OSCAR ATE MY MUFFIN

Spring Projects in Print!

Remember those exciting print projects I mentioned in an earlier post? It is my great pleasure to unveil the following two dog-related features that officially hit newsstands and mailboxes this May: An illustrated recipe spread (art and text by yours truly) in none other than glorious The Bark* magazine; and an illustrated essay in the premier breed magazine for the Rhodesian Ridgeback world - The Ridgeback Register!** Both of these projects were absolute joys to complete, and I send a heartfelt thanks to Bark editor, Cameron Woo, and Ridgeback Register editor, Denise Flaim, for the opportunities.

*Why YES - that IS Oscar Dog in The Bark spread, inching off the picnic blanket and salivating over the Big Dog Burger and Liver Cracker Bun! I couldn't very well illustrate a recipe page without testing out these treats myself, so Oscar stepped up and volunteered his discerning palette for a few rounds of "canine test kitchen" - one such exercise easily became the focus of this year's birthday celebration...

**The Ridgeback Register is a subscription only publication, so you'll have to be "in the Rhodie know" to catch my work there - The Bark, however, has national distribution and can be found in most major bookstores or large newsstands, so if you're looking for a phenomenal collection of all things contemporary dog culture - hot-foot it to your nearest book seller!

The Return of Ice Cream and O-Town

Gosh golly - it's been too long!! What a disgrace... I mean, really... we were plodding along just fine - stumbling through snow storms and city adventures, cookie-baking and DIY projects... and then, *just like that*, life got crazy and two whole months flew by without a post!! What on earth, you ask, could have kept the Beast from flexing his dog-blog skillz and celebrity clout for so terribly long? In a word - this shameful suspension was squarely on me. And I take full responsability for the deliquency - BUT, I promise my distractions were worthwhile, many of them were in fact entirely related to the content of this blog and will be shared in short order.

For starters: 1. Oscar helped me wrap up another thrilling semester of teaching (fellow teachers - nothing boosts your status in front of a room full of teenagers like the presence of a large, too-cool-for-school hound). 2. Dove-tailing with the grand end of the spring semester, I was uber-fortunate to be involved in multiple print illustration projects - two of which appeared in major canine publication! (more on this in an upcoming post) 3. In between grading art projects and working into the wee hours to meet my print deadlines, I had the pleasure of collaborating with one of my studio besties (a videographer with an eagle-eye for story-telling) on a short "day in the life"-type featurette. Not only did a cheerful 4-minute video result, but Oscar made his film debut! 4. Oh yeah, and - despite dirty looks from the Beast everytime I laced up my trainers for a long solo run - I ran the Boston Marathon this year... so pretty much all of my non-work hours were spent pounding pavement around our fair city...


Topping off such a corral full of awesome preoccupations, just last Saturday, this very blog was chosen as the winner of the Best New Blog at the "Nose to Nose Pet Blogging & Social Media Awards" (the culmination of the fifth annual BlogPaws Conference, held this year in Virginia). Wow. Oscar and I could not be more honored!

So you see, dear readers, we haven't thrown in the towel and abandoned your sweet selves, nor have we found ourselves lacking in worthy content to share - nay, we just needed a wee break to catch up. An expansive summer recess is before us (as evidenced above by Oscar's first ice cream of the season), and our regularly scheduled posting will resume this week. Look for another post - with proper content, free of excuses and self-shaming - this Thursday - so stay tuned!

*It's good to be back...

Spring Cleaning: 'DOG-I-Y' Style

At long last, there is a tree on our block that has erupted into frilly yellow blossoms - they're the odd little flowers that "regular" trees make, but they are also a bona fide sign that wicked old winter has finally taken a step towards the exit, and spring is at least revving it's engines. Things are about to get brilliant, for sure, but first... they're going to get messy. Very, very messy.

If you share your life with a dog, welcoming the first glimmers of spring outside also means accepting an influx of soggy, smelly dirt inside: grit tracked in onto your floors, dingy pawprints on your rugs, and probably a fair amount of mud on your very own clothes. Honestly. It gets everywhere. I typically keep a ratty old hand towel draped in a front closet, for heading off the worst of the grime at Oscar's first step indoors, though the thing about mud is that once you sop up the liquid component with your towel, a not-insignificant amount of solid silt and sand just filters down onto the floor afterward... whatever is a clean-freak to do?!

Well, I am beyond honored to announce this week a collaboration between the Beast and I and the exemplary dog/design blog, dog-milk.com. As part of dog-milk's crafty "DOG-I-Y" series, we'd like to introduce our very own homemade solution to this dirty-dog challenge - we call it the "Mud Puppy Mitten"!

For complete illustrated instructions, pop on over to dog-milk!

Move Over, 2012...

After an indulgent (and much needed) long holiday break, reveling in knee-deep fresh snow (WE HEART YOU, VT!!) and snacking on way too many cookies, Oscar and I are back in the hood - and a bright, shiny New Year is upon us! We hope you enjoyed a similarly cozy-fied, ribbon-curled season with friends and family, and that you're as excited as we are about 2013's potential. You see, 2012 ended on some stellar high notes, and we're feeling full of momentum to keep that ball rolling. One last-minute project we're positively chuffed about can be seen here on top of the Beast's big brick of a head...


Yes, yes, it's a paper hat... but it's also made out of our very own custom illustrated and hand-printed wrapping paper! A mere three days from concept to completion, this project had been on my wish list for ages... waiting for a window of time, and just the right inspiration... but of course, the critter that finally got me hustling happens to be... a puppy. 

I've never met little Bucky, but the socialsphere makes the interwebs an increasingly tiny, exceedingly well-connected place these days, and we made it work using nothing but Instagram, Photoshop, and a bottle of ink. Full results can be found proudly on NOTCOT (where Oscar's "Mini Me" cookies made their own splash soon after), but in short, here's how we made merry with the gift-wrapping this year!:


And because it's dreadfully easy, and more than a little fun, posted below are illustrated instructions to make your own paper party hat! Newspaper makes a great, cheap material for this, but any large sheet between 12 x 18" and 18 x 24"-ish will do the trick (you may want to play around with the ratio of page height to length in order to get your hat just right).

And with that, the Beast and I wish you a tremendous, adventure-packed, project-filled, monster of a joyful 2013! Huzah!

Gingerbread... with a Twist

Sooo, even with a holiday to-do list already busting at the seams, inspiration struck last week when I stumbled on this kinda amazing, albeit ambiguously simple, novelty gingerbread cookie-cutting set. I've made my share of spice-cookie architecture and smiling ginger-boys and girls, but this was something new, something special - and I loved it... but I could so totally do something better...

So I did.

Starting with a silhouette of Oscar's handsome pop, Ruger, and utilizing some very gracious design/engineer friend-consult, I fashioned, step-by-step, my very own custom Ridgeback cookie cutters...


Now, molding tin dog silhouettes to a perfectionist's specs isn't exactly a walk in the park, but lest you think it's all smooth sailing once you've got a bonafide "dough-stamp" - working with raw gingerbread (I'll posit any cookie dough) is, let's just say, rather tricky. *Consider that your molds - dependent on THREE cookies to amicably interlock - have a lean margin for variance in cookie thicknesses; consider that gingerbread rises ever so slightly (and completely uncontrollably) while baking; consider that your icing, depending on how you make it and how thickly you spread it, adds it's own hair to two-hair's thickness; then consider that gingerbread, as a sculptural material, could honestly care less about what you're up to... Add that all up and you've got a recipe for trial and error. Lucky for me, I'm one patient amateur baker...


Many delicious prototypes and test runs later, I had a small pack of "perfect" gingerbread dogs, which I guarded FIERCELY until all photography and special gifting was complete. And now - project documentation buttoned up and posted - I just have a half dozen or so extra reasons to go out for a run or find a treadmill every day for the next month...

*For those curious, the gingerbread recipe I followed was from trusty MarthaStewart.com, as was that for the Royal Icing. And if you're wondering about the icing color, which is actually a bit brighter in person, behold - Neon Food Coloring (yeah, they make that now!).