Willard, Art, California Storms, a girl named Sue and a guy called Joe

Yes, these California storms were nothing less than astounding, as you may have seen in the news, with scary words like BOMB CYCLONE (still don’t know what that was, but now I know don’t want to know), and ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS … I now know what this is and wish I didn’t! But we are fine and nothing got wet but the grass . . . there’s Joe out there making sure we’re safe. Now we know why it’s all so spectacularly GREEN around here! So! Ready for a new Willard? Let’s GO!💝 MUSICA!Guess what arrived this morning? YES!!! Through rivers of rain, life-threatening wind, flowing mud, and flooding canyons ~ the boxes I’ve been waiting for, all the way from England ~ inspired by real life, I dreamed them, and now they’re HERE! The new cups! They made it!

LOOK! Shiny bright new. . . just in time!

Box-loads of them! As always, first come first serve, if you preordered, the first shipment will be going out this afternoon . . . we’re trying our very best to get them to you in time for Valentine’s Day!🥰

And plenty of time for Patriot’s Day in April!

And, don’t forget, we also got more of this one ~ for everyone who missed it first time around! Special for the Anglophiles in your life. Celebrating the long productive life of Queen Elizabeth II, this 16-oz. Commemorative cup! Filled with one of my private blend teas, this one is the Fine Romance Tea, Earl Grey with Lavender, rose petals, honey and cream!💖 YUM! Be your own Valentine!💞

For Anglophiles like me. I couldn’t love it more!🇬🇧

And this little cutie too . . . the Happy Birthday cup, for the Birthday friends in your life, in the smaller 11 oz size! All three of them arrived today! Won’t be long now until they come to a mailbox near YOU! Thank you for your patience!!! If you have been waiting to order until they actually got here, you can go HERE to secure yours now!🥳

This is one of MY best gifts, Kellee, she’s DEFINITELY tied to MY heartstrings!💖

Joe and I drove up to see her and the new studio yesterday . . . it was wonderful to see how Kellee has arranged everything ~ she did such a good job! ~ moving is such a good thing, we’ve unearthed things we haven’t seen in YEARS … like this appliqued quilt I designed for a new fabric line (new at the time) called Tea Party that Kellee hung over our cutting table. Note teapot on top shelf of appliquéd cabinet, and then I put the whole fabric collection on the shelves! And bordered it all with bluebirds of happiness because happiness, history, stories, and comfort is what quilting is all about! These fabrics are long gone, but we still have the pattern for the quilt, in case you’d like it!

The Studio is just an old warehouse, mostly furnished with shelves and tons of books, puzzles, charms, cups, tea things, vintage things, stationery things … but it does have lots of windows, lots of light, and Kellee put down cozy rugs and made a perfect office for herself and a darling little kitchen where she hung our sailboat cups.

Is that YOUR Autumn book sitting on top there?💘

I loved wandering around, seeing the products, and promised Kellee I would design more cards and notepads . . .

I got to smell our new kitchen soaps in their little wooden holders … the Genius Soap is made with Tea Tree and peppermint to enhance alertness and focus! Cute for a blue kitchen, soft and soapy. The oatmeal is the same, no rough herbs to hurt your hands, lovely soapy smell. I use the lavender all the time, but now I get to try the two new ones! Kellee and I wandered around for a while, then we went next door with Joe and Joel (Joel is the man who just brought our shopping page into the 21st century! I hope you like it!) and ate delicious Mexican food (a good Mexican restaurant next door was a BIG selling point for this space!) and discussed what good news we’ll have for you the rest of this year!💖  

It’s inspiring, being here, in all new surroundings, seeing old friends, being close to Trader Joe’s😂, having so many good memories, getting organized ~ even when it’s raining, it’s a feast for the senses. No problem if it rains, we have a lot to do ~ mostly going through files, drawers, closets, barn, storage rooms, cleaning, and getting everything into piles . . . speaking of finding things ~ I’ve discovered so many things here, a note from my mom, a hilarious letter from my sister, childhood photos of my grandma, an old set of cookbooks, a collection of old paintbrushes . . . and bits and pieces like this: 

 Old pieces of art I haven’t seen in years. Been so fun discovering them and remembering doing them. See the cards I blotted my paintbrush on? I saved them from my very first book, Heart of the Home ~ I couldn’t throw them away! As you can see, I’ve always been trying to learn to paint people . . . either from magazine pictures, or made up, or from real photos, that’s a pencil drawing of me and my two brothers as children on the right… and that’s a portrait of our friends, the Schwiers, above it. It looks like Peggy, but definitely not Bob (except for the hair) ~ which is why it’s still here! And you can see me practicing Martin Luther King Jr. before I put him in my 2000 wall calendar! I think I spot Vanna in the center of the page, in the sunglasses, next to the baby jumping out of the egg (which never made it into my Baby Love book). That painting above is an original, painted on d’Arches paper, not even signed yet, just sitting in a box, I don’t know why! I’ll have to think of something special to do with it!🤔

Check this out. The stick people of 1988 … I started getting excited about painting clothes, as you can see from some of the paintings on the floor . . . I still have the jacket and the headband, my sister has the pin ~ I wore that exact outfit to a movie premier my friend Jane (who worked for George Lucas) took us to in 1988. The movie was wonderful, called Tucker, a Man and his Dream. I never see that movie anywhere for some reason, but it was great. That outfit was much cuter when the ruffled skirt flipped around! The Yuppie guy in the painting (who is not Joe) ~ his brown saddle shoes, and starry suspenders, was all made up. Thank goodness because I didn’t leave a lot of room for brains in that tiny head! Hers either for that matter! 😂 I couldn’t give them hardly anything to drink because their hands were too small to hold it! But one does not give up. One hides the imperfect art in a box for 20 or 30 years until one feels brave enough to show it so that all her friends know that things wanted, must be worked for.💖 I have like three paintings of stick people. It’s like a collection, my stick-people period.

I’m going to paint a little more on this and you’ll likely see her in a future calendar! She doesn’t look so bad! And her puffed sleeves are back in style! I was smart this time, I hid her hands!You’ve already seen this on a calendar page about Creativity! The original stick person! I drew it in kindergarten. One of my first adventures in drawing people! Note that I am trying out the fat arm and fat leg vs the thin arm and thin leg…six fingers vs five. It’s all about trial and error! My mom put this in my baby book! Good strong representation for the belly button!

This was folded up inside my baby book too … It’s HUGE, almost 5′ tall framed ~ it’s poster paint on kraft paper, also painted in kindergarten. I forgot about it until Joe found in the back of a closet. The reason it’s so tall is because it’s “actual size.” My teacher, Miss Caldwell, had the whole class lay down on paper, and she traced around us, and then we got to paint ourselves! I was so excited to see it again. I had it hanging in my studio on the Vineyard at one time, but immediately it began to fade really fast . . . so I took it down and it’s been face-to-the-wall, hidden ever since. 

Here it is … how it was, the only photo I have of it as it originally was … you see the colors? So I took a trip to the art store the other day and bought poster paints, children’s paint brushes, and fixative, and if I have the nerve, I think I will try and restore it! Something interesting to think I painted it when I was five, now again 71 years later! My eyes look more like that now than then, I’ve grown into them! But I’m way better at putting my lipstick on. Note that learning to paint people takes time!💞

Found this too … never used it … I wrote “No Time For Love?” in the early ’90s, because I was irritated by my answering machine😂 and couldn’t get a real person when I called a business😬!! Ahh, the innocent 90s. I thought I could see the future and I didn’t think I liked it. The words I wrote scream out for editing, but I still think I was right!😆 Only now it’s phones! Don’t even talk to me about drones! (You see lines going off that page? Those are misspellings or grammar that I needed to fix! But since it went nowhere but into a box, I didn’t bother.)

Back to art . . . This half-finished painting is another find . . . it was here too ~ I have no idea when I started it. It was completely drawn, but only about ⅓ of it was painted … I had painted the table ~ but everything on the table was only in pencil, and the chairs were white. Then, one of our first mornings here, I woke up inspired, thinking “Brown, those chairs should be brown!” Which, as you can see, I did, and I’ve been working on it ever since! I wob it.💕

Happy Anniversary to Joe and me!💞 February 6th was the 37th Anniversary of our first date! Here we are just a couple of weeks later at Holly Oak, my little house on Martha’s Vineyard that had quilts for curtains. Talk about gifts!💝 He’s how I know God loves me and wants me to be happy.💝

I’ve had such a good time with all these California discoveries, I think I’m going to leave a treasure hunt, complete with map, as a surprise for the new owners of this house! I’ve been thinking about it . . . like a time capsule, or something. I’ll tell you more about that in the next Willard . . . Until then, how would you like a chance to own an original watercolor painting, signed to you by me? For Valentines Day, I thought maybe my girlfriends would enjoy one of my “finds.” The one with the yellow kitty! Kitchen art if I’ve ever seen it!

“April in New England is like First Love,” which it is! The painting is almost 10″ x 10″, it isn’t framed, and it’s not signed, so I can put a TO and FROM on it (for whomever’s name is drawn) and sign it! I think, by the looks of it, I painted it at Holly Oak probably in the 1980s, when I was discovering first love (in more ways than one)! Just leave a comment, and you’ll be automatically entered. (To enter: Under the last words of this Willard, you’ll see a whole bunch of tiny printed words; the last one will be a number with the word “Comments” … click there!) Happy Valentine’s Day!

One more thing, I wanted to pass you a tiny Trader Joe’s tip … get the Trader Joe’s fresh-dried pasta in little nests, probably about 6 or 8 in a package (we ate them, I don’t have them in front of me!).🥰 Drop one or two of the little noodle nests in boiling water for just one minute, toss them in a peanut salad dressing (opt), and add them to any salad, spinach, Asian, it’s all good! Makes a person so happy to have noodles in her salad!🥳🥳🥳One more quickie, hard to stop, did you love the Grammys? Tracy Chapman!😢 Joni Mitchell!😭 Everyone! All that creativity! Like us💞, creating our lives every day! We never know if we’re inspiring others, but it’s my dream that through us, dear girlfriends, when we’re a source of the joys that bring us happiness, we’ll pass that on, inspire others, and bring us all a more beautiful world.💝 Let’s reach a tipping point for goodness! ❌⭕️❌⭕️

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GARDENS, CATS, TRAINS, & INSPIRATION: California Style

Yes! This Willard has it all, from cats, to trains, making home sweet home, inspiration, and back again! California Style! 💝 Plus, MUSICA! To you from me, with love love love . . .💖

I say tea first! I’ll wait!

Well, here we are, in the mirror, happy as two clams, running away from home, tucking ourselves into our teeny-tiny room with a view, aboard Amtrak Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, just pulling out of South Station in Boston, then onward to Los Angeles!

Settled in for 3 glorious days of soft rocking which puts us to sleep, lots of naps and reading, three meals a day in the dining car (some meals better than others) and interesting dinner companions from everywhere …🚂

. . .but mostly we stared out the window at the ethereal never-ending views across this beautiful country . . . because as most of you know, it was WINTER with a capitol W the entire time across . . . looks like the moon!

But it was so beautiful . . .

Even from the window in our dining car ~🍷🍷 we drank delicious red wine, while watching a white-out blizzard blow outside the window as we rolled along, listening to the train whistle.❤️ Imagining the conversation between friends across the country:

Note outfit. The train (Southwest Chief) always stops for an hour in Albuquerque which allows me to get off and go for a brisk walk take big breaths of fresh air! Cold there too, just like everywhere else!🥶

Alfredo brought my car and met us at the train … we bought that car new in 2005, a Toyota Highlander that still has only 60,000 miles on it ❤️ … it starts with a KEY👏, and it has a CD player, and comes with all my old CDs, so we are playing Kokomo (Beach Boys) as we round the bend, almost to Santa Barbara ☀️, our first glimpse of the Pacific ocean, palm trees, and look at that sky!👏 We are beside ourselves! It’s another world.

Welcome to Hotel California . . . such a lovely place.🎵 Our “driveway” … it’s dirt! It’s the Country Life for me! My neighbors wanted to pave the main driveway, but I held out for the earth ~ a little breathing room. So it’s not paved EVERYWHERE ~ and here, it’s not paved ANYWHERE. Home sweet home, and the first thing we did is breathe in the green while taking pictures . . . Our trees have grown so big!

In this place where bees grow strong . . .

After crossing the snowy grey country . . . we couldn’t help ourselves:

We bought this place twenty-three years ago, and got that tractor. We had been to England. Had seen their amazing gardens, and said, “California is perfect, sunshine, rain, we already have orange trees, we can plant those gardens here! Hedges, garden rooms, and let’s do a long walk!”

Because what we had here was dirt. Fabulous ancient river-bed dirt that grows anything! It wasn’t the house we fell in love with although it’s nice and big and perfect for what we wanted (Joe doesn’t love it as much as I do!) . . . it was the location, the beauty around it, the long views, the hills, the creek, the moon and sunrises, and the possibilities. So on went the grass seed, in went the picket-fence garden, and on went the white paint . . . We dug down deep for the garden, lined the bottom and up the sides with hardware cloth, to protect it from gophers and other underground critters!

This gorgeous albizzia tree was already there, but in the beginning it sat in a sea of dirt . . . compare it to the picture above it, you can see what we did to cuten-up the deck and the basically metal-sided garage . . .

Mas MUSICA! A whole other kind . . . my favorite 💖

Before and . . .

. . . After. We looked at it the right way! See what white paint and picket fences can do!

After that it was hedges and hedges and more hedges. More trees, roses, and all the things that love the California sunshine. This valley is farmland, mostly what they grow here is wine grapes, avocados, artichokes, and cabbage.

The garden diary I kept while walking through English gardens! Full of inspiration we borrowed for this place!❤️  

Tiny Christmas apples grow here! And pepper trees!

And we’re back . . . still working to make it better . . . the smoke out back is coming from the piles of dry brush we’re burning. . .

One of the first things we did is buy new artichoke plants to go into the ground on the warm wall behind the garage. So delicious, fresh artichokes, hoping we get a few baby ones before we have to go!

We grew them here before ⬆️ and they were so prolific! I’ve thought we should grow them and supply our grocery store on the Island ~ they get the WORST artichokes! “But, you’re selling the house,” you say, and I say, “Yes, you’re right, but the new owner will LOVE the artichokes!” Paying it forward, remembering how wonderful the garden was in our house on the Island, and so grateful to Mrs. Bowditch (the person who lived there before us) for what she did!

We have too many friends we love who are realtors in this neck of the world, making it impossible to choose❤️ ~ can’t stand to hurt anyone’s feelings. So we are going with a perfect stranger. We’ve kept all your letters of interest in looking at this property, which we are sending to her, we hope she’ll get in touch with all of you when the time comes!💌

One of the first times we went out was for an afternoon spent wandering around our favorite antique stores looking for little cat food bowls, and some new/old little vases for flowers for the shelf over the kitchen sink. Gotta have that! The vase on the far right is my favorite, it has a little hole in the back so you can hang it on a wall too! $6. Be still my heart. 💝

Next thing I did is oil the cutting board and the wooden spoons with mineral oil ~ because mineral oil never turns rancid. I can’t live in a house with a dried out cutting board, and spoons that look like big splinters when it’s so easy to make them warm and beautiful!! We even sell mineral oil in our webstore HERE

Sun comes in early in the morning, sweeps across the floor, and look what it finds!

Yes! It’s Sammy ~ one of our studio kitties, so sweet, here to sleep with us, and provide deep-fur rubbing service!👏👏👏 Look at his freckle!!! He has a little Jack in him! And there’s my “studio,” in the back corner of the living room, with a view of the picket-fence garden…

And Simon! Two sweet boys! Simon is HUGE, all muscle, and pure mush! He smells every single one of my fingers in the morning, looks up at my face (making sure no stranger-infiltration has made it into the house). You can pick them both up and rub their bellies to your heart’s desire! We are spoiling them with love. I know they aren’t happy that things seem to be changing, but right now, I can say they are sitting extremely pretty. wob wob wob them. I should probably write this entire post in arf and arfy . . . and you know why . . .

See that eye? I feel him watching me . . . But his babysitters have promised they won’t tell him a thing! Shhhhh…. He’s doing so good! I get pictures texted all the time!😻

We’ve been cleaning like crazy, emptying closets and cupboards, and going through files and boxes. Finding old art, photos, and newspaper articles. Putting some into the trash, keeping some, giving some away, and keeping some to make the house look cute/useable until it’s sold. I have so many old books here, especially GARDENING BOOKS ~ had to have them, because this garden here didn’t come out of nowhere!

Yesterday I drove up to Atascadero to see Kellee and visit the new Studio … oh, it is wonderful! The work these girls have done is amazing! Perfectly organized for action. I couldn’t love it more! I picked up some of our candles, the Autumn book, the new Heart of the Home and other necessities of life while I was there! Need to feed people around here! ❤️

Sheri helped Kellee move ~ this is us on a ferry in England a while back, we’ve all been friends for such a long time.❤️ Lucky us to find kindred spirits in each other. Kellee was still in college when she started working for me back in 2002! 

Judy, on the left, met me and Kellee at the new studio too . . . she also worked with us for a while, back when we had the store . . .  we had a wonderful meeting . . . so inspiring! We went out for Mexican food and talked all about Susan Branch Studios and what new things we’d like to do!

For those who’ve never seen it, this is a picture of our store back in the day ~ around 2007. I found SO MANY fun photos of it here in the house! Great memories. How I loved shopping and making things for this shop!💝

Yup, talkin’ about getting the band back together! Sheri too. Ideas were flowing, new products to make, new projects, ways to make our website look more like that store 💝, new books for me to write, new ways for you and us to connect, shorter Willards that happen more often ~ I don’t want to get everyone’s hopes up, but I have to say I went away from our first meeting with a nice long to-do list, absolutely elated, and filled with inspiration! I’ve been painting every day since we got here and it’s been so much fun .. it’s always good to get away for a bit, dangle your legs off a high swivel seat, ringing the side of the water jar with your paint brush, stroking paper with color, and allowing yourself to see the bigger picture with inspiring girlfriends.💝We are ready now . . . because what we’ve been doing, actually for months now, besides physically moving the Studio, is updating the website/blog/webstore. It might not look different, but we’ve done a lot! We made it easier to sign up to get my Willard Newsletter sent to your email box, that was a biggie I’d wanted a long time ~ check out our easy new sign-up at the top-right-side of this blog! I hope you like it!😍 We are TRYING to be more dependable around here!💖

We also moved the entire site to a new server that should be strong enough to handle it without shutting down every two minutes!👏 And we FINALLY got our webstore updated, so shopping should be much more fun and not take half-a-day to do! It hasn’t been easy, we’ve had a website since around 1999, it was dusty, crickety, jerry-rigged, spider webbed and filled with daddy long legs, and every time we did something, it shut the whole thing DOWN causing shock and consternation from Martha’s Vineyard to California! Mostly it was ME, hollering, “Hey! WHAT IS GOING ON!!?” Be careful what you ask for! Our shopping site was shut down for over a MONTH from December to January 😵 … some of you have been asking about it because you haven’t been able to order anything . . . Well, it’s fixed, swept clean, sparkling new, and our new shopping page is up and it’s BEAUTIFUL. Shoutout to Joel and Kellee for all hard work, and patience with me! And thank you!💖 I’m very happy! Look below, that’s it! Everyone says my name (in red) needs to be bigger . . . and I could not agree more!😆 Right now, it looks like this: 

This is not doing it justice ~ it’s much better in person . . . Click on “Shopping” on the top of the blog page to see the real thing! Or, HERE. Welcome to the 21st century! Tell me what you think!

And after throwing around ideas for new products we have NOT forgotten what is coming. .  . and SOON! 

We’re getting a head-start on the celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the shot heard round the world (1775) and the Declaration of Independence (1776)! I was so inspired by our visit last April to charming and historical Concord and Lexington, the gorgeous old houses there, and what I saw at the Patriot’s Day re-enactment  (if you haven’t already, click there and scroll down to see the post about our visit). I could not wait to make a cup for it!❤️

250 years of an experiment in government, that, for the first time, let the people govern themselves! Not ALL the people, of course, because of who was making the rules🤓, but we’ve been working on it! A pure miracle, made possible by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington! We made this country, and we can make it better. They can’t do that in so many other countries. I know I’m old-fashioned, but we were so little with our 5-year-old fat little hands over our hearts, swearing allegiance 🇺🇸 and carrying the flag in school, at parades, learning how to fold it camping with the Girl Scouts 🇺🇸, we ⬅️PROMISED! I just can’t get over the loving-America feeling! Both Joe and I cried at the reenactment, it felt like we were there, and when the soldiers were fake-shot, it was so real, we could feel it; it made tears in our eyes! That tiny framed painting of George and Martha hangs in our kitchen.❤️ We went to the Washington family home when we were in England. There is a Yankee Doodle Dandy living in my soul.🇺🇸   

And the other cup, back by popular demand, ⬇️ the longest reigning Queen of England is on our tea cup, the perfect place for remembering a beloved British Queen,🇬🇧💂‍♀️ Lilibet.💖

A person the whole world admired for her selfless guidance of her country. And her very familiar human struggle to be better, do better. (This cup has a corgi on the bottom!❤️)

The new cups will ship from England at the end of this month . . . Estimated time for arrival at our new Studio will be a week to ten days . . . so around February 10th! Only two more weeks from now before they start flying out the door to YOU! You can still reserve yours HERE!

Perfect timing, because here comes Valentine’s Day! And a reminder that it’s all about you. Be good to yourself . . .❌⭕️Speaking of Valentines . . . look what I found . . .

Sweet letter, Kellee left in the house for me . . . Regina, if you are reading this, thank you so much! Sweetest letter! 💖💖💖

Eileen Burke, our girlfriend who won the vintage quilt we gave-away in the last Willard, wrote me ~ she was thrilled to receive it, things hadn’t been going well for her daughter and herself so this just made her day 💝💝💝. It warmed the cockles of my heart. I knew you’d all like to know! I’m finding so many wonderful old things in this house! Things I haven’t seen in years, family photos, art I never used for anything, newspaper articles, tucked into boxes, which were stacked into closets and cupboards not seeing the light of day in 20 years. I’ll show you next post. I’m thinking one or two of them would make a perfect giveaway for you next time!❤️

I could go on all day, as you very well know. I get started and there’s so much good stuff to share, I have to say stop! I say it, on average, maybe six times before I do it. But here we go, time to say goodbye . . . with the words from one of my very favorite quotes . . . It’s the best I ever heard for this nutty world we live in . . . My favorite word in it, is WIT. It goes up to the mountain top, meets the word Wit at the top, and goes gently down the other side! With all my love💖, Anna Susana Dana Branchburger the third.☺️

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