Hi everyone, 

It’s been a while, we’ve missed you! Happy June and happy pride month! <3 We hope the trees are verdant and green where you are; warm weather feels hard won after this long winter. Remember to drink lots of water! 💧  We’ve been pretty busy for the last couple months, but we hope everyone’s been well. We don’t have too many updates this time around ^_^.

Thank you SO MUCH everyone who stopped by our tables at MoCCA, CAMP, CAKE, and Kawaii-kon! It was our first time tabling at CAMP and it was such a lovelyyy experience. So many kudos to the organizers who kept everything running smoothly and with such a small team, too!  And thank you to everyone who stopped by our small publishers panel with Mili as our moderator, she was just amazing! We love Portland, and we hope we can come back again <3 We love all the creepy lighthouses, too. Also thank you to everyone who stopped by our table at CAKE and said hi to our wonderful friend Luke who graciously tabled for us, we sold out of mostly everything!  And also THANK YOU to folks who stopped by and said nice things about our newsletter! We’re happy you like to read our thoughts and going ons 🥺.

Behind the scenes, we’ve got Knapsack Volume 3 very much in the works. Everyone’s still cooking up their pieces and it’s all very top-secret at the moment, but we’re so excited to share updates with you very soon 🖉👀

We’ll see you all at SPX in September, it’s our next show!  If you’d like to grab our books in the meantime, our online store is always available for purchasing our books 👛. 

That’s about all for our LPP updates! We’re still watching ATLA together and we’re almost done with season 3 but we’re enjoying it all so much and kind of dreading when we’ve finished watching the entire series. They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore!!! What should we watch together next? Excited to watch the new movie, we have no idea what to expect…

We’re ALMOST done with Baldur’s Gate, and when we’re finally done Steph can delete it from their laptop and can finally open up Photoshop again. We’ll be sad when we’re done with it, though! There aren’t many narrative multiplayer games we can think of, but we’re thinking of playing LOTRO next. We also started playing Tomodachi life on stream together and have been having such a fun time with it.

Sara put together a book club for our group of friends and we’ve been meeting weekly to discuss the books we’re reading! We started out with Shakespeare to get into the groove- Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night back-to-back and then we watched some adaptations of the plays. She’s the Man is the best Shakespeare adaptation to ever exist. Now we’re reading Pride & Prejudice and keeping with the fun and light books, they’re fun to discuss together! Any book suggestions? We have a long list running but we’ve been just loving to read romance!!

Steph Corner 🐟

I feel like so much has happened since March that I kind of want to keep this short and sweet! I was in the mainland for a month for NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) and then I spent a week in Chicago with our friend Luke, and then I flew over to NYC to spend time with Sara, drove up to Portland to table at CAMP, and finally spent a weekend in Honolulu! It was really, really wonderful to experience the start of spring and to see all the ephemerals pop up. I was really missing cold weather, so it was an absolute joy to be back for a little while and also spend time with loved ones. I was like YESSSS! 40 degree weather!!!! And I got to spend time with very dear friends and meet my pottery mentor, Joy, for the first time in person. At NCECA, my friends and I hosted a Filipino Potters roundtable, and it was so heartening and validating to make connections with other SEA artists. I also had a piece in a show, my very first for my ceramic work! 

I feel very thankful to have relationships with people who are so kindhearted and intentional about the ways they move through the world. I relish in all the walks and delicious treats and conversations over tea together. It brings me a great amount of wonder and hope. 

I also saw an AMERICAN WOODCOCK! This is a major lifer for me (and I’m sure for many of you too, haha). I was literally soooo happy and excited to see a few around Bryant Park in NYC, I called my partner who was at work and made them video call with me so I could show them the little wormie dance they do. 

Also, if you’re ever in Chicago, please stop by No Longer Human! It’s a great teahouse that specializes in Japanese tea. They also have a little store portion with local handmade wares and some wares from Japan. Their mission statement is about cultivating in-person connection, so they encourage people to put their phones away and they don’t have social media or anything like that, so people hear about the shop by word of mouth. I really like when people explore different avenues of running businesses without social media presence. And the tea was wonderful! 

I also visited HoMA for the first time, which is a gorgeous museum! We wanted to check out the Toshiko Takaezu retrospective, which was really wonderful. I felt my stomach rumble when I saw her piece titled “Sweet Potatoe.” It really looks like one! I think I was hungry, but I got hainanese chicken afterwards, so all was well. The Philippines wing was also super inspiring, there’s a huge range of Filipino art and craft, from weaving to woodwork, to metal and shell and pottery. 

I’m back home and I spend most of my time in my pottery studio, or at the beach! We’re very lucky to not have been impacted by the Kona Low storm in March, which flooded the north shore on O’ahu and many places here on Maui. Many people have lost their homes and farms to flooding, and if you would like to contribute to families that have been impacted there is a compiled list of gofundme’s here.

Sara Corner 🐌

Hi! I’m same as Steph, so much has happened that I’m gonna try keep it a lil light here. I feel like as I get older I’m more and more affected by the harsh winters we’ve been having, or maybe I’m just living my life more seasonally, and I miss the sun and activity of the warmer months. Either way, this winter was a little hard for me, so I’ve been totally de-thawing with the seasonal change; it’s a huge relief and I’m super happy just biking around and feeling the sun on my skin. I went to a good friend’s wedding in Japan (oops again) and was heartened by love, old & new friends, and the vivacity of spring. Flowers were blooming everywhere! It made me feel alive. Speaking of getting older, I recently turned 29 :-) My final year of my 20s is upon me! I feel good about it, things feel like they’re falling into place; I feel much lighter.

I moved into a new apartment! Steph visited while they were on the mainland; we watched silly movies, cooked, and talked deep into the night. Don’t tell them, but no one in the world makes me laugh like they do & our laughter filled the new space with a special type of warmth that still pervades ^_^

I’ve also been woodworking a lot for fun and joy! I love trees so much and working with them for art has been crazy fun. Here’s a spoon I hand carved that literally took me 5 weeks. I love to move slow and uncover the stories of the life of the tree while working with it to become something new.

Most excitingly, I started my seasonal job on the farm! During the summer season I work for a farm that grows veggies on a small farm in the Northeast. I’ve been doing this kind of seasonal work alongside illustration / design for a little while now but fully dove in for the full season last year and I reallyyyyy love it. Living with the seasons, being outside, and having a hand in growing my own food makes me feel like a full person living a full life. Right now it’s been a lot of bed prep, seed sowing, and transplanting during the spring, while the harvest is just about to start in earnest. We have some asparagus (it’s perennial!) that was the first thing we could harvest so I was putting it in everything I cooked. Also, a million chives. Lettuce, radishes, turnips and most recently snow peas are what’s currently in the mix. I’m so excited for carrots I can’t even put it into words. We also grow flowers! Here’s a few pictures from the farm. Living my harvest moon life! And doing art & LPP stuff on my days off. I’m looking forward to the next book show we go to- seeing old friends has lit my heart up so much this year <3

All our love,

Sara, Steph, and Pocket

Steph:

Playing / reading / watching: Katamari before bed to wind down from the day, even though sometimes it actually makes me gamer rage. I’ve been revisiting Oklou’s choke enough album and by suggestion of our friend Goss, I’ve been listening to a podcast about animals/animal attacks called Tooth & Claw which I’ve low key been eating up… The host is a bear biologist and I like his thoughts! I think because I’m afraid of bears it makes me feel more prepared(?) and knowledgeable(?).

Eating / drinking: Lots of green tea since it’s getting hotter! 

Sara:

Playing / reading / watching: The Wound Makes the Medicine by Pixie Lighthorse has shifted a lot of things for me! Also Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard has been a great audiobook to put on while working outside.

Eating / drinking: I am eating so much lettuce it is actually wild- I sit out on my porch, watch the stars, and eat like 2 heads of lettuce during the hotter nights. Some recent cooks include some sweet rhubarb ginger jam, pickled radishes, muffins made with soy milk and rice (they are so good, if anyone wants the recipe let me know) and roasted turnips. Been drinking a lot of deep-steamed green tea in the morning on farm days to wake me up for the early morning shifts.