Fri, 5/17). (I got to come home with quite a few of the pieces and oooh, they are nice). More shoot photos here. Lots of hang time with Scotch the cat, brunch and beach visits in Cape Elizabeth, a walk through the woods, lunch at Pai Men Miyake and dinner at The Blue Spoon. 

First We Feast

First We Feast invited me to share some of my favorite (personal) food photos, and the stories behind the images and the meals. Thanks, Elyse + team.

Outtakes | Someone I Know

Outtakes from the shoot I did with my friend Audrey for Stuart Pilkington's Someone I Know project, just as the trees were starting to bud several weeks ago.

Paris Instagrams

From top to bottom: 1. cactus shop in the Marais 2. gardens at the Museum of Natural History 3. Merci shop 4. Tuileries 5. Sneaking up on the Eiffel Tower 6. Sacre Coeur in Montmartre 7. Keys to a Belleville apartment 8. Signage in the 7th Arr. 9 + 10. Luxembourg Gardens 11 + 12. Tuck Shop 13. Colonnes de Buren, a conceptual art installation by Daniel Buren in the courtyard of the Palais Royal 14. A in the gardens of Notre Dame 15. Ceiling at a Boulangerie in the 2nd Arr.