Pregnant & Crafty Tuesdays

This Tuesday, we’re delighted to get started with an ongoing crafty evening for mamas at the shop. We invite pregnant and freshly minted mamas to come sit and craft with one another from 7 to 9 pm on the first and third Tuesday of the month, so for now, that’s 4/17, 5/1, 5/15, etc…. We’ll provide the tea and gossip, you provide the projects.

Illustration by Barbara Nessim, from one of my favorite books on the subject, Birth by Caterine Milinaire, 1971.

Vestirsi è facile

1972, Italy, architects, all still concerned with simple clothing systems. And now, there’s a kit for that:

A kit! You shouldn’t have, Archizoom! But is this diagram nightmare really necessary to start making simple clothes at home?

Yes because it’s worth it:

Vestirsi è facile, or, Dressing Is Easy, was another tantalizing clothing system made by Archizoom Associati. I have no idea why the absurd aesthetic of the earlier Nearest Habitat System gave us American Apparels on every corner, but this system, which is to me infinitely more stylish and actually adaptable, seems to be available to us now only through limited supply chains such as Miyake Plantation, Kenzo Jap, Flax (kind of), and certain more discerning purveyors of world beat trimmer garb.

Please, allow me to present that for you again:

Assumed here as a basic element is a square piece of cloth. This first logical use of the raw material eliminates waste, enabling one to operate on a geometrically defined element with which one can plan, rejecting imitative operations of any anthropometrical importance.

Indeed, it is only by abandoning traditional sartorial methods still so ubiquitous in industrial production that we shall be able to cope with and correctly utilize productive technologies and methods, drawing planning criteria directly from the nature of the productive process.

In this case the first fundamental operation is to consider the fabric and the cloth to be like a continuous ribbon of unvarying width, and not an indefinite surface from which portions are haphazardly cut out.

And so forth, and so on, published in Casabella, December 1973, and Zaaaaang.

The best news is that there is also a film for this, also called “Vestirsi è facile”. A film! But I can’t seem to manage a way to view it….And I’m having trouble finding sufficient information. This deal is so rad. I came across mention of it in a book,  Italian New Wave Design, by Andrea Branzi, 1984, one I recommend. So this is a shout out–if anyone has some more information, please share it!

Nearest Habitat System

OK, the year is still 1971. You are now a group of Florentine architects who began with a focus on radical architecture and urban research, and you have lately taken up an interest in clothes.

Cuuuute. Despite your day to day choice of sensible tweed suits and slouchey knits for your own body coverage, your idea for others is to make a simple clothing system based on slimfitting bodystockings over which decorated overalls could be worn.

You sketch it out, see that such a system would look nice in empty corridors on your own, in pairs. It would work with bald men with bushy beards, with haired men with bushy beards. It would probably work when you cast a shadow against a wall. Or when you visit skyscrapers, when you do yoga, when you play a stringed instrument.

You think to yourself, This idea works. Let’s test it out on some handsome neighbors. Sure enough:

Slam!

Ka-blam! Sans understocking.

Hot damn. This last picture is from 1972, boys and girls. Nineteen Seventy-Two. And so, the American Apparel problem was born, never to look so very fine again. Oh man, oh man.

Peanut Gets a New Name

We Aunties welcome Oliver Brooke Halsey Murch into our flock of well loved, overly-much-kissed boys.

Our dear Bronwen gave birth to Oliver on the morning of January 22nd in the same room where elder brother Arlo arrived, in the same house where Papa Mickey was born on their family farm up north. Nice start little one.

Glad you’re here Love!

Your Friendly Neighborhood Midwife

Ladies and Gentlemen of my lovely community,

I, Nile Nash, am one of the three ladies that own this wonderful shop, Gravel & Gold. I am also a certified nurse midwife, a nurse practitioner of women’s health, and a registered nurse. So much of our intention with Gravel & Gold is to create community around our passions. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is seeing mamas and babies in the shop, or getting to hold wee ones while mama tries on clothes, or recommending any book by Ina May. And Gravel & Gold, both the shop space and you as a community, have always been a support to me on my path of becoming a midwife and starting my own practice.

So, I’d like to share with you that I’ve launched a fundraising campaign to help raise money for my new practice, Mama Lion Midwifery! I’m providing home birth and well woman GYN care to the community of San Francisco. Help me raise money for supplies like a microscope, speculums, and other goodies, rent, and a pro bono home birth for one lucky family. The campaign runs until the spring equinox on March 20th, when the day and night are finally equal and the light continues to grow. Think of all the lovely witchy metaphors that abound when you DONATE to my campaign!

Tell your friends and family: http://www.indiegogo.com/Mama-Lion-Midwifery

ALOHA!
Nile

P.S. Nilie caught all three of these beautiful babies in one week! Hazah!

Nin Kit

Here’s a nice little Anaïs Nin starter collection. A Woman Speaks was new for me. It’s been a pleasure to read through this Major Arcana auntie’s extra-literary words and thoughts. And certainly, it’s always a pleasure to come across copies of Little Birds and Delta of Venus designed by Milton Glaser, whose book of design we celebrated yesterday.

From the top left, we have Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories, published by Magic Circle Press, 1977. A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin, edited by Evelyn J. Hinz and published by The Swallow Press, 1975. Delta of Venus, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Little Birds, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Joan Didion’s Packing List

That’s Right Debra

Well, nobody stopped me from getting that exact same haircut at the advanced age of 25, only I didn’t have the hutzpah to go for the full dye job. Auntie Debra, would you like a job tending shop? And thanxxx Nicky.

Purple Palace Now “Decidedly Charcoal”

I spied some devastating news splashed across the front page of the Chronicle this morning. Barbara Meislin, the celebrated Purple Lady of Tiburon, a singer, healer, and author of No One Can Ever Steal Your Rainbow, has lost her fabulous purple-filled house to a fire.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

It was a tragic end for a uniquely embroidered house owned by a distinctively colorful person. Meislin, who has lived in the house for 43 years, is known as the “Purple Lady of Tiburon” because virtually everything she owns, wears or uses, from her undergarments and eyeliner to her car and cell phone, is a shade of that color.

“Her garden features princess flower bushes; beds of violets; a wisteria-covered gazebo; hanging baskets teeming with fuchsias; fences covered with morning glory; and abundant patches of lavender,” wrote Jim Wood recently in Marin Magazine, a glossy periodical that mostly features the hobnobbings of the well-to-do. “Inside her house, you’ll stroll on purple carpets, be surrounded by soft violet walls, stand under a mauve ceiling, and gaze upon magenta vases, indigo candleholders and countless works of art imbued with purple hues.”

The hue was decidedly charcoal Wednesday as Meislin collected belongings from the garage, where two cars were parked bearing the license plates BPURPLE and BPURPL2. The gate to the front yard lay on its side, the purple stained glass with swans and butterflies still intact. A soot-stained statue of Buddha with his hands raised to the sky stood nearby.

“I’ll have to rebuild this house,” she said, holding a sign with the number of her house surrounded by a rainbow. “There is a purpose in everything that happens.”

Meislin reportedly fled her burning home wearing only her purple pajamas and slippers.

It makes me so sad. I wish I could have visited the purple palace while it was still with us. And almost as sad-making is the thought of this Auntie, burned out of her incredible house and home, roaming West Marin in only her purple pjs. Perhaps Judy would be willing to lend Barbara her periwinkle ensemble during the rebuilding process.

At least Barbara has the right spirit about things. “‘I truly believe that nobody can steal your rainbow,’ she said. But, ‘if I was ever tested, today is the test.’”

Auntie’s A’ama

Looking around the dance floor in my living room the other day, I realized that a certain extremely positive regression to middle school had occurred in the sense that all of my most beloved friends were wearing the exact same Sharon Leton earrings in different color ways at the same social event and we were all really stoked about it. Well, take a look at them! Wouldn’t you be very very pleased to see a whole herd of these beauties swaying and shimmying to the beat?

We of the shop are most honored to be able to carry the beaded work of Nile’s auntie Sharon Leton. Sharon was a leather worker in San Francisco when she vacationed to Kauai in 1976 and stayed for good. For the past thirty years, she has been combing the beaches with a pair of tweezers for the Puka, Ni’ihau, and Sunrise Shells that, when painstakingly strung with vintage Czech glass beads, pearls, leather, and treasures from around the world, transcend the art of exquisite OG auntie adornment. Each piece is one of a kind, with shells that that absorb and enhance the mana of their wearer.

This past Christmastime, Nile, my mom, and I got to visit Sharon at her home/studio in Haena. Here you see Nile sporting an insane Seven Sunrise necklace that Sharon made for her tenth birthday with the matched shells her Uncle Bill found on the beach whilst she fans the flame of that special new jewelry acquisition glint in her eye. Also you see the dragon’s ransom of recent delights. And in the shop, should come visit us, you might just see a few of these pairs of earrings and beaded leather bangles that have come all this way to the mainland.

Sharon’s work table displays her genius means of keeping her array of tiny pink-to-beige Ni’ihau shells, glass seed beads, and precious stones tidy and at the ready—tea coasters! Of course!