OUT STRAIGHT, as defined by John Gould in his book Maine Lingo is “anybody bustling about, full of business, too active to do anything else, is right out straight. The phrase comes from teaming oxen; as they lean into their yoke and strain every muscle the chain connecting them to the load is right out straight.”

HOW is it already nearly September? HOW! I write this sucking on a cherry pit, tea steaming next to me, staring at the explosion of tiger lilies outside the window. The light shifted last week, or was it two weeks ago, and now it comes streaming in in the afternoon, lingering on the kitchen cabinets til you’re nearly done cooking dinner. I want to eat only the tomatoes and cucumbers slipped into my hands by friends.

This month was hellishly busy, until this week at least, cause I have done nearly nothing this week: leaving the studio a mess and mostly just resting and resetting other parts of the house. I did a huge amount of prep and printing for the High Season Market, which was as socially exhausting as I expected, but sweet nonetheless. Thank you to everyone who came and said hi. Before getting launched into the printing and packing for that I had planned on doing a late July shop update, and am only just getting around to it now. So yeah, there are patches and more project bags listed online now and the password to the shop is tomatoes. It’ll go live to all non-subscribers tomorrow (August 27th), so you’ve got time to keep reading and circle back. I still am unsure how I feel about trying to sneak shop update passwords into the newsletter, let me know what you think.

Speaking of shop updates and life updates, I have also made a big decision business wise, or at least it feels big to me. All prints that can’t be shipped in a flat mailer will be retired in the new year. Shipping in a tube is truly a nightmare and other than the calendars I am gonna cease doin it. That means when the Beds and Mermaids sell out from this shop update they won’t be restocked. Tiles also won’t be restocked. But don’t despair, I’m going to bring some of them with me to future in-person events (like the 3rd Annual Midcoast Holiday Bazaar on November 22nd!).

I have been talking to fellow small-business owners about the constant pressure to keep growing your business and how a lot of us just don’t want to anymore. I need to be able to pay my mortgage, I love to be able to pay my friends to work with me, but I don’t need to and don’t want to have one million followers and make one million dollars, that simply isn’t the point to me. Listen, I am insanely lucky to have an art business that sustains me and is profitable, that is nothing to sneeze at in this economy, but I am beginning to resist (resent?) the hustle that is expected of self employed artist types. I just wanna slow down. Don’t we all?

That being said. We contain multitudes. So let’s talk about the calendar. Oh how she LOOMS. Oh how she makes me feel like I have to Hustle. Oh how she is so much of my annual income I feel stressed about her until she is safely in your hands. I picked the color! It might surprise you, it might surprise me! And I have been slowly dipping my toe back into the internet trying to promote her after a year of frankly doing hardly any catering to the algorithm. In years past I have made a video every day for tiktok about the process, but early this year I deleted tiktok and am starting to wonder how that is going to impact sales. Highly recommend deleting tiktok, I have not once missed it, but between that and no longer really making or posting reels on Instagram, I am wondering if I’ll reach enough folks to sell all the calendars this year. I guess we’re gonna find out.

Alright now for the non studio things I write about in my newsletter. Books. I finished only one book this month. The North Woods, by Daniel Mason. I listened to it and I liked it. I think I mostly liked it cause I have also been slowly making my way through House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk which also conjures the same deep feelings of place/home/belonging/change/sameness in a distinct but not dissimilar landscape. Stories like this resonate with me, in my old house, and I liked feeling like the landscape Mason was talking about was just outside my door. Now I am listening to The Responsible Party as a lil bit o fluff as a treat and am excited to start Centroeuropa but I think I have to return it to the library as it is already past due and I am embarrassed to keep renewing it. That’s late summer for you.

The highlight of my month was certainly a mid-week overnight at the Deer Isle Hostel, I made the reservation long before I knew how busy August was going to be, and despite the stressful lead up it was a true delight. I hate leaving my house, especially in the summertime, and mid-week, less than two hours away, kitchen where you can make your tea in the morning is my kind of vacation. It was dreamy. Someday maybe I’ll write about all my favorite places to go in Maine.

Other things I’ve been enjoying in August:

• maple syrup in my tea in the morning (still always PG tips)

• SoftPawVintage on the internet.

• pond swimming in my YouSwim suit, my code ADDIEBEST10 will get ya 10% off.

• kefir with maple syrup. Went through this phase in the late winter/early spring and now I’m back in it.

• the new season of Ted Lasso—tbh not sure how I feel about it so far, but I do love a show that comes out weekly that is familiar to me.

• Charlie Crockett, specifically “Burn Another Honky Tonk Down”

• The hat Frida knit me.

Alrighty now I’m going to sign off to run some errands and do some admin. And maybe sneak in a little carving for the new round of patches.

Thanks so much for reading and thank you for your support of my wee business. We appreciate you!

Alrighty, xoxo

-Addie

JULY! The days are long and my heart is bursting, every morning is a handful of ice cubes into the teacup, every afternoon is a race to the swimming hole, every evening an open screen door and the gentle thrum of insects under the stars. But though it may be just July, you can already taste autumn in the air, feel the bite of winter on your skin when you emerge from the ocean. We experience the seasons in such full and beautiful extremes here in Maine but winter never really leaves us.

This month slipped through my fingers so quickly. Every day has been full to the brim: I have had visitors nearly every weekend, I finished the calendar, carved at least four new patches and have been in the thick of prepping for the only market I’ll do this summer. I finally got my firewood delivered, and there is a Dutch oven of soon-to-be pulled pork sandwiches in the oven for the friends who are about to help me stack it all under the shed. Summer here is social to the extreme, it is a beautiful whirlwind of work and plans and cars trundling up the driveway and throwing your swimsuit into your bag just in case where you’re going after this cup of tea there are people who will want to swim (there always are).

Somehow in the corners of the days I finished some books. I listened to Whistler, that new Ann Patchett book that was as introspective and slow and delightful as everything she writes seems to be. There is a formula, but that is not a bad thing. I read The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, and the review of it I’ll give is that I immediately went to the literary and checked out House of Day House of Night. Her writing captivates me. And I listened to The Hill by Harriet Clark, it reminded me of so many childhood feelings that I think you are supposed to forget in adulthood. I want to read a western now, probably not Lonesome Dove (lol, why is everyone reading that these days!), please tell me your favorites.

Since we’re on the topic that my assistant and friend Chip and I call the Media Debrief on our shared days in the studio, let’s talk about movies and TV too. Midsommar? Have you SEEN IT?! listen I know it came out in 2019, I am so very late to the party but I have been scared/I actually hate to be scared and I avoid being scared at every opportunity probably because, well, evolution. But last month I got a projector and got brave and watched it real big on my whole wall with my sweetie and his big dog in my house for protection and it was both terrifying and captivating. It was heartbreaking, beautiful, and yes, disturbing, but not in the ways I expected. Would you join them if you were her? Please discuss.

And then yeah I saw The Odyssey at the theater and I want to see it again and I want to read it and I want to wear all their outfits please.

Finally, Love Island UK has been making me cackle with delight. Why is it so insane?! What is this alternate reality! Needless to say, I am invested and will also likely go back and watch older seasons because I have never seen it before and it is scratching the ITCH. Bad TV and ornament making are a match made in heaven.

Okay back to business. Let’s talk about this Market. I’ll be at High Season Market from August 14-16 down in Port Clyde. I have been in a storm of ornament making, recruiting all my friends to help me get a huge pile of them ready. This will also be your (maybe only) chance to get complete sets of Zodiac patches, and I’m reprinting project bags and a few big prints that might not be available online again for a while. But mostly, ornaments for days and days. I am kinda dreading the three day hectic market, I am the worst at that sort of socializing so bear with me but please do come say hi. It’s in a beautiful old hall and I can’t wait to see you there.

The big news in the studio is that I finished the calendar. This is the earliest it has ever been done and I’m so tickled about it. I think it’s my favorite one I’ve done so far, I can’t wait to get them all printed up. I haven’t decided what color to do yet, if you have any ideas let me know. I’m thinking we’re about due for a pink or yellow? In the years past I have so diligently documented the process of making it to turn into short form videos to get folks to buy it. This year I took so few videos and I think that is why it turned out so well, just settling into it and not trying to worry about the marketing yet. I deleted tiktok at the beginning of the year and I love not ever having to watch or think about short form video content and it feels loathsome to maybe have to make some for the promotion of this thing. But maybe I don’t have to, we’ll see. But it is done. And that is a delight.

Alright, mostly this beautiful fleeting summer has been full of things that feel too precious for the internet so maybe I’ll tell you about them someday but now I’m going to go back to all the real life stress and sweetness in equal measure.

Much love, thanks for reading and I’ll see you soon.

-Addie

I am writing this while I wait for some superglue to dry. After a week of non-stop work renovating my bathroom and then a house full of guests over the weekend I leapt into calendar carving this morning with clumsy enthusiasm and immediately carved something away that was necessary. So yes, all mistakes on the calendar can be fixed. With superglue. If only it could always be that simple.

It has cooled down and it’s looking like it will rain all week. Summer kicks you in the gut here in Maine: spring feels more like more and more endless winter and then suddenly Summer is here and you’re sunburnt and slapping mosquitoes and trying to decide if you are going to sleep upstairs in the inferno or downstairs where it is cooler. Tonight will be an upstairs night. June has flown by in a flurry of little decisions like that. I did way less studio work and reading than usual this month. I spent more time at the pond, more time with friends, more time working on house projects and gardens, and more time driving in the car. Yesterday I ate only pie. And I’m back to feeling behind.

I’ve been working on the calendar a little bit every day. Taking a gamble on it this year with a little demon parade at the bottom, carrying the yarn across to the other side. I LOVE weird medieval depictions of the devil and demons, and love traditional sayings about sewing and idle hands etc and the devil, but I know the secular satanic isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Whatcha gonna do! I think they’re cute.

I also finally stuck a big old pile of these two patches in the shop as a fundraiser for those impacted by the Robbin’s Lumber Mill explosion last month. Half of the proceeds will be donated directly to EMT Sarah Tompkins’ GoFundMe and half will go to the Maine Strong Relief Fund that will be shared between all the families of those impacted. The impacts of this fire continue to ripple through our community, thank you for supporting first responders near and far.

The biggest project of the month was a whirlwind gut bathroom renovation: I moved into this house two and a half years ago knowing that at some point the bathroom was going to have to fully come out, be reinforced and rearranged, be put back in. My father drove from Pennsylvania to help me with the plumbing and carpentry and after five ~12 hour days we somehow had a tiled floor, rebuilt walls, a flush toilet, a sink and the tub all ready for 6+ houseguests arriving that evening. It was a tight deadline and there is still a lot to do, but it is so much nicer in there and I am so grateful. Tiles are from Zia Tile, beadboard and trim color is Farrow and Ball Pink Ground.

Maybe this goes without saying I didn’t read much this month. I finished The Master and Margarita which I had a hard time getting into until Margarita showed up on the scene and then it was amazing. I listened to Tom Lake and it was so very sweet, and listened to Cloud Atlas which was, as promised, impressively written although wouldn’t make it on my list of all time favorite books.

I also watched the first two seasons of Derry Girls, the first season of The Four Seasons and just started Not Suitable for Work. Calendar season is brought to you by a lot of mindless television. Last year, for example, I carved the whole thing while watching The Righteous Gemstones. All four seasons. And the final season of Yellowstone. Please tell me all your favorite TV shows below, chances are I’ve seen em but I’m always looking for more cause oh boy I spend a lot of time working by myself and sometimes an audiobook just doesn’t scratch the itch.

That’s about all I’ve got to say for this month. I’ve been putting maple syrup in my tea, actively getting braver by the day, and going to the pond as much as I can. Speaking of the pond and of being brave and of work, I’ve been trying to diversify my income a little and reaching out to brands I feel excited to work with to see if they’d want to work with me too. This is a weird and scary and new thing for me, but I’d love to get some passive income going on the side if I can. I get asked so much about clothes, etc, and am trying to reckon with how to ethically share things I like and be paid a little for my time. Also feels weird to get to a point where feel like I deserve to be paid for that sort of thing since it’s such a privilege to have a job like mine in the first place. So, bear with me, and as awkward as it feels to say, I do have a code for one of my favorite swimsuit brands, Youswim. ADDIEBEST10 will get ya 10% off.

Alrighty, that’s all for real. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you probably very soon since this newsletter is making its way out late late late! Please also let me know what sorts of things you’d like to read about around here. I’ve been feeling like I’m falling out of the easeful sharing of my life as so many things offline feel too sweet and tender to hurl them (or anything, to be honest) easily into the abyss. What say you?

Much love, thanks for your support.

-Addie

Dear reader,

I’ve been working hard this year to think about my silly little art job as just my J-O-B, and the days that make it feel silly and little (like yesterday as you will soon see) as what I have worked hard for for all the years I have been doing this. This has been hard to do, the constant feeling of disbelief that I get to make art as a job and the feeling that to do that successfully I should be suffering and toiling away constantly because capitalism and the way I was raised and the world in general is a hard one for me to release. If I am not working constantly to maintain it and grow it am I ungrateful for this rare and fleeting thing?

Maybe if you, too, are in the trenches of a silly little art job, you will know that sometimes it just feels fake. It will feel fake even when it is your sole source of income and you have two dear sweet employees. It will feel fake even when you know by all the numbers and tax forms you don’t understand that This is a Real Job. It will feel fake because nothing in our world makes it seem like you could possibly love your job or that you can be so lucky to have a job that pays your bills and lets you sit in the sun all afternoon on a random Monday. I am so lucky, yes, and I have worked so hard to get here. It is both. Someday we will talk about it.

Here is the day that got me thinking about all of this.

Yesterday morning I woke up at 7, I had finished my book the night before so instead of my usual morning reading I opened my computer and looked at facebook marketplace (classic) while I waited for the kettle. I made a list for the day and I made tea and I made breakfast.

The list:

1. design the june patreon patch (it is june after all)

2. carve the june patreon patch

3. go into town and get linen for the patreon patch and for two other patches cause Mia is coming tomorrow and we have to have the linen cut and ready

4. also in town, go to bank go to library for new book go to goodwill go to restore and look for a sink and go to the grocery store to get strawberries

5. cut the linen for patches

6. post a photo of a new print on the internet.

7. take a photo or video of the new patreon print to post on the internet later

8. pay outstanding bill from accountant because somehow autopay never actually got set up and they just emailed you that you are months behind. thankfully they are also months behind so it’ll be okay.

9. vacuum house

10. clean studio desk for Mia tomorrow.

11. mow the lawn

12. work on the calendar for at least two hours if there is time leftover

But instead the day looked like this:

1. I drew the same thing three times for patreon and they all were kinda wretched.

2. opened pinterest to look at victorian knitting instructions for said patch inspiration and got distracted by this font you can download that was

   

3. downloaded the font, learned how to upload it to squarespace and spent an hour updating my website to include it. I am actually really happy I did this because my website needed some TLC.

4. Spent an hour and a half on the phone with the power company and my community solar thingy because turns out CMP calling you and telling you your power is about to shut off really sounds like a scam especially if you are definitely paying a power bill to someone, but actually might not be, LOL.

5. Put my mower battery on the charger cause WHEW folks we have power

6. got a call, spent the afternoon with people I love, in the sun welcoming in June in the simplest and most perfect ways: greenhouse showers, the ocean, ice cream.

7. did go to town, did buy linen for the patch and did get a new book.

8. got home, carved the patreon patch and it was so ugly I’m going to scrap the idea entirely and try to carve something else. That happens sometimes.

9. Liana came over and we got a pizza and sat in the yard and talked about running our tiny businesses and it was very healing for a day where I feel like I totally struck out work-wise. I love my friends and I’m grateful to have friends who are also in the silly little art job boat.

10. Wrote half of this newsletter.

Yeah so. My instinct is to say that Monday was a wash, and but what is Tuesday for the hopelessly self-employed if not another chance at Monday. But really, yesterday was okay. I did some things that needed to get done, and if I push the guilt aside the day filled up my heart real good and I needed that as much as anything. It is such a luxury to have built a job that can be like that. I wish for everyone to find that balance and rhythm, but maybe without the tax forms of chronic self employment. I would also like for everyone who does what they love and figures out how to make ends meet thusly, myself included, to feel less guilt about their jobs. To release all that pressure if you can. How do you do it? Is that even really possible?

Now I’m going to go try to carve that patreon patch again. Cut that linen. Clean the desk. Pay the accountant. Everything that needs to get done will get done. Somehow we can do it all and hold it all, I hope.

Thank you for making this job of mine a J-O-B. Couldn’t do it without you and I am Oh So Grateful.

Yours truly,

-guilty about loving her job

xx

Before we get into it, last Friday the Robbin’s Lumber Mill caught fire and exploded, just twenty minutes from where I live. So many of my loved ones and friends and neighbors are volunteer first responders who went to the fire. It was, and continues to be, heart wrenching. Emergencies like this have huge ripple effects on a small, rural community, everyone knows someone who was impacted. If you feel called to help and are able to donate or share, EMT, farmer, and friend Sarah Tompkin was severely injured in the explosion and has a long road ahead, this is her GoFundMe. Sarah is the direct next door neighbor and dear friend of Chip, who packs all your orders here in my studio. Thank you to all the first responders who make the world go round.

Magnolia season is upon us. I’ve got a white one in the back yard: when you pull into my driveway at night your headlights light it up and it looks downright spectral, big luminous, floppy stars floating in the darkness. The pink one in front of the house has barely begun to bloom, I can just see the first few starting at the top of the branches out my studio window. That one will bloom all summer, clinging on into August. The white one has already started to carpet the ground with petals, it goes by so quick.

Screen door season is here too. And you know what that means: chipmunk television for Tove and Snorkmaiden (those are the cats). The chipmunk lives right under the walkway, he seems blissfully unaware of the cats staring at his comings and goings with hungry eyes. I’ve been opening the door right when I go down the stairs in the morning and it stays open all day, the breeze bringing in the spring smells of cut grass from the neighbors and manure from the dairy farms just over the hill.

Things have been pretty chill in the studio since April. I carved three new patches I love, we printed them, had a shop update, and then I carved the May patreon patch. I also printed that new block this month, and honestly I am really happy with it and it makes me excited about carving the calendar since the calendar has a little scene that is ripe for sweet details. We’re in that calendar season lull of creativity, where all my energy goes towards that thing. The calendar is about 60% of my income on any given year so it feels all consuming when we’re in the thick of it. I haven’t even really started carving it yet to delay that feeling of intensity and pressure just a little more, but I’ll start banging through the numbers today. But it’s coming along. I usually am so diligent about making little videos of the carving process and this year I’m mostly just sending it, just trying to just get ‘er done because the documentation slows things down so much and I just simply am Not Feeling It.

And honestly part of my lack of interest in making videos of the calendar process is having just finished listening to Yesteryear and it made me never want to film anything ever again. I’ve spent so much time thinking about social media in the past few months, I’ve got it set up so that I only have instagram for 10 minutes a day three days a week, just enough to do the parts of my social media job that I can’t do on a desktop. Instagram has been so soul sucking and dystopian for years, and although it enables me to do what I love for a job, gosh it feels shitty to have to curate a persona, etc and market yourself/your work and Yesteryear gut-punched me with that feeling.

Now honestly I really didn’t think Yesteryear was all that good. It was engaging, it made you squirm because it felt like it was about someone we all follow, but honestly it relied maybe too heavily on the fact that we all know that one person who is trying so hard to be famous on the internet at the expense of The Real World. But it did make you feel the extremes and swings and comparisons that influence us, even when we are not influencers and, yup, that was scary. This review of it hit home for me.

Other books from the month: The Courage to be Disliked, we talked about this last month. I listened to the audio book and ordered not one but two physical copies afterwards, that’s my review.

No One Belongs here More Than You, Miranda July’s short story collection that actually made me, a lifetime dismisser of the format, like short stories. “The Sister” and “Swim Club” in particular had me cackling.

And I picked up a copy of Post Office when I finished my book in New Orleans and hadn’t packed another one. I had never read Bukowski before and, you know, now I have. It was funny, and made me deeply appreciate my mail arriving every day, but it was also Bukowski.

Kacey Musgrave’s new album Middle of Nowhere has been the soundtrack of the month. I am an unashamed, enthusiastic lover of country music, especially older country music (Ernest Tubb, Dwight Yoakam, George Straight, etc etc) and when a contemporary artist attempts to match the tongue-in-cheek songwriting style and perfect instrumentation it delights me because so much modern country falls so very devastatingly flat.

Okay final thing. I dyed and altered the above 30s pants and have been wearing them so much, which has jolted me out of my old carhartt overall reverie that has lasted for at least two months. I also dyed a pair of shorts that used to be teal and now are my favorite color green, this time of year you might call it fiddlehead green. I wish I could say I naturally dye things, but these days I just take the natural fibers iDye and put it in a pot on the stove, you just use boiling water to dissolve the dye and the salt and then have complete control over the final color.

Alright, that’s all for me. Thank you for donating to or sharing Sarah’s fundraiser, my heart is aching for everyone who was injured in the fire and all who responded to it. Hold your communities tight, friends.

Thank you for reading, tell me what books are delighting you for spring and summer, and I’ll see you soon.

-Addie

Hello friends—

I’m lying on my couch listening to the peepers. It’s raining, and it looks like it’ll be raining tomorrow too. But my first tulip bloomed last week and the sun stayed out for enough time this morning that we could sit on the rocks by the ocean and work on projects. It was dreamy.

I’m just here to give you the password for the shop, really. I’m not sure if I’ll leave password posts up on patreon after the shop is open to the public, I haven’t decided yet. So far I’ve been liking substack as the host for newsletters, but we’ve only had to test it out once for the password and it lined up nicely with another post so it didn’t have to be its own thing. But anyway, the password is…

sprung

Please make sure if you are purchasing a project bag and you want it embroidered, you add the blank bag AND the embroidery to your cart! There wasn’t an easier way to do that on squarespace, alas.

I’m excited about the three new patches and one new print and I hope you like them too. It was so fun to go on a patch bender, I haven’t had a shop update with three newbies in a while.

Alright, that’ll do for now. By the time you’re reading this I’ll be in my prius listening to Kacey Musgraves on my way to pick up 39 square feet of tiles for my bathroom on facebook marketplace. Thrilling stuff this weekend.

Thank you so much for your support, friend. We are grateful for every order.

Much love,

-Addie, Tove and Snorkmaiden

I have left the state of Maine more since February than I have in maybe four years. It has been a real treat, to leave and then be so excited to be home, to be reminded that I am in the right place by the leaving of it. These past months I have done more laundry than carving prints, more sleeping than waking the garden up for the spring, more meeting new people and frantically trying to catch up with friends in between. I’ve missed my cats, pet so many random dogs, and have decided that I always need to have a few extra teabags in my pockets. Just in case.

But now, home. For at least a month. I am thrilled. And I have been making an extra effort to clean before I leave. No dishes left out, everywhere vacuumed and my bed made with clean sheets. It makes coming home feel like vacation, and it’s a delight.

I flew home from New Orleans on Monday morning; driving home from the airport in a spitting despair of sleet and snow my sweetie tried to convince me that it will be green in only three weeks. Something to do with turkey hunting and how you know it’s over when the leaves are out and you can’t see them anymore and that always happens mid May. It was pretty convincing, I’ll admit it, but I said no no at least three months! maybe it’ll never be green again! it’s never coming! And then I got home and my daffodils had buds and my magnolias had buds and coming over that last hill to home the pink blush was spread out across the hills so you know what maybe he’s right, three weeks and then there will be leaves. It is funny how quickly I forgot that one morning last week I looked out the bathroom window and there were crocuses in the suntrap of the hillside and that last time we saunaed there were peepers. So true spring must be here, and the green of summer will be upon us. Maybe in just three weeks.

And til then, I will put on my coat and read on the porch. Take one quilt off the bed every time I wash the sheets. Savor those gentle few weeks of storm door off but no screen door on, doesn’t the house look handsome? Do I take the window inserts out today or wait one more week?

I bought a tub this month. Drove my Prius Downeast and spent an hour sorting through the hardware from two and a half tubs to find all the parts, hauled it into the back of my car from the upstairs of an inn undergoing renovations, drove it home and parked it in my barn. I am a capital B capital G Bath Girlie and am trying to hoist my enthusiasm over the mountain of anxiety about rotten joists, expensive tiles, mold mitigation, dumpster logistics and plumbing dumpster fires one secondhand fixture at a time. I’ve spent so much of my past two and a half years trying to unlearn debilitating house project anxiety inherited from a past partner and just when I think I’ve conquered it a little voice says oh yeah that floor is going to collapse under the tub and you should fix the grade and gutters before you even think about putting anything in that corner of the house you dumbass and then suddenly I’m replaying that scene from Marty Supreme (you know the one, right?) in my head and feel like maybe my bathroom is just fine the way it is. It isn’t. Neither structurally nor aesthetically. But we’ll get there.

Let’s see, there is actually big news in the studio. I made shelves for all my patch blocks, and it hugely motivated me to carve things that are missing, I think starting with a guitar, just some tulips, and some form of vehicle. I have been feeling unmotivated in the patch world for the past few months, and this felt like a kick in the pants to get going again. And, seeing them all together makes my heart feel real big, this isn’t even all of them, so many have been fully retired and those are staying in the drawer for now. It also made me want to reprint a bunch of them that I haven’t thought about in a long time which takes the pressure off of making a bunch of new ones too, and that’s pretty nice.

I also finished carving this block, and am just waiting for a good warm day to print it. I’m hoping for an early May shop update, with patches, this new print and! project bags!!! My friend Lily has sewn two batches of these for me in the past, and this is the third and I’m so excited to loop in Midcoast chain stitching queen Liana to offer custom embroidery on them. I love the print, and it makes me so happy to work with other incredible self employed women on a little project. Aren’t they sweet?

This year I vowed to start the calendar before the first of May, so tomorrow I’ll do it. Cut the block, do all the math to set up the grid, and ink in all the numbers. I’m actually excited for it this year, perhaps because it is an excuse to lock myself in my studio and say oh sorry today I’m working from nine to five and if you want to see me you’ll have to come have tea in the studio, which is honestly my favorite mode to be in. I also drew out a new block last week to treat as a palate cleanser for all the calendar work to come. It’s good to have a few easy and low pressure things going in the background.

I’ve been reading The Courage to Be Disliked, a recommendation from my beloved therapist and have been trying to convince everyone else to read it now too. I also read The Brave Cowboy this month (do all Edward Abbey books end with a man hunt in the dessert, please someone tell me they don’t), cackled my way through Big Swiss, and read Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London because I (and everyone else in the world it seems) read this substack article.

Mostly though I finished 100 Years of Solitude and it has made every other book feel dull and slow no matter what they are. I haven’t felt that way since I finished The Shipping News, and I forgot how hard it is to get excited to read again after your heart is devastated by immaculate storytelling. What books have made you feel like this?

Alright, that’s about all the news around here. It’s raining, it’s going to keep raining, my basement will flood and then the garden will be in full bloom before we’ve even realized it’s stopped raining. I’m eager for the expansion of spring, for all the sweetness May is promising to bring, and only four weeks til the monster trucks come back to Maine.

Much love,

-Addie

It snowed in Maine again. It won’t be the last, but it’s the time of year where you are really hoping it will be, where you walk downstairs to make tea and flip the radio on, and then off, cause the never ending winter feels global and political too and you just can’t bear it this early in the morning, so you go try on all your summer dresses just to remember what it feels like to not wear two layers of pants at all times, pack away your winter coat prematurely and then when that’s not enough you find yourself engaging in the tried and true ritual of spring cleaning just to call something “spring,” and then somehow miraculously you’ve limped yourself one day closer to screen door season. Congratulations.

This snow was really pretty. It still is now, three days later and still sticking to the branches of every single tree, clinging desperately to even the telephone wires. Everything is sparkling. And I’m all about aesthetics, it is a WONDERLAND out there okay, but damn I want MUD SEASON. The bleakness of the grubbiest time of year, when you walk out the door and sink at least an inch deep into good old fashioned wet dirt. When you can’t go down the dirt roads your friends live on cause otherwise you, too, will be living there, axel deep in your prius, knowing that if you step foot outside your car you, too, will probably just sink neck deep, eye deep, doomed if you’re in doomed if you’re out. It is Ugly out there; no one comes to Maine in March, we won’t even have daffodils for almost two more months, but the bleak, soggy, seasonal “worse-before-better” in between season makes you want to burrow into the moist earth and make like a bulb.

These days, my moist earth is my house in late winter, the making like a bulb is dumping all my fabric onto the floor, emptying one junk drawer a day (if you say you only have one, stop lying to me!!!!!), hauling all my furniture around and sinking my teeth into my third spring in these four walls. Three springs! This one feels different, not just because the sump pump finally turns itself on automatically when the basement is flooded by snowmelt, but also because this is the first spring I have been largely just living in my house, not largely just working on it. I have decided that transition (from working>living to living>working) happened last March when I finally painted my dining room. Yes, there are still big messy projects to be done in the bathroom and downstairs guest bedroom, but largely clean, painted, finished and mostly furnished spaces is thrilling, making me feel alive and like poking my head out of the mud.

If you too are feeling like spring cleaning and resetting will bring spring faster and you want to read all about it, first, a disclaimer. I know I’m not the first person to say this, and many I’m sure have said it better (including this person, who made this amazing video about this), but social media has forced so many of us to feel rushed to have perfect, designed, styled, clean, tidy houses and then to feel shame when they aren’t perfect or even just aren’t livable or attainable for our individual lives and needs. I am so guilty of all of these things. Of posting only the tidy corners of my house online, of consuming a huge amount of home design media, of having design sensibilities that sometimes make me agonize over the right choice just cause it might be ugly. And here’s the thing, I think social media is ruining everything, really truly, and I know that’s rich of me to say as someone who relies on it for income, but also this aesthetic moralization of homes and gardens and material life is as old as time and that’s important to acknowledge too. All you need to do is read Home by Wintold Rybczynski and The House Beautiful by Clarence Cook to grasp these historical patterns of trend and status. Humans LOVE to see inside of other people’s houses, we naturally are going to compare ourselves, this is in our history, in our nature, in our blood, so honestly let’s just all admit that sometimes those plastic tubs are the best storage solution and we all have piles that never get addressed and dust in the corners of our stairs. One person, or even two people, in this modern, capitalistic world are not going to be able to pay for health insurance and groceries and have a social life AND dust all the baseboards weekly. I’m not going to get into the WHY of that right now, but let’s stop pretending that’s possible because it just isn’t.

Okay disclaimer over and now back to my third spring of undusted baseboards and ladybugs clomping around the window inserts. My house is finally telling me what it needs, I am listening and I am learning what I need: we are in conversation. And that takes time. You don’t usually move in with someone right when you first meet them, you get to know them for months or years, but homes are funny like that cause often you do just have to move in on the second date or you’ll miss something truly beautiful. But you don’t know how to make their tea yet. And they don’t know how to make yours.

And then, when you’re getting pushed by the internet and your inner critic to make your space perfect as quickly as possible, everything can end up feeling a bit shit. So please join me in trying to not just fall into the patterns of the house (did you put the couch where it was in the showing or did you try the other wall?) and the internet (wait, do you actually like that rug?) and trying to evolve as you learn how you like and need it and how the house likes and needs it, maybe by swapping in and out marketplace furniture, admitting that the giant dining table that is so beautiful just isn’t comfortable to sit at and maybe that’s why we’re not using the dining room and selling that table and replacing it with a slightly less beautiful one is actually just the ticket because it suddenly means we sit in that room with friends now and that IS perfect, you know what I’m saying?

There is also, of course, furniture I’ll never ever get rid of, that I will rearrange my whole life around, you just have to know what those pieces are, and then do this gut-wrenching thing for the deeply sentimental among us and sell the other armchair that never quite worked even though you did go get it on that one beautiful October day. It takes a lifetime to make a life, to accumulate the materiality of a life, the things that will be used, the things that will be cherished, the chair braces and stair treads that will be worn down by decades of feet. Everything just feels a bit forced and stiff if you try to make it all happen in a week, or month or year. So, in life and in home, know what is worth keeping, and practice letting go of everything else. Easy to say, right?

And since we just looked at this photo, let me show you what this wall looked like before this week, when the loveseat was pulled up to the fire and I was trying to make this one very large room into two smaller rooms for the third time. I think we have also lost the seasonality of houses: there used to be different curtains for different seasons, different rhythms for summer and winter and different arrangements of the furniture. I am going to bring this BACK, cause I do want my couch two feet from the stove in the winter, but want an open and spacious entrance for guests of spring and summer. And it’s more fun this way, to let your house live and breathe with your routines instead of forcing your life to fit around one prescribed arrangement of furniture for all seasons and phases. There is no part of me that feels more in touch with my presumably transient and hunter gatherer ancestors than the dopamine hit of moving my couches around when the weather shifts.

Okay so now I’m feeling like every time I try to write about houses and home design and interiors I end up saying the same things, now I’m feeling awkward about yelling about how much I LOVE LIVED IN HOUSES from the rooftops of my tiny village yet again (surely the neighbors are tired of this now) so here is a list for home design in general and spring cleaning in particular and maybe it will help you and maybe it won’t but either way it’ll make me feel less like I’m foolishly rambling and more like I’m being useful so here you go:

1. If you can, give yourself one small closet, one small room, where you can just close the door and not look at things. This is a luxury of having extra space, I know, but in theory we all need a place for those giant cushions that didn’t really look that big in the picture on marketplace and we’re not quite ready to get rid of them so they can just live in there for a little while til we decide. Or maybe this is just about giving yourself permission to not be mean or stressed about the messy corners.

2. Prioritize comfortable seating. Especially in the kitchen, sturdy chairs are important. Just get the couch that is 70% there aesthetically but 100% there comfort wise. This is the move that prompted me to write this, a $125 down filled marketplace couch that made my living room suddenly make sense even though it’s got one of those skirts. It isn’t a very textbook instagram sofa, but it sure as hell is comfortable and that is what matters.

   

3. Do an audit of your favorite art and furniture. Ask a friend to come help you move it all around. What will you never get rid of, what would you like to find or exchange? Having a physical list of this helps you know what you’re looking for and only end up with things you want/need. Maybe the internet would like it if I called this method of furnishing your home desideratum-core.

   

4. MAKE HOLES IN YOUR WALLS WITH ABANDON. I know this is different for a rental, but plaster and sheetrock can be repaired more easily than Big House wants you to believe and if you chose that paint color and know what it is, don’t let making a hole stop you.

   

5. Just buy the plastic bins. I am a basket girlie, I hate plastic in any shape or form, I avoid it at all costs, but there is nothing better for fabric storage, for winter clothes in the summer, etc. Half of sustainability is knowing what you have and taking care of it, and sometimes you just need the goddamn plastic bins.

6. Delete instagram. I’ve been doing this as much as possible and it’s the best feeling ever. Everyone always says it, but it’s true. It will free you to make choices true to how you live in your home.

7. Invite people over, it will teach you so much about your space, it will feel good. Likewise, go over to other people’s houses. Not the ones you see on the internet. My recent spring rearrange itch was ignited with a passion by moving couches over at my friend Autumn’s house, one of my favorite houses ever. Made me go DAMN I also want a comfy couch, this is so nice! Real houses, real people, see how they feel.

   

8. I think I read this in Beata Heuman’s book Every Room Should Sing but every couch or chair should be accompanied by somewhere you can set down a glass. If you can’t put your tea down, you will not sit there, your guests will not sit there, and it will feel awkward. You gotta see it to believe it.

9. Get old books about interior design. My favorite is English Cottage Interiors because those houses are so layered, so grubby around the edges, and so full of wobbly plaster and life. But any older interior book will show you what is “timeless” (places to put mugs next to couches), and what is just passing. What lasts from “dated” interiors helps us know what works and is worth investing in or recreating in our own ways. Current home trends have not been tested by LIFE.

Okay that’s all for me, I’m signing off to the gentle drip drip of the melting snow, I can only spend so much of this enthusiasm about cleaning writing about cleaning, so off I get. All this thinking and doing will really pay off when we can open the windows and let in the spring for real. Please share your home wisdom in the comments, tell me about the most beautiful houses you have ever seen and the people who have lived in them. I am constantly learning, trying to take in as much about living with objects as intentionally as I can, I am fascinated by it.

Best of luck with the mud season of your soul. Hey, there are tulips now if you know where to look, so fill your house and wait for them to burst forth—

-Addie

It is objectively a dismal time to try to sell your wares on the internet. After a trip to the Big City I’ve been trying to write a post about ruralness, that deep love I have for where I live, or, anything really, and it feels insane and impossible to write when the world is on fire in every conceivable way. Every time I sit down to do so I just give up as it all feels too trite in this mess. I open my computer, stare at it for a few minutes, and then close it, turn my audiobook back on and walk downstairs to turn the kettle on. This past month I was gone so much that the moments of being home, in between the reading of the paper and the doom scrolling, have been a constant seeking of quiet moments of joy and a batting away of the guilt for the feeling or the not feeling. Every day feels like a long wait til the next cup of tea with friends. But somehow the hours and days are rolling by and every moment feels extra precious in these dismal times.

I’ve become a tea in bed sort of person, putting the kettle on the most aggressive heat right when I go downstairs to pee; just the right amount of water in the kettle, no more, so by the time I feed the cats and say good morning to the house it is whistling away and ready to be poured (PG Tips for LIFE) and carried back to bed for half an hour of reading. I’ve been cruising through One Hundred Years of Solitude, it makes me long for a landscape I have never known and make me think of everything incidental as being full of mystery and magic. (No, I don’t want to watch the show.) I read Love in the Time of Cholera late last year loved it too. Gabriel García Márquez is a master of capturing the excruciating beauty of the most mundane human emotions.

I almost always have one physical book and one audio book going at any given time, so as soon as I finish my bed tea I transition to the kitchen and my audiobook. I have started listening to audiobooks at 1.4 speed because really no one talks that slow okay, and thus have been cruising through them. I really enjoyed This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell: I think there is something deeply appealing about escaping into the minutia of other people’s lives and relationships in parallel realities, these days especially. The highlight of my workweek is often a morning of discussing “low stakes tea” with my one sweet assistant, I have long been a lover of gossip and heartily believe in its benefits, and I think learning about a friend of a friend of a friend having a baby and another friend of a friend of a friend’s missed connection adding them on facebook and another random person you overheard on the subway two weeks ago talking about finding true love at a hostel or WHATEVER IT MAY BE feels so sweet and tender in this huge and isolated and online world and I revel in it. Maybe this is why I love memoirs. We all just want a window into someone else’s life just to see what it’s like in there. That’s why we’re all here, right?

Okay back to books for a second, I am currently listening to The Dead Come to Stay by Brandy Schillace after having scratched my fluffy mystery itch with The Framed Women of Ardmore House and discovering it had the aforementioned sequel. A few years ago I listened to fifteen books in the series Her Royal Sypness, which is honestly humiliating to say out loud but I love a formulaic mystery and have decided in my adulthood that no book should be considered too insubstantial or intellectually lacking to enjoy heartily and that’s a freeing choice to have made I’ll tell you what.

In the studio everything is both frantic and at a standstill. Is there a word for that feeling in any language, or even in this language? I entered the year with all sorts of enthusiasm about making a real calendar with pages in addition to the tea towel and paper calendar I’ve made for the past six years, but I am now realizing that is a wholly unrealistic goal for 2026/2027. However, I figure if I made 12 square format prints over the next year maybe 2028 will be the year of two types of calendars, so I find myself carving square prints with gusto. It’s been bringing so much joy to do illustrative scenes again and to feel an excitement for making art carving prints that got swept away in the flood of transitions and emotions of the past few years. So that is what is on the desk in the studio, as well as a new collection of patches, as always, they’re actually in my shop now, the password is SPRINGFEVER.

Please let me know if that password works, if you like or can even see the password for the shop in this format. I know it’s buried in here. If you are seeing this post after noon on March 14th 2026, you won’t need this password and these patches will likely be gone. I have been trying to streamline allll of my systems, and have toyed with the idea of doing away with newsletter subscriber early access to the shop, but I think once you offer that it is hard to go back. What do you think? How do we simplify?!

Since my socks there has been nothing on my knitting needles that excites me these days, although I desperately want to try log cabin knitting after seeing my friend Lily post about it, and then my friend Autumn knitting some inspired by Lily, and then seeing THIS FREAKING SWEATER that I am obsessed with. I’ve been feeling that spring lull in knitting inspiration, or maybe that’s just the way of the world these days. Or maybe this gentle blanket of spring snow outside my window will motivate me again, or maybe I’ll just hunker down with my book and read til noon.

Mostly I have been doing a lot of reveling in every moment of being home after being away for three weekends in a row. I am a homebody by nature, but leaving the county has been good for me this winter; everyone always says a change of scenery is good and this is the first year I’ve felt like dishing out that advice myself. I am grateful for the all the friends and places along the way and grateful to have the flexibility to go and come back at leisure. It is such a privilege.

Other thing worth reveling in:

• not wearing long underwear for the first time in months.

• not wearing winter boots for the first time in months

• making the same breakfast over and over and over again for months (tinned mackerel, rice, over medium egg, onions, avocado, cucumber, sriracha, mayo)

• admitting you kinda like camo after all

• deleting instagram as much as possible and only taking photos with the big camera and getting over the awkwardness of taking the big camera everywhere

Okay now I’m getting an oversharing hangover, easing back into this whole writing about life thing. I hope you all are wallowing through okay, there is so much to be said about the state of the world and right now all I can say is show up for your communities: it’s town meeting season here in Maine, find yours and go. Get involved, help your neighbors, drowning in the global despair is unavoidable but so is tomorrow, you know what I’m saying?

Thank you for being here, please tell me what you like to read about on substack, send your suggestions.

MUCH LOVE,

Addie

Hello my dear ones—

I am mostly here to say that there are new prints in the shop, new patches are on my desk, and if one closes their eyes and breathes deeply with their face tilted to the sun, spring is there, somewhere, and that I am going to start using substack to tell you such things. Hi. Here we are.

I used to write monthly newsletters. Well, that makes it sound like I haven’t in years and years, but it’s really just been three, four, seasons of not knowing what to say, not wanting to write, feeling like my world is too small and sweet in this huge and horrific planet to know how to hold both. The words would not come, and that was okay.

Another thing about those monthly newsletters, they just disappeared. Occasionally, someone would write a sweet note in response to a newsletter, but it was rare to feel like it wasn’t just parasocially-enabling, screaming self indulgently into the void (isn’t that what all social media is these days though lol). Substack has been appealing to me because 1.) there is an archive, 2.) there is a community, and an actual platform where access and connection to comment is easy. I’ve been told so many secrets in my instagram dms. It feels so raw and odd but also so deeply human, and deeply connecting, and you just sort of lose that impulsive intimacy in a 2026 email inbox, you know what I’m saying? So will you please tell me your secrets on substack?

This exploration of substack also comes as I try to shift my patreon to mail only tiers, simply because the patreon app drives me crazy for writing or sharing anything and I am realizing that I am no longer in a place where I want to or am able to share with such consistency over there. I feel bad having paid tiers where I can’t follow through with the promises I’ve made. So here I am going to make no promises and paywall nothing, what a relief! I am so grateful to my patrons who weather all these transitions with me, it’ll be six years of my patreon in May, isn’t that crazy.

Yeah, it’s a long shot to call substack the perfect answer. The “is substack a bad company” of it all is another thing. I think the answer to that is yes but for heavens sake I use instagram, who perhaps is at peak evil company status at this point. I also feel the deep and seemingly universal urge to step away from that space, so from one evil to another? Some might say.

I am eternally grateful for the following I have on instagram, grateful that all of you keep me afloat, allow me to live out the fragile, unlikely dream that is being a full time artist, but the wind is shifting and so must I. So all this is to say, I’m trying to release perfect in pursuit of just doing it, and I’ve never gotten anything done by getting stuck in the weeds, so let’s, as the kids say, fucking send it shall we? We’ll sort out all the details* later.

*details include, but are not limited to, will I actually ever post anything? what will I post? is there a way for me to send out early access to subscribers here or do I still have to use my squarespace newsletter to do that? etc etc etc

Alright, that’s all for me now, this is freaking long. But first some business:

-There are new prints in the shop, oh I’m so proud to have some new work to show for these bleak winter days.

-I donated a little wallhanging to this sweet thing this weekend, and encourage you to donate to local mutual aid organizations doing the work in your region too. Feel free to share links to such things in the comments!

-tinned fish is lifeeeee

Much love from your friendly neighborhood printmaker who is slowly exploring new horizons (including those of tinned fish),

-Addie

Subscribe now