2012 was filled with sunshine and dreary days, joy and pain, good luck and bad, beautiful and ugly. As far as years go, it wasn’t one of the easier ones, but I lived to tell about it… Hoping for health and success in my new year and yours.
2012, the year of:
We’ve gone several months without a Hot Hands award around here. Not because there is any shortage of creative do’er folks out there… more like we missed a month and then two and then not only are there no Hot Hands Awards but no posts at all!
Come to find out that even though I [...]
Last weekend we jammed a booth at the Expo Center in Portland with more East Fork treasure than I ever imagined could fit in a 10 x 10 space for America’s Largest Antique & Collectible Show.
Whew. Those things are hard work. But we had fun selling some of our favorite finds (and looking [...]
Thirteen years ago today, the most amazing thing happened. I had a baby boy.
He was much anticipated, and a few weeks overdue. I spent that September in Michigan getting a nursery ready in our little apartment, every day feeling sure that day was the one we’d finally get to meet face [...]
I’ve been practicing my tiny rolled hem, which makes for a lot of tea towels. I love linens, but linens with really cutesy designs on them BUG me. You get where I’m going with this?
Looking at these pictures makes me wish I had sense enough to iron the [...]
Burgers are what’s on the menu and I don’t have hamburger buns. When I was growing up, we never had hamburger buns. Hamburger buns were something McDonalds had and other people brought to the family reunion. I ate hamburgers at least once a week for 18 years, and I never recall having a bun. I [...]
Welcome to the latest edition of Making Ugly Stuff Awesome. Today we’re in New Mexico, awesomizing a night stand that needed awesomizing.
No, no, sorry, I’m not in New Mexico. There’s quite enough ugly stuff near home for me to start on somewhere else just yet. This post is dedicated to someone else who is making [...]
Dear Neighbors,
What is the matter with you people? You live in the most beautiful place on earth and instead of letting it affect you in a positive manner, you scowl. I smile at you. You scowl at me. I get that you have life-things to worry about. I get that your job sucks and [...]
I can take the simplest job and make it complex. I am nearly incapable of following a plan. I try sometimes, but nobody ever really got an A for effort. The most recent display of my delinquency is reminiscent of so many others before it.
My dad, aware that I’m perpetually in a state of [...]
Some recycled Father’s Day reading from the old blog.
In case you got all the ads for bbq grills and neckties in your morning papers last week but couldn’t put two and two together, today Father’s Day. I built my dad a birdhouse, made him a cheesecake, and brought him Starbucks. [...]
Some stuff I made recently. All for sale at Heisson Store. Made of 100% recycled/reclaimed stuff, of course.
So last week, Dick’s BFF Trent came by. He was all stoked because he had come from a sale and had a few treasures in tow. I came out to say a quick hello, but I was a busy doing whatever it is I do, so I retreated to the back yard [...]
There were lots of sales going on last weekend. Ordinarily we’d have hit quite a few, but we both had some other projects to tend to, so the tally through the weekend was 7.
If you aren’t a religious garage sale goer, 7 might seem like a tremendous number, but if you just hit one [...]
I’ve always had crappy hair. It’s fine, wavy on one side only, and doesn’t respond to coaxing, pleading, or traditional cosmetology techniques. I have the added pleasure of cowlicks at random intervals all over my head. Every stylist I’ve ever visited has given me a confused look and asked what side I part my hair [...]
Today is Stepmother’s Day. I have an awesome stepmom who also happens to be a fantastic artist. Each month East Fork Spring recognizes someone from the realm of creativity for his or her work. This month’s Hot Hands honoree is Marie Wise.
Marie lives in Kalama, WA with her husband Allan. She is [...]
Disclaimer: the information in this post might come in handy sometime, but I didn’t attend medical school and don’t have the license (or the inclination, for that matter) to practice medicine (as practice it would be, indeed)outside the friendly confines of my bathroom. The general consensus is that a doctor should be consulted in matters [...]
It’s always sunnier on the other side of the river. That is not a metaphor, it’s a fact. Especially on beautiful spring days like the last few, all we can do is watch helplessly from beneath the dense fir canopy as the other side of the river is flooded with sunlight. I happen to be [...]
Okay, so I controlled myself as long as I could, watching Dick have all that fun carving fish.
But the little man that lives in my head is relentless with his “Come on, try it. You could do that. What are you waiting for? That would be FUN, don’t you think? Are you [...]
A few days ago I asked for nominations for our April Hot Hands Award. Dick, my partner in crime (as well as legally permissible activities) nominated himself. I think it was (partially) in jest (kind of), but it got me thinking.
“Uh-oh,” I thought, “I’m not thinking, am I? Something good rarely [...]
April Fools Day is lame without my Grandpa Wise around, calling to tell me there’s a pod of whales swimming up the Cowlitz or a tsunami headed straight for us. He always came up with a good one for me.
Today is actually lame for a whole pile of reasons, but we haven’t the time [...]
Thanks for joining us, or… um, just me- for the newest addition to the site. It’s a little feature I’m calling “Making Ugly Stuff Awesome”. Today I took two of the ugliest light fixtures I could think of and transformed them into a chandelier I kinda dig.
I screwed this one up first thing, [...]
So, I just started selling some of my treasures online (please, feel free to do a little shopping). My offerings thus far has been collectibles, housewares, and vintage decor. Lord knows there’s enough of it to go around. A few handmade things. Now I’m going to be [...]
Everyone knows that rule. I’m still up so it’s not today yet. Just enough time left in today (which is really yesterday) to post. I did make a promise, ya know.
I haven’t done much for the “hunt & pick” part of this site yet. Mostly because I’ve been damn busy hunting and picking. Wanna [...]
First, allow me to clarify the title. When I say “Free Doghouse Plans” it means the plan is free and the doghouse didn’t cost anything for me to build. All materials I used were salvaged from our remodel or otherwise scavenged from someone else’s project leftovers. That’s what makes it a Spring [...]
Renovating. Remodeling. DI-Why. Why do we do this to ourselves? Because we can’t help it, that’s why! Or at least that’s why I do it. I swear to you I have told myself, aloud, not to start another project. Begged myself, even. But by the time it gets to the pleading, I [...]
About This Project
I’ve always loved the old mail collection boxes. So I made one. Much better than the old one. My mail lady even likes it. She took pictures to show it to her mail friends.
I don’t know that it’s really worth it to anyone for me to post [...]
Good grief, chief. This website business is hard! How come nobody ever talks about that? You always hear about how easy it is to get yourself online with a lovely website. “Look! You can have a website set up exactly how you want, free of charge! All you have to do [...]
East Fork Spring is pretty jacked to announce our very first Hot Hands Award recipient: Matt Calcavecchia.
Matt is an exceptional artist and an amazing human. I first met Matt as a freshman at the University of Washington in 1995 (my math must be wrong, because I thought I just calculated [...]
About 6 months after we moved into the fixer on the river, I was feeling overwhelmed, unproductive, and downright tired. I picked up my notebook, intending to gather my thoughts and prioritize my monstrous list of want to do and have to do.
As a flipped through looking for the next available [...]
I had been posting sporadically with Blogger. I took a peek today to see if I should migrate anything from there over to here. I read my first post and had a nice chuckle. Not because of the side-splitting hilarity of my writing, but because I’m pretty much in the same state [...]
I’ve had the notion for a while that east fork spring needed its own little corner of the web. But it needed to be a pretty place. Not your ugly ol’ weblog. And it needed to be a place where people could interact and get inspired. Oh yeah, it also needed some [...]
Spam Sandwich: It’s a Shame to Delete So Many Entertaining Comments
Before I started eastforkspring.com, I really didn’t pay too much attention to the comments sections of sites I visited.
Comments from butt-smooching readers gushing about how superfantasticallyawesome the blogger is or nit-picking yahoos with nothing better to do than surf the web pointing out grammatical errors and offering unsolicited/uninteresting/unwarranted criticisms.
To be sure, not all [...]