What a week! I took some time off to create a website for Lisa, who (among MANY other things) does some mad illustrations of anthropomorphized creatures:

to appreciate that one, you have to see the original Caravaggio painting, Judith Beheading Holofernes:

Lisa is available for commissioned work, including t-shirts, covers, website illustrations, and portraits of your pets wearing clothes. Check out a little more of her work at lisahanawalt.com. Just don’t use Internet Explorer.

A while back I was thinking about getting a FLOR rug for the living room, until AH told me he thinks that carpet tiles always look commercial or institutional, no matter how pretty they are. I had ordered some samples anyway – you can get six little squares for $5 – and thought they’d make a nice little mat for something, but they’re too small for a doormat. When I noticed the cat litter being scattered around the box, I finally knew what to use them for.

Using a bit of puffy shelf liner / rug pad you can get in the Contact paper section of any hardware store, drugstore, or supermarket, I cut a little rug shape and affixed the tiles to the pad. You can order their FLOR ‘dots’ stickers when you get your samples ($5 per set of 12), or you can get more creative since it won’t be a very high-traffic area – safety pins, gaffer’s tape, glue, whatever.

A nice little litter catcher and scratch pad for kitty.

Lisa Hanawalt, in addition to being a completely awesome human being, is also a startlingly good artist. I’m proud to hang two of her pieces in our home – a photograph and a watercolor – but this new brush pen thingy style of illustration she’s got going makes me swoon:

See more at her Flickr set and her website. For more of her illustration, check out the comic Tip Me Over Pour Me Out, which is funny. Very funny.

Yeah, I know it’s actually spelled “towels”, but see, I was trying to play off the fact that phonetically, the word “owl” is kind of in “towel”, and thus was making a reference to towels with owls on them. Nevermind.

Feedsack (or flour sack) towels have been around since at least the early 1800’s, when household goods like flour, sugar, grains, and animal feed were stored on the farm in bags made of homespun linen. Although the bags could be brought back to the miller for refill, many sacks were recycled by the resourceful farm wife in the form of diapers, clothing, and – as I get to my point – dish towels. After the advent of mechanized sewing, the feedsack industry boomed, and cloth sacks were used by farmer and manufacturer alike to store and transport goods. Since different goods are different sizes – flour, for instance, is much finer than rice – sacks were made of varying quality according to the goods they contained. Flour sacks had the largest share of the feedsack market, and since they were also the finest weave, they became extremely popular for household linen use.

Flour sack towels have made a comeback as of late, partially because they’re inexpensive but mostly because they’re cool and easily embroidered – how often has someone complimented you on your hunter green and burgundy dish towels you got at Ross? Fortunately, for only a couple more dollars (sometimes less) than those unsightly rags, you can get a work of art that’s both stylish and functional.

Anyway, everyone knows owls are cute. Not real owls, of course, because those can be kind of scary up close, with those talons and beaks (does anyone remember The Secret of NIMH?), but the stylized owls that have been popping up on every purse and earring in sight. Since this is about homethings, however, we’re going to look at some kitchen textiles with owls on them:

Rock Paper Scissors has some really painfully beautiful screen-printed textiles:

A set of two towels costs $12 (plus shipping), and since they’re really works of art, it’s like you’re only paying $6 for wonderful little kitchen art.

Kraken’s etsy shop has lots of magical things, but the owl napkins ($20 for a set of 4) are marvelous:

Then, of course, there’s fruitflypie’s shop, where not only can you get a cute little towl for just $4.50, but also small owl-themed ceramic containers for various uses:

They come in all different colors, and a few different molds and sizes.

Of course, you can always buy plain flour sack towels (they sell them at practically any supermarket) and embroider them yourself, if you’re so artistically inclined. The possibilities are endless!

We have another very special birthday weekend coming up, so I begin with a little homage to Lisa’s cats. I realize her cats are not necessarily Siamese, but for the purposes of kitsch, they’re close enough. Holt Howard, a company mostly active in the 50’s and 60’s producing cartoon-like housewares and kitchen items, made a lot of Siamese cat things. This ridiculous napkin holder (wouldn’t the napkins just fall over and ruin the effect? can we just use it for christmas cards or something?) only has a few hours left on ebay  at the time of this writing:

Oh, they’re so coy! I love the boy (?) cat’s jaunty little cap. Holt Howard made a lot of cutesy things like this – a lot of salt and pepper shakers to the same effect – and are for sale on ebay frequently and relatively inexpensively.

In addition to HH (which is generally the mark you should look for on the bottom; this mark was used until 1974), there are so many adorable Siamese cat salt and pepper shakers that it seems like it must have been an epidemic in the 1960’s – you’d think people watched Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, got the song stuck in their heads, and then thought, “Aha! That’s what my kitchen needs! Seasonings dispersed from the heads of these Oriental cats!” I guess it was also something about “The Orient”, as it was referred to then, that made common creatures seem appropriate to put on your kitchen table. Anyway, some are adorable:

And some are just weird:

Wow, do you know a kitten named Dottie Downer? Because you totally remind me of her right now. Are they scared of us? Sad? Upset? Is the small one crying? She must be pepper. Whoever came up with the mold for these was either very depressed, or enjoyed hurting small animals.