Category: General

To adjust the light, open or close the book… The designers have other objects based on a pleated octagonal shape, more info here.

Finally a green — Pantone’s color of the year for 2010 is turquoise. They claim it “transports us to an exciting, tropical paradise while offering a sense of protection and healing in stressful times.” A little over the top, don’t you think? But it is the first green tone that Pantone has selected — the swatches from the past 10 years are below (the color from 2005, first on the left in the second row is “Blue Turquoise”…). Read the entire press release here.

Winter for me: cocoa, a quilt, a good book. The winner of my snowflake coasters, chosen by random.org, is Patty with “Sledding, Snowball Fight, Happy Smiling Children.” You can read how other people described winter in exactly 6 words here.

I thought I’d celebrate the beginning of winter with a giveaway of a set of my snowflake coastes. To enter, describe what you like about winter in exactly 6 words (short, like a haiku!) in the comments below. Contest ends Wednesday Dec 9th at 7am (PT), when I’ll select a commenter at random.

Sunday I began compiling the list of people to send this years’ holiday card, and in between names, thought about what’s happened in the past 12 months that I might want to report on. I always enjoy the look back, although not so much the letterwriting.
That train of thought caused me to peek into my friends Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Wheeler’s recent book, Good Mail Day, about making postal art. A “good mail day” is when something other than a bill or flyer arrives in the post, an actual handmade, hand-written object. And you probably won’t get the good stuff unless you send a few of your own. So they encourage readers to write letters, with an emphasis on creating and sending artful objects. The book is chocked full of ideas for decorations both inside and out, including envelope templates and faux postage. The book’s got a little something for everyone — from the history of the mail art movement to good photos of mail art to project demonstrations to lists of resources.
A bit later, I picked up the Sunday paper, to find a review of Thomas Mallon’s new book, a meditation on the art of letter writing, called Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (which is a companion to his book on diary writers, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries). The reviewer waxes on poetically, and I know I turn first to Mallon’s essays when they appear in the New Yorker, so I’ll no doubt read his book.
And while I’m ruminating on letterwriting, one more tidbit… according to this article “most people use the web to talk to people nearby” and “the volume of electronic communications is inversely proportional to geographic distance.” I must admit I send many more emails to my husband, even when he’s sitting downstairs from me, and to my friends in the Bay Area than to my family on the east coast!

I decided to spell out the year as “twenty-ten” on my calendar because it looked right typographically. Little did I know then that the pronunciation of “2010” was such a controversy! According to this piece the other day on NPR, “In 45 days, there will be a mob at Times Square counting down. But what do we call the year that kicks in when the ball comes down? The four digits — 2,0,1,0 — are not in dispute, but how we say them evidently is.” It goes on to ask many supposed experts the correct pronunciation, but there doesn’t seem to be an agreement. So what expert should we decide to listen to? Last night I listened to the BBC World on the radio, and I noticed the readers all said “twenty-ten.” I’ll be keeping my ears open for what everyone else is saying…