Get your Zen on: Zen circle Enso T-shirts, onesies, bags

 Makai Ola commissioned some shirts with their logo-- the Enso-- on it. I loved the way they turned out, so I made several more. They are each hand painted with permanent fabric paints, using a messy and hands-on screen printing process. Think: mod podge, spray cans, dough scrapers, embroidery hoops. It's a bit wild.

Available in: 

• 6-9 month onesie
• 12 month onesie
• 2T-3T Kid's Tshirt
• Adult Woman's Medium: activewear Danskin V-neck t-shirt, blue
• Adult Large, blue
• Canvas library bag, blue

Turns out? Painting is hard.

I can draw-- I think all those years watching my mom's magical sketches appear in the phone book and on the program during church meetings worked on me. So a likeness? I can capture it. So I thought I'd give painting a whirl!
I've done a little-- some watercolor portraits, a little bit of acrylics, waaay back in the dark ages. Think AP art class, folks. But really, how hard can it be?
Turns out, hard.
Colors that should go together rage against each other? Dark and light is not a matter of more black or more white? Complementary colors clash and shimmer on the edges! But I love the density, the opacity of those lovely thick acrylics-- the squeaky plastic way they dry on the canvas.
I found a book that is a great help: Color by Betty Edwards, the author of the transformative Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Drawing on the Artist Within.
So while I plug away at my color-wheel assignments (is it red-orange? Yellow-orange? Tone? Intensity? Grade? Circumference?) I gave this a shot:

Lihue Ace Craft Fair!

Knotty Honu and Baba's Basement collaborated to create this lovely table at the Lihue Ace Craft fair:

Thanks to everyone who came out to support us! It was our very first experience with craft-fairing. Some take-home lessons:
1. doing a dry run with the set up three days before= very helpful. Thank you etsy blog for the suggestion!
2. Next time, have a better awareness of the customer base! Think "Obaachan" rather than "hip mom."
3. Also, alas, the inventory problem! It seemed like I never had the right design in the right size for my customer. Whoda thought I would need my "I heart Boobies" design in a men's XL? Hmmm, maybe I should have seen that coming.
4. Half-way through the fair a group of folks in Sunday best and lots of leis breezed in. They stopped at our table, we said hello, and we asked if they were getting married. Nope, running for governor! Then, my mental filter failed to kick in. I said, "I thought you were about to break into a Bollywood Dance number!"  Woops. Sorry, potential Governor Aiona...

All in all, it was a great experience, it was fun to have the motivation and the deadline to produce, and it was good to get feedback from real live customers!

Onward and upward.

Pen and Ink original drawings

Food is Beautiful

The open space behind my road is all wild and tangled weeds-- a sloppy mass of non-native plants. But when you identify the individual plants, you realize that each species was introduced for a reason. Those miniature dry pea-pods shuddering on the indigo? Brought over for dyes. That stumpy white-barked tree with the lacy leaves? It's delicious in soups! Stir fry the ugly bittermelon on the vine, pickle the reeking noni-- useful and delicious plants are hidden in the landscape all around.

O Bon Festival and Dance

The big sugar plantations brought over thousands of Japanese field workers to Hawaii in the 19th century-- and they brought their Buddhist traditions with them. Today their great great grandchildren, like my own daughter, still remember and celebrate the dead during the sweet and sad summer Bon dance season. Bon dances mean carefully wrapped Aloha-print kimonos and elegantly coiffed hair, naked bulbs strung across open fields, pastel paper lanterns, tinny recorded music and Taiko drums and people dancing careful steps around and around, remember the passing years and their loved ones.

Landscape Notecards

A few months ago we spent 24 hours sitting on the beach. We got there at low tide with a strong undertow --the weedy black rocks shouldering out of the water. As it got dark and windy the moony waves approached the camp site-- threatening to inhale the campfire and the shivering sleepingbags next to it. By morning the surf was flat and silver and the beach was covered in mist. Then it poured: water crashing from the sky and we huddled miserable and salt-soaked under a tarp. Then hot: blue water, blue sky, white foam.

All in one day!

That's how I feel about the landscape in Hawaii: if you can hold your gaze still, steady your madly distracted eyes, you will see how fast things change. Living here I get to see the cyclic whirr of seasons the way I never could if I was passing through. These shots briefly freeze some of those swift changes.



Here are some landscape photos gleaned from our years on the Big Island and Kauai. These are attached to 4x6 blank notecards with envelopes, available in singles or sets.

Hawaiian Botanical Cards

I live on a little dirt lane bordering the Waita reservoir. Uncle Ronnie down the street has colonized the open space along the road with hundreds of fruits and flowers: bananas, papayas, lychee, longan, guava, peppers, squash, eggplant, noni-- also trumpet flowers, ti, ginger, plumeria, anthuriums...
This photo series is all from my garden or from Uncle's open-space plantings.
Check out KnottyHonu.etsy.com to order!



heliconia rostrata
heliconia psittacorum



And French Kiss Ginger!
I had to look this one up: it's a skyflower vine.






allamada cathartica-- golden trumpet