What's Coming Up

-
It's only March, but here comes April! I have two big things occupying my attention right now, the half marathon in September, and cooking school next month! It's coming up fast, and I'm super excited. I'm attending the 10 Day Vegan Fusion Cuisine Cooking Immersion in Seattle, plus three extra days of teacher training. I'm a good cook now, but I'm looking forward to being great, and to sharing what I know through blogging and teaching.

I got a message from my friend Joan yesterday, saying she had a vegan coming to visit (oh my!), and did I have any suggestions on what to feed her. Of course I did! And she also gave me a great idea for a class I could teach. Something along the lines of How to Feed a Vegan, for people who are not vegan themselves, but want to know what to feed their vegan friends and relatives when they come for a visit, or just for dinner. I know from experience that we throw most of the dinner parties around here, because our friends don't know what to cook for us. There are more and more vegans and vegetarians in the world every day. Eventually you're bound to run across a few, and I want to take the "food wall" between plant eaters and everything-else-eaters down to the ground! My goal after cooking school is to teach classes here in Taos, sometimes in my own kitchen, but more often in people's homes, so they're comfortable making "weird food" in familiar surroundings. I also want to take my skills on the road, maybe to your town and your kitchen! Sounds like a party to me!

But back to beads for a minute - I'll be away from home and studio for most of the month of April. That means no new beads then, and probably a closed shop for a few weeks. It also means that if you're planning on ordering a Birthstone Snow Globe for Mother's Day (May 13th), you need to do it now. Literally. I'll close orders for these in a couple of weeks, because I can't promise to fill a bunch of orders when I get back from Seattle. I do intend to re-open the BeadShop in May, and of course it's open now. I don't ever want to stop making beads completely, but I do hope to bump them back to hobby status one day, and put more focus on helping people learn to feed themselves in the most healthy, delicious way possible.

I feel the world changing, fast, fast, fast, and I love being part of it. Life is good! Eat your greens! If you want some recipes, hop over to my other blog, PositivelyVegan. I think I'll be blogging there a lot while I'm in Seattle. This is going to be good! Ah, but it's only March... I'd better pay attention to where I am now. Time for breakfast!

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 5, 2012 at 8:36 AM

    This is going to be GREAT!! I love your idea of teaching "How to Feed a Vegan" and I would imagine there would be a big demand for it as more and more people consider changing their eating habits, even if it starts with one meal at a time. And I think YOU will be AWESOME doing this.

    I live amongst omnivores and I love it when a meal is finished and someone says, "Wow - that was fantastic. Can we have that again?", and I debate about whether to reveal the "secret" that it was an entirely vegan meal. :) Thanks to your Positively Vegan blog, I have new ideas and recipes to try. As I tell my family and friends, one doesn't need to Become Vegan or Become Vegetarian in order to enjoy delicious, healthy meals that simply happen to have no animal products. Have a fabulous time in your class and travels!! xoxo M-E

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for your comment!

Popular posts from this blog

cats are not dogs, and how tangling string untangles frustration

-
Image
As Airbnb hosts, we have lots of lovely interactions with guests while they're here, and with potential guests making inquiries before they book. I try to be really clear in our listing, about the house, amenities, and rules. The trouble is, some people would rather not actually read the listing, or if they do, they just ignore the parts they don't like. Oy. I mean really, who thinks cats and dogs are the same thing? Today I got a booking for two nights in March, from a very nice-sounding couple coming down from Canada. They were very excited to stay here at Mermaid's Nest , and everything was great... until I got to the part in their message about bringing their cat... Ruh roh... I had stated very clearly in our listing that we allow small dogs . Cats were not mentioned. Neither were goats, snakes, skunks, or rhinos, because I figured people would see that part about dogs , and at least ask before assuming all other animals were welcome. Oh, silly me. Apparently the...
Read more

where to buy what i make

-
Image
I closed my Etsy shop recently. What??? Why??? Well, because I think Etsy has done great harm to the livelihoods of makers everywhere. If you do manage to get noticed, which is pretty difficult these days, it's impossible to compete with the pricing on so-called "handmade" goods that are mass produced in foreign countries. Equally frustrating to me is the number of actual makers who drastically underprice their work, effectively turning themselves into voluntary sweatshop laborers in order to stay in the game at all. I'm not playing. I would love to see makers of all fine handmade things everywhere reclaim a sense of dignity, and charge a fair price for their skills and talents. Until I find such a group of folks that I can join, I'm back to being on my own here, in my own little shop, charging a reasonable price for the quality materials and hours of work it takes to make the things I make. I feel good about this. The Shop, at the moment, contains exactl...
Read more

soft spring scarf

-
Image
If you come here often, you know that I finished this pretty little swath of yarny love a few days ago. The yarn is from CandySkein , and I love it. A lot. It's a beautifully hand-dyed, washable merino fingering weight that was quite wonderful to knit with, even though I'm sort of a lazy knitter and usually use something quite a lot more bulky. This worked up into a delicious, lightweight-but-warm fabric that's perfect for between-season wear. Pardon my pilly worn-all-winter sweater, and focus on the scarf. It's my favorite style - an asymmetrical triangle, worked from end to end. It has a ziggy-zaggy edge on one side, and a smooth edge on the other. The pattern is called the Hitchhiker Scarf, and you can get it on Ravelry . I test drove this one for a day and loved it. But as I do with most of the things I make, I also decided to let it go. Only three have made it into my personal wardrobe for keeps, and I'm just fine with that. Make them, love them, let ...
Read more

and what do you do?

-
Image
I'm in my outdoor office this week, at the picnic table on the patio. I have a favorite vintage tablecloth, lilacs in a martini shaker, and tea in my new favorite cup, made by Charan Sachar . I'm considering a new format for my blog, which I'll try here today. I suspect that only three people actually read this, and yet I persist. I like to write, so that can be good enough. I have lots of things to talk about, so I'm going to try dividing my time here between Life Stories and Ponderings, and of course, Knitting. Feel free to tell me what you think, or even just grunt if you're out there. Really, have no idea. Pondering... I like meeting new people. But I hate the inevitable moment when New Person will politely raise their eyebrows and ask me, "And what do you do?" It's sort of like the human equivalent of dogs sniffing each others' butts. We need to size each other up somehow , right? What better way than to sniff out what a person d...
Read more

yarn that speaks for itself

-
Image
I've had this amazing ball of hand-dyed-and-spun yarn for months. It was made, and given to me, by my friend Valerie, which makes it even more special. I've moved it around the house, looked at it, held it, and asked it what it wanted to be, but it's been very quiet. I've loved it so much just as a ball of yarn, I was in no hurry to knit it into something else. Here it is with my great-grandmother's hand carved crochet hook. So much wonderfulness. Maybe sometimes yarn can just be yarn, at least for a while. As the weather got colder, I started think of hats. Not just baby hats like I make for the hospital, but big hats. For me. That wind on the beach can really bite a girl's ears in the winter. So, long story short, I knitted my beautiful, most favorite yarn into a hat. I found a really easy pattern for a beret, which Rick made for his daughter (yes, he knits a bit). Here's the pattern . It's really cute! And here's my hat. Also really cute. ...
Read more