Betsy Dorman: the Kara Walker of animal silhouettes, perhaps...

Reyer Stolk, 1945 (seen first by me here, and then in various places, such as here.)

Love the above Dutch picture book madly (but aren't prepared to search through vintage dealers for a copy)? Try Betsy Dorman's fascinating, beautiful take on animal silhouettes, found in Besty, her Etsy shop. She manages to be both unsentimental and yet sympathetic, even affectionate, towards her subjects. Check out her porcupine. Not exactly a pretty guy. I revel in the courage of it.


And, "S" is for Sloth.
Few animal silhouettes are observant and witty enough for anyone to dare class them as portraits (e.g., these, which are pretty stock), but hers do actually make it as portraits. Each profile, each face, has its own look, its own particular, watchful, attentive gaze beyond the frame.

I also find it deeply impressive that BD's sloth, and several of her other silhouettes, manage, successfully, to toe that ambitious, elusive line between abstraction and absolute specificity.Poster, $60, Besty.

Good, no? Let's be honest; we're talking so damn fine.

a silk print for the last days of November

and with a a swatch of vintage silk in a feather print, we let November go, say goodbye for now to Thanksgiving, and welcome in December with its pine needles, its brown paper packages, its mittens, its champagne, its snows.

vintage illustrations & where the wild things are...

Loving the splattery, scrawly look of mid-century illustrations right now...

and the flat, bright surfaces of these 1930's world's fair posters, too....




Thanks to illustrator "ward-o-matic" and his flickr set for the first image. And thanks to Vintagraph for the two world's fair images. Both of the latter are available for purchase in a variety of sizes.


Great link, btw: wardomatic's recent and wonderful analysis of some of Maurice Sendak's choices in Where the Wild Things Are. I am one of the people who know that book quite well, but I'd never thought hard about the role of "white space" in the story. Such an elegant, simple, and powerful strategy. Dazzling.

ah-yi's Nocturne 02 print

ah-yi's prints are simple on the surface, very lovely and crisp.. . but there's a wild messiness there too that I love. she contains the disorder of little thin fragmenting lines in the safety of whale-like, brain-like organic shapes, but the tumult is there, biding its time, ready to burst through. ah, let it burst and break, ah-yi.

bare design

summer's textures of rafia, rope, cane, and sand are the closest it comes to going naked in design....

chequita nahar's gorgeous fringe necklace with string beads; dedon's "daydream" lounge bed.

pattern: oversized dots and oblongs in silky neutrals

o . O o . O o . o O . 0 0o O o . o O0 oblongs

Joy's nantaka joy line is out and it's too delicious....! (image via d*s). was so inspired, i had to show a sample of other gorgeous oval and oblong patterns in textiles and ceramics.

Embroidered tambourine fabric by Minä perhonen via photos from IdN spotted on Elly's site.


brooch by scottish artist Ann Little.


"Martini" runner by madeline weinrib

beloved Arabia: Finland giraffes found here.