It’s that time of year again… Icicle season! Winter magic video here.

Dear Friends,

So many thoughts and reflections. December, the end of our calendar year, the month of holiday parties, the winter solstice, and dressing in layers all they way down to your socks. Instead of using this month to do a big-picture end of year recap, thinking about the huge changes in my life and in this world, I want to dwell in the microcosm of the right now. It is snowing outside, so Gary has not come to help with construction, which I am grateful for in my current state. Instead (I am drafting this on December 10th) I am sitting on my couch nursing cramps and sore muscles and joints, doing laundry, and sorting linens. Even in my day of relative rest, I am using it to tackle a project I have been putting off… the laundry and linens are actually a rather big project of going through all of the blankets and sheets and comforters that have been gifted to me for my home and guest rooms, they have been accumulating in boxes and garbage bags, rising like a tower of pisa at the foot of my bed, a growing monster of toppling softness. To wrestle them into submission (quite literally), I am using vacuum storage bags for the first time, and it is very effective. The project used up my limited energy, so couch flopping and newsletter writing is my best bet for maintaining some semblance of productivity. This is better than the scrolling and pondering, my brain meandering my way though the stresses big and small, from threats to our democracy to my own petty gripes and physical pain. In writing, I remind myself of all that I have to be grateful for. My health, my wealth of community and family and friendship and love, this unbelievably lovely place I am still just barely settling into, and the miracle that my primary job is teaching art and sharing my passion for paint and color and nature. Outside my window the snow swirls around me, cloaking the hemlocks and pines and bare branches and ground, a reverse snow-globe with me snugly inside the warm dry places looking out at the cold wetness.

What a life I live. Over the weekend, my mom helped me to tie ribbons on 320 mini calendars and I packed up almost two dozen packages to mail, some with greeting cards or prints or original art in them as well, and prepared even more items for local pickup. Monday, I taught on zoom for over seven and a half hours, talking to wonderful people about conceptual art, art history, perspective, color mixing, Yesterday, I went birdwatching with my brother and another friend, beginning our day in zero-degree weather, crunching our way through snow as the sun rose on a crisp, quiet snowscape under a clear blue sky, collecting data for the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas Survey conducted every 15 years.  At first, we thought we would not see a single living creature, but were eventually rewarded with crows, juncos, chickadees, kinglets, goldfinches, red-breasted nuthatches and multiple woodpecker species. Then we returned to my place and unloaded furniture and used doors given to me by family friends and purchased at Habitat for Humanity, then used the truck to go purchase a ton of pellets, bringing them back and then unloading all of them into my basement, building up a sweat despite the cold. The afternoon my dad and I did planning and designing and research and measuring and problem solving on so many different projects, back and forth between the freezing cold unheated construction area and my warm kitchen. At the end of the day, I took the hottest bath I could stand, soaking the cold and aches out of my body, followed by hot soup and hiding under an electric blanket. Today, as mentioned, a quiet snow day, doing laundry and sorting linens and writing this.

I love this unusual and beautiful and quiet life I have. I know that I am lucky in so many ways. Thank you, dear friends, for sharing it with me.

 This month I want to skip ahead to one of my absolute favorite projects within the house that I am most proud of, because I want to dwell on something pretty and show it off to all of you. So, we are going to talk about tiling today, which means my superhero will be Tim again, who taught me how to do tiling and has helped me with some part of every tile project so far, even as I opt for complex projects emulating the more challenging tile patterns that I loved so much in my time in Central America. For my Nature Spotlight, I want to feature a very sweet, lovely and humble native ground cover on my property that I love, that is also a little Christmas-y in its reds and greens that stay vivid all through the winter: the Partridgeberry.

Be gentle with yourselves, stay cozy, and have a happy holiday season whatever you may celebrate,

Love,

Elody

Birding with my brother Joe just after dawn in single digit temps on 12/9/25

Feature Project: Pretty Tiles!

Since we did ceilings first, and then all that drywalling and painting, the next step was flooring! Only after flooring was in could we do the trim and other final touches. We did not do tile everywhere, but on my side of the house we did it in the laundry room, bathroom, and entry area, in that order. Tim was master tiler, my teacher, adviser, consultant, helper and grouter. You can’t just stick tile onto whatever, you have to lay a sub-floor first. We used hardiboard, which is relatively simple to do, you cut the pieces into the right shapes, then screw them down. The screwing is extremely tedious, you do a LOT of screws. Then off you go with tiles!

First, the laundry room. This was a small room, and we used inexpensive 12 by 12 tiles leftover from a project at Tim’s cabin. Tim showed me how to apply the mastic (the tile adhesive we used) with the nifty square notched floor trowels, layed out a few tiles with spacers, showed me how to use the tile saw, and then said… OK, now you do it! And so I did. It was remarkably satisfying and easy, though I was soon to learn it was easy because a) what we were doing was about as straightforward as it gets, and b) it was a small floor and was over too quickly to really start hurting from working on the floor. Then, Tim did the grouting, and showed me how to wipe up after the grouting after it has set up just enough. Ta da! While thing done in a single session. Easy, right?

Below: The first project, simple and straight-forward. Freshly laid in the laundry room.

Second, the Bathroom. Have I mentioned that I haunt facebook marketplace for materials (and appliances and furniture etc etc)? I got an incredible deal on some very beautiful, high quality, and extra thick tiles. Normally they sell for $12-15 per sq ft, I got them for a little over $1 per sq ft. Unfortunately, the quantities were not quite right. I had a little too much for one bathroom, and not quiet enough for the other. So, I decided that the one I had plenty of would go to the guest bathroom which would be uniform and simple, and for my bathroom I would deal with the complicated multi-tile design. I did the main tile as a big square in the center, surrounded by a border of the tiles for the other bathroom that I had extra of, and then surrounded that with leftover plain tile. The problem was, I quickly discovered the second style of tile was just a little bit smaller (same brand, same supposed size, but almost a quarter inch smaller) and the plain tile was a totally different thickness. So we did a wider than average grout line, and then made it even wider on the border tile, and then did an extra layer of hardiboard and even wider grout lines on the outside border. Tim helped me lay out the design spaces and laid the first two rows, and then I laid the rest except the outer border and the areas with plumbing. I did it in three separate sessions on three different days to a) make it possible to walk through the room at all times, and b) spread out the time spent working on the floor to spare my back and knees. Finally, Tim did all the really tricky bits and helped me figure out the layered border tile. We had kept the grout lines wide partially because the thicker tile was going to make getting the grout down in between the tiles harder. Regardless, the grouting was particularly hard on this one, very challenging even for Tim. Ultimately, the effect is something like a rug. I love how it came together!

Above: Leveling up! The bathroom in fancy tiles that I did not have quite enough of. Below: The bathroom later, when the trim was also finished.

Lastly, the Entry. Have I mentioned that I am crazy? When you have a vision, you have to pursue it! So, in my time in Central America, I fell absolutley in love with the tiled floors in all the old spanish colonial architecture. The patterned tiles, the painted tiles, the concrete tiles, the patterns of laying out the tiles of different sizes together. I wanted to try something like this out. I spent some real money buying some beautiful handmade 4” by 4” tiles from Mexico (they were actually remarkable affordable, especially if you buy the batches of 50 “seconds” where some of them have bumps or chips or tiny flaws in the glazes), and designed a pattern using graph paper to combine them with some 10” by 14” tile I got really cheap on, you guessed it, Facebook Marketplace! You think I would have learned my lesson by now with the bathroom tile having different sizes from the same manufacturer, but I had not. My theory did not match actuality. The 4 by 4 tiles were on average about a quarter inch larger than they said they were going to be and actually varied enormously in size, and the 10 by 14 tiles were (consistently at least) about a quarter inch too small. So when we began to actually lay them out, my design did not work out quite as well as I had hoped. Unfortunately, we did not realize this until we were committed (just by chance the first couple handmade tiles were on the smaller side) so I ended up having to very carefully trim a saw-blades width off of all four sides (to keep the design painted on the tile symmetrical) on many of the hand made tiles. Did I mention that at this point, we are talking about last winter here, it was very cold? We had heat on where we were tiling but the tile saw was outside (you have to cut them wet) so this meant spending about 500% more time with my hands wet with very cold water in the very cold air. Not fun. Tim was a trouper and laid all the tile while I cut and chose which design went where (because of course I had strong opinions). It was really challenging keeping the layout aligned and symmetrical and parallel to the walls with all of the variables. Once again, Tim applied the grout and I wiped it. In the end it was all worth it, and I LOVE this floor SO MUCH! And how the room came out when totally finished? Chef’s kiss!

Above: Laying out my pattern using graph paper, then with the real tiles! Below: A happy Elody on the day we finished grouting, and then later after trim and lights were done.

TIMELAPSE VIDEOS: Here is a video compilation of some tile installation on Instagram and on Facebook.

Superhero of the Month - Tim AGAIN!

Did I choose to date this guy for his wide range of construction skills? No, but boy does it seem like I did! I did not really understand or appreciate just how broad his skill sets were until this whole project. He told me he could teach me to tile, and he did! All of the tile projects he has helped me with. Some he just got me started and I laid out and cut all the tile, but even then he still came back to help me grout. And for the fancy patterns with the Mexican tiles? For these complex floors we did the whole project together, working side by side. He had not done anything quiet like these complex patterns, and it was sometimes a mind-f*ck, but he stuck with me and they came out so beautifully! We both do not love the physical discomfort of spending a whole day kneeling over, but we both find the process and the results are so satisfying! Thank you Tim! I love you!

A lush carpet of partridgeberry glistening in an October rain.

Nature Spotlight: Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens)

The Partridgeberry is a beautiful tiny evergreen plant growing as a ground vine. It can be found all over eastern North America and has tiny white blossoms in late spring/early summer and bright red berries most of the rest of the year. At my place, it grows in huge patches, delicately carpeting the ground under the pine and hemlock trees. When blooming, the pinkish white flwoers are like a galexy of stars, and later the rich brilliant red berries dotting the surface also seem to glow in the shady understory. It is often confused with the very similar teaberry/wintergreen plant, which I also find on my property, but in much less abundance. So, I am going to teach you how to tell them apart! For more help with this identification distinction, check out this cute youtube video.

Leaf appearance: The Partridgeberry has darker green, smaller leaves with a paler yellow midrib (stripe down the center). The Teaberry has slighter larger leaves that are a more uniform green.

Berry Appearance: Both have bright red berries, but the partridgeberries have two little dots on them (they bloom in pairs of two flowers which together turn into a single berry) and teaberries have just one and are shaped like a miniature apple.

Smell and Taste: Partridgeberry leaves and fruit have very little smell or taste. Teaberry leaves and fruits smell and taste like wintergreen! Both are edible, but the partridgeberries genuinely have absolutely no taste and are usually dry and tough as well, so don’t bother!

Learn more about partridge berry here, and enjoy that close-up photo of how furry the tiny white flowers actually are!

Above: A close-up of the tiny pairs of blossoms in June. Below: the bright red partridgeberries coordinating beautifully with recently fallen autumn maple leaves.

Final Shot: 12/11/25 The sun emerges as I am walking on the edge of the frozen lake!

Sirona Falls