Apples!

This weekend we were lucky to be next to apple vendors at the farmer's market. They had so many fun, colorful varieties. And the best thing about local market apples is that they're often interestingly imperfect shapes. I particularly like how the one in the front here looks like it grew in a stiff headwind.

Apples are also a great exercise in color mixing. I love how these three apples go from a deep, cold red (back left) to a medium red (back right), to a really warm streaky red (front.) A bunch of different mini apples clustered on a bracelet or a pair of chunky, multi-apple earrings would be incredibly cute. And a great gift for a teacher to boot!

Here are some more apple photos to get you inspired!

Library Love

I adore libraries. When I was a kid, our mom used to take us to the local library once a week, and set us free to pick out books. I remember spending hours reading spines and dust jackets, trying to pick out the very best books. I'd always have a heavy armful of novels and craft books, and would set them in front of the librarian at the checkout desk with a most satisfying thump.

To this day, I love the quiet and calm and vague mustiness of a library. I particularly love that libraries are free and open to everyone. Sure, there might be hundreds of online resources for learning about everything from artichokes to zucchini, but in my mind, there's nothing quite like picking up an actual cookbook and looking at the photos, or learning about color theory from a beautifully illustrated painting book.

I also love that libraries these days are much more focused on creating fun programs for their communities. When I was a kid, programs generally were limited to story time for really little kids. Nowadays, lots of libraries have these fantastic rooms set aside for all kinds of awesome programs, like mitten-making, puppet shows, and even tiny food crafting! It's fun to be in a library and chattering away exuberantly while crafting.

Librarians really made the writing of our book possible. A local librarian in Charlottesville initially asked me to teach a class on making tiny fruits as an after-school activity for teenagers. From that first class, many more followed, especially teen summer programs through the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library. Another librarian, Barbara Kreuter, from Staunton, VA strongly encouraged us to write a book based on my classes. She was also a sneaky supporter of the actual writing process (we kept it a secret until early this year), and helped set up several classes for her library so that I could test out recipes on real people. Thank you again to all you participants in my classes for helping us refine many of the recipes in the book, and for asking so many great questions.

So it's especially gratifying that a lovely youth services librarian from New York wrote a sweet review of our book on her blog, 4YA: Inspiration for Youth Advocates!

If you haven't been into a library in a while (or a long, long time), I definitely encourage you to go. This time of year (fall, sliding into winter) is particularly good for spending some quality time getting inspired in the cookbook section. Or maybe even revisiting a classic, and deciding that you too need to make a little madeline charm in honor of Rememberance of Things Past.

~Jessica

Pumpkins!

This past weekend at the Charlottesville City Market, the first pumpkins of the season appeared! It was a thoroughly fall Saturday, chilly enough that we dug out our sweaters. Rain drizzled throughout the morning, which made for some beautiful photos of the new pumpkins and made us inspired to create new miniature pumpkins as well.

The booth next to ours had a lovely selection of pie pumpkins, sweet potatoes, turnips, and even honey in a gorgeous array of colors.
Around the corner (and right near the much-needed coffee!), the farmers had big pumpkins, and these unusual ones with the coloring of butternut squashes, and the squat shape of turbin squash. It's neat how the stems on the regular pumpkins are thick and a deep dark green, while the paler pumpkins have much more delicate and leafy green stems. It would be fun to play with color mixing to create these!

In the same family, we spied these spooky gray-green squashes. They look almost like ghosts of regular pumpkins and might make a fun charm for foodies for Halloween (Ghosts of food past? When produce returns to haunt you?)

We love how varied and textured pumpkins can be- even the really classic ones. The stems on these pumpkins are all twisted and gnarled and curved in every direction- the perfect illustration of how natural foods are inherently imperfect! We hope these pumpkins inspire you to create your own tiny pumpkin and squash charms- complete with knobbly stems, uneven ridges, and all shades of green and orange.

Edible

Where on earth do we get our ideas for which tiny foods to make? Everywhere! The grocery store, farmer's markets, restaurants, cookbooks, food blogs, and magazines are all great places to get inspired.

One of our favorite recent sources of inspiration for fruits, veggies, and other edible plants is a gorgeous book put together by the folks at National Geographic. Appropriately enough, it's entitled Edible, and is stuffed with beautiful photos of all kinds of edible plants from all over the world. Not only does it have great photos, it also has all sorts of information about edible plants. It's a neat coffee table book to browse through (and salivate over!) Why limit your eggplants to the traditional purple kind when there are white or striped heirloom varieties?