see you at the Chili Bowl!

this is the first bowl I got from the Women's Studio Workshop Annual Chili Bowl at least 8 years ago.
it is, by far, my favorite.

This Saturday February 28th Women's Studio Workshop is hosting their 12th annual Chili Bowl Fundraiser in Rosendale, New York. This event is a blast. Enjoy a delicious helping of chili made by local restaurants and chefs in your very own Women’s Studio Workshop handmade bowl. All of my favorite bowls have come from this event plus I love this organization and want to support them anyway I can. I hope to see you there.

Get more info here.

what the world eats- in pictures!

Photographer Peter Menzel and author-journalist Faith D'Alusio have gone all over the globe to create this pictoral study of what families are eating on a weekly basis. As someone who is very food-centered, I seriously appreciate the value of this type of documenation. Hungry Planet: What the World Eats was published in 2005 by Ten Speed Press.

A review by Arthur Boehm:
Among the families, we meet the Mellanders, a German household of five who enjoy cinnamon rolls, chocolate croissants, and beef roulades, and whose weekly food expenses amount to $500. We also encounter the Natomos of Mali, a family of one husband, his two wives, and their nine children, whose corn and millet-based diet costs $26.39 weekly.

We soon learn that diet is determined by largely uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization, which can bring change with startling speed. Thus cultures can move--sometimes in a single jump--from traditional diets to the vexed plenty of global-food production. People have more to eat and, too often, eat more of nutritionally questionable food. Their health suffers.

Because the book makes many of its points through the eye, we see--and feel--more than we might otherwise. Issues that influence how the families are nourished (or not) are made more immediate. Quietly, the book reveals the intersection of nutrition and politics, of the particular and universal.




view article by NPR here.
view artist website here.
check out Time Magazine Photo Essay here.

knitting circle

woke up this morning to this amazing light in my livingroom. i was inspired. everything was in place from our knitting circle last night and thanks to the girls I have finally figured that craft out (well, sort of). At least now I can do it on my own and practice.

Found out about the The Revolutionary Knitting Circle recently. They are are awesome.

Check out their manifesto:

The Revolutionary Knitting Circle Proclamation of Constructive Revolution

We hold that all communities should have the means necessary to meet every essential need of their own people.

To that end, the Revolutionary Knitting Circle calls upon people everywhere to take up the struggle through the tools of local production. We shall bring forth not only our voices raised for global justice, but we shall rise together, with the tools to liberate local communities from the shackles of global corporatism.

By sharing in the skills and resources of our communities, we shall become free to cast off dependencies on global trade for our subsistence. In so doing, we shall all be able to enter fairly into meaningful and equitable trade of not only goods, but also those cultural intangibles that are necessary if we are to bring about understanding, justice and peace to truly enrich our individual lives and our communities.

By returning production of the essentials of life to the community, we can eradicate the dependence imposed by the elites - giving communities the freedom to guide their own destinies.

We call upon all people who would see their communities freed from corporate slavery to come forth to share in action dedicated to removing the production of essential goods from the hands of multi-national corporations and returning that production to the people.

This is a daily struggle.

We shall put this struggle in the faces of the elites by engaging in knit-ins at their places of power throughout the world.

We shall conduct workshops and skill-sharing at their major meetings, on the steps of government edifices, and - perhaps most significantly - in the banks, malls and even those 'hallowed' office towers of the richest of the rich.

We will remind ourselves - and those who would have us believe there is no alternative to the corporate doctrine - that we can have the ability to produce what we need without the destructive hand of the investment banker and his ilk at our throats.

So whether you want to knit, quilt, grow food, build homes, teach, heal or any of the other skills that can provide for a community, we call on you to come forward in solidarity to create production and learning outside of the dominant 'corporate economics'.

We look on with delight in our hearts to this action that will shine as we produce so much for our communities while providing no offerings to the elite's loathsome 'bottom-line'.

Let us join together in action to create a globalization of justice so that freedom can be made to ring out for all people.

This is our constructive revolution.

the rockies via Liz

back to the daily grind. a week of vacation goes very quickly.

these were taken on a day trip to the Rockies. The mountains are moody, majestic, romantic and humbling (I felt very, very small). I miss them already.

westward bound

image from the poudre canyon

I am spending the week in the Fort Collins, Colorado area. It is beautiful here and I am enjoying some needed R&R. Aside from playing in this spectacular landscape, I plan on checking out the Center for Fine Art Photography while I am here which has been on my radar for years.
I will keep you posted throughout the week.