​NOT OPEN ON FRIDAY, NOV. 25!
We’re hoping you can come to our Artists’ Open Studios! We’ll be open on Saturdays and Sundays only this year: Nov. 26 + 27 and December 3 + 4, 10am – 5pm.
Sixty-six artists are showing their work and working methods, all around the Quiet Corner of Connecticut, so check out our website and flyers! This is a fabulous day trip: visit some studios, get a bite to eat, see more studios or a group show…
Open Today Signs will take you from Susan Morisette’s Sober Camel Pottery Studio, #42 (great work, totally worth checking it out!) at 200 Pole Bridge Rd., Woodstock, CT 06282 -- out to our place, Meb’s Kitchenwares, #39.
Park near the workshop, the first building on the right as you drive in.
Indoors: Masks please. We have extras… Meb has cancer, Tom is 81… If you came to the new shop last year, or to our old workshop in earlier times—please visit again. Lots of changes!
Downstairs: You can tour our off-grid systems: the workshop machinery, the inverter system and dust collection/expulsion. We’ll demo how we make our work—and also how Meb teaches spoon-making classes. I sincerely apologize that our space is not handicapped accessible—we’ll try to make it so in 2023. I’ll be happy to bring pieces downstairs or to your car for perusal.
Upstairs:  It’ll look like a working show—drying racks of work, our work displayed for sale or just for air-stirring in preparation for a spoon class! Also, a hangout with chairs and puzzles and stuff for kids to do. And lots of pieces and parts of trees, large and small, cool explorations of wood. Plus I have give-aways-- stuff I just can’t keep around anymore (from file folders to gloves to hankies) and extra flyers for the Open Studios tour. Also I’ll have gift certificates for spoon classes—a new class format is available!
Outside: If you like, you can tour (walk or just drive around) the homestead (Meb may or may not have the energy to guide you). 10 solar panels as you enter on the left, 4 panels in front of the house, SOO many projects underway: a roof over the cistern, a new roof for the original outhouse, the sawmill (maybe in operation!), the house’s south wall heat storage area underway, firewood piles everywhere, a shower (actually inside the house!), pathways through the Mountain Laurel*, a campfire to burn all the sticks that have blown down (depending on the weather). Just remember, this year, nothing is as neat or dust-free as we’d wish!
Hope to see you one of these weekends! Meb and Tom
*come back for an Open House in early June to see the Mountain Laurel in bloom. It’s quite a sight!

Two years ago, in a quick, 7-week preparation for the tv show, PBS’s Weekends with Yankee, Steve, Pat, Tom and I took the empty shell of a new workshop and added in just enough equipment and adornment to make it look like a working shop for the show.
After the filming, we continued clearing out the old workshop and eventually, just stuffing everything in the new shop. We’d go to look for something, thinking of where it was it the old shop, then had to resort to excavating layers of stuff just dumped in assorted piles around here and there. 

Downstairs
Recently, patterns have been found, sorted and banded together for ease of communication. Blanks (hardwood parts that are cut out and ready to carve) have been boxed and labeled. Everything has lids on to keep the ever-present sawdust from infiltrating. This is so much easier on my chemo-addled brain—I can just desire to make something and Voila! Here are choices! Ready to go!

Upstairs
While the downstairs of the workshop is very useable (except for dust collection), the upstairs is a mass of paperwork (custom orders, correspondence, bills, filing, returns) that MUST be dealt with. Six months of ignoring is quite astonishingly scary. Also many technical issues that keep me from moving on: Internet/Verizon, Etsy problems, Microsoft’s new mode, my Android phone, technology in general…
 I’m still looking for someone strong and smart enough to help me tackle this horrific mess. Yes, With the holidays coming, I’m apprehensive of Etsy especially becoming overwhelming. there is payment involved, and I realllllly do need help! Please email me ([email protected]) if you know anyone who fits the bill.
Meanwhile, we are so, so, so grateful to Corlis, Rachel, Mary, Leslie, Dan and of course, Ethan for helping the workshop to come back to life.

Chemo
I still have hair (patchy and thin)! This bout of chemo is much milder, less devastating. I also still have skin and nails on hands and feet. And a prickly feeling (not so much numbness) in my fingertips. How much is due to Tom’s meticulous diet, acupuncture, chaga tea, immunotherapy, L-glutamine powder or yoga I can’t say, And maybe this will change when the weather changes, but for now, I’m pleased to be able to continue working and enjoying this beautiful fall. I’m having tests this month, so before the December holidays I’ll have more news. Fatigue, though, is always nearby, demanding several (sometimes sudden) naps a day…

Open Studios
We’re holding Artist’s Open Studios here in the workshop soon. For the days of the show (November 26 + 27 and December 3 + 4), we’ll shut off Etsy so we don’t accidentally sell something that has already been sold and don’t have the panic of Real Time! Etsy will turn back on the Mondays (28 and 5) following the weekends.

Open Studios is like having a party—clean up everything and make it pretty—not a bad thing! And for us, that means cleaning up the 4 acres of developed property out here.
A friend asked why I put my limited energy into Open Studios and I realized that this off-grid PLACE is my MISSION.
*Teaching and making woodenwares with Solar Power.
*Showing off our systems—water, batteries, composting toilet, heating with the sun, heating with wood.
*Encouraging young people to see how they can fit into environmental issues.
*Living the life—peace and quiet, privacy, self-sufficiency.
*Exposing the difficult side of off-grid life—it’s not always fun.
*Working hard physically and staying young!
 
Services
Since we are so far down the dirt road, services don’t come out our way. We’re also grateful to neighbors on our road for help with daily functions. ¾ of a mile away, we have trash pickup! And a mere mile away, our packages are delivered to a large dry box (we’re still trying to train some delivery folks to actually PUT packages IN the box…) at another neighbor’s house. And when we’re having water issues, several neighbors allow us to fill our gallon water jugs. Sometimes we just go out with a coffee in our robe and slippers to pick up and drop off!

The Hankie Project
Now that I’m older, I have a drippy nose just like my grandmother. Instead of constantly throwing away paper, I’ve taken to keeping a hankie tucked in my pocket. What a good thing for the environment! I think! I was able to find some pretty, vintage-looking handkerchiefs online (and delivered to the box). I liked them so much that I got more and am giving them away to everyone (friends, nurses, receptionists, my pharmacist, our helpers). I’ve been truly gratified at the response. Here’s a link to the ones I like. They’re not very manly, so I’m considering finding more for the guys.

Birthday Gift
I turned 70 recently and was able to watch the total Lunar Eclipse from my pillow! What a gift!
 
I hope you all have happy birthdays and a great Thanksgiving.

Meb and Tom
 

Meb: So there we were, my granddaughter Addie and I, at the homestead having a delightful time playing in what we call, “the little house”-- a two-year-old-sized house on stilts-- where every child is entranced because they fit right in.  There is a porch that is open to the woods about three feet up, and suddenly, I found myself on the ground. 

The good news is that I didn’t have bleeding in my head, but the bad news is that my right wrist (yes, I am right-handed), is fractured.  The emergency room said I’ll be four to six weeks in a cast/sling, no driving or typing and certainly no flying pig tail carving. 

Lisa:  I arrived this morning to take Meb to her first radiation treatment, and there she was with her arm in a sling!  Oh dear!  So, now I am the typist. 

Meb: I thought I was done with chemo on March 27th.  Then in May I had the mastectomy.  My hair came back--short, lush and (surprise!) curly.  My finger skin was re-growing, I even tried playing the violin and it worked!  My finger nails were growing back strong, my head was clearing again… and then! 

​In July, I was told that I needed six more months of oral chemo and two months of radiation!!!  What, I’m not done?   It was explained to me then that because I’m what is called “triple negative”, (you can look it up, but essentially the highest rate of recurrence), other treatments including hormones, were not effective on my cancer. 

Lisa: I arrived at the shop to work and Meb told me this news, saying she was shocked to hear the adjective “deadly” used in describing this type of cancer. 

“I guess I have been rather la-la about it” she said.  

Well, I don’t think that she has been “la-la” about it at all, but rather has had an amazingly “keep calm and carry on” spirit in the face of it, and that I think that it has been precisely this in her very positive character that has helped her get through it so well, and I told her so.  Also, always her sense of humor is at the ready and we have enjoyed laughing together often and recently over her special new “swimming boob”.

Today on the radiation table, when the radiologist was tagging her for the new tattoos to mark the specific radiation parameters, Meb said to him, “Ah, a new tat for tit!”… it took him a second or two, and then he and all of us burst out in real laughter together… and it felt good to hear it in that room.  It was a human healing moment.

Meb: I don’t know where I am right now with this new set-back.  I’m very frustrated, a bit depressed and just a little angry at myself.   We just returned from our lovely intense Nantucket show with depleted stock, and Chatham in about two weeks, and I’m in a cast!  Hopefully I will find out tomorrow for how long.    
 
Update: The cast comes off on August 29th! I'm driving myself to radiation every day. Almost ready for Chatham, and it really is raining every day...