A little weekend recap…because it’s always busy around here, and Sunday night just seems like a good time to catch our breath, size up the progress, and take a deep breath for the busy week ahead.

A new springy journal:

And a stack of new covers for small journals. These are all made from pages of a 1924 issue of the French fashion newspaper Le Petit Echo de la Mode.

Last fall, I found several issues of this periodical from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s and I’m enjoying the advertisements most, much like the journals I made from ads in 1920s dental & orthodontic publications I picked up on our trip to San Fran last Labor Day weekend. There are great ads for various medicines to treat “female maladies” and each issue is filled with letters and style features, as well as knitting and embroidery patterns.

Everyone should have a little Billy Collins in their lives. Enjoy.

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse
by Billy Collins

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.