Greetings, dear ones and Happy Solstice! What a year. Good, bad, momentous, and often odious, the year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty-Five has swept past us and we are faced with the darkest part of our planet’s wobbling tilt cycle around the sun, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere.
Generally I love this time of year. I love the holiday parties, Christmas movies, decorating my home festively, eggnog, twinkling lights, and peppermint. I love the spirit of generosity many share, wearing big cozy sweaters, snuggling in at home and baking or visiting my family in Utah during these darkest days. This is of course juxtaposed with my business’s absolute busiest time of year.
The holidays are frantic at my little store, Bay-Made. While everyone is winding down their year, our busiest week in the entire year is the week before Christmas, and we do a full quarter or more of our sales in the month of December. And while things may feel tight economically, people are without a doubt showing up to buy local gifts, and I am grateful.
I actually appeared on our local NPR/KQED station for a live forum call earlier this month specifically based on inflation and gifting during the holidays! If you have an hour, take a listen! It was fun to have friends and family text me to tell me they heard me on NPR.
While it is at times exhausting to work in customer service, I find I do enjoy it, at least at my store for we tend to attract very kind and thoughtful customers. I love working with so many artists and neat businesses, selling their beautiful work to the people that want to support them most.
I wrap so many gifts, y’all. So. Many. I have packed thousands of gift boxes at this point, and I have wrapped thousands of gifts every holiday season for the eight years Bay-Made has been open, and for the toy store on Lakeshore for four years before that. Eleven years of complimentary gift wrapping. I have transcribed heartfelt notes onto our postcards, and once a bawdy rhyme for someone’s birthday that made me laugh aloud. I think it’s a blessing to see first hand folks’ generosity, and be some small part of that.
This year has driven home that I made the right choice, staying open. I enjoy it so much more. I have more energy. I’m making art that makes me happy to make, and conveniently have a place to sell it. The people involved in the collective are remarkable, and I’m grateful to have surrounded myself with such hardworking folk of such talent.
In Sarahjane art news: I’ve perfected my plein air gouache painting setup to fit into a hiking backpack: tripod, easel, panels, brushes, paint, and all. I’m finally painting landscapes like I have always wanted.
“Plein air”…”gouache”: huh? What are those? En plein air (pronounced “in-plain-air”) means simply to paint outside with natural lighting. Gouache (pronounced “gwah-sh”) is a water-based paint similar to watercolors that is also filled with opaque medium like chalk, known as “chalking agent”, in addition to pigment—the particles of color, and binder, the materials that give paint their solubility and body. This chalking agent makes most gouache opaque, even being able to be painted on black paper with stunning results.
In addition to oils, gouache is easily my favorite traditional painting medium, and doesn’t involve me hiking or traveling with solvents—I can leave that for my home studio. I find it satisfyingly tactile in the same way oils are, and the colors are similarly rich and pigmented. While many paint with gouache on illustration board or watercolor cotton rag paper, my favorite is to paint on gessoed board (gesso is another chalk-binder combo that is used as a paint primer for many mediums) and seal it with cold wax—it looks extremely similar to oil paints when on panel and treated this way, and is protected from moisture. Panel allows one to build and build layers of paint without risk of fibers of paper or cotton pilling or tearing, as the paint rests on top of the gesso compared to seeping in.
In September, I took a painting workshop with Mike Hernandez down in Carmel-by-the-Sea with one of my closest friends from art school, his best friend, AND his retired surgeon mom, and truly had a wonderful time. I learned new techniques and it was like a switch flipped learning how to paint rocks and surf. My friend’s mother has also since invited me to stay with her for a week in Venice this winter to paint with her, and I am taking her up on it. Life is short! Can’t wait to share my paintings from there with you.
Favorite Books I read in 2025:
While this year has not quite been as big of a read-a-thon as the last two years (a measly 64, haha), I have enjoyed some fabulous books this year. In no particular order:
Katabasis by RF Kuang - Can one have a perfect trip to hell? What if you accidentally kill your graduate advisor and need to bring him back? I absolutely loved this book.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - I read this at Halloween, and the mystery of grotesque moldy imagery side-by-side the lushness of Mexico was a creepy delight.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - I was hesitant to read this after reading Weir’s Artemis (which I truly disliked—he needs more time learning how to write interesting women where they don’t just breast boobily around), but I loved it easily as much as The Martian. I guess Weir does best when a guy gets stranded somewhere by himself. Looking forward to the film adaptation next year.
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb - This is just the first book of a sixteen book saga, and I genuinely was so sad to finish. I read other books between each installment, but I still finished all roughly 11,000 pages in four months. This series is more akin to modern fantasy epics such as A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time than anything I’ve read recently, and I was stunned I had never heard of it until I saw it available at my library. If you like big stories, this is a masterpiece.
A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon - Oh! Queer yearning, warrior matrons and queens, dragons, magic fruit, and the prequel to Priory of the Orange Tree—I think I actually enjoyed this one more than Priory.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - I picked this up on a whim from my library as well, and it tells the far future tale of humanity seeding extra-solar sentience via virus accidentally to…spiders, and what happens when humans need to land on the spider planet. Maybe don’t read if you have arachnophobia.
Swordheart by T. Kingfisher - In my mind, T. Kingfisher perfectly blends romance, horror, whimsical fantasy, and lovable characters. What if a man was trapped in an ancient sword above a mantle and stopped the woman trying to kill herself upon him by suddenly appearing? What if hijinks ensued? What if they fell in love?
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge - A classic from 1992, this book, like Children of Time, explores non-human personhood, this time in the form of dog-like multi-member packs, and how waylaid humans engage with them and interrupt machinations and politicking. Just so good.
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing - This isn’t a new book (originally published in 1959), and certainly not fiction, and I waited for this book at my library for nearly 8 months—but boy howdy was it riveting and worth the wait. Comprised of the first hand accounts of those aboard the Endurance and their ice floe misadventures in 1914, it seemed that the stakes were raised with each passing day. RIP doggies, a cat, and hundreds of penguins and seals, but still truly astounding that not a single man died.
Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson - We all know I love BrandoSando’s writing, but this is more of a deep cut that probably requires reading both the Mistborn saga and The Stormlight Archive. However if you are Cosmere literate, this was one of my favorite entries to his universe. Originally a short story following a trapper and his magic birds, the fully-fleshed novel did not disappoint. I also have the special edition printed book where some of the pages are black and printed with silver ink, to denote traversal through a different plane. It is lovely.
In addition to reading a lot this year, my first Skyrim playthrough is still going strong, I’m obsessed with Hades II, and have been dating everyone and everything in both Fields of Mistria and Date Everything! I like my games all over the place, what can I say? Though, both of those games are making my husband wonder if he is perhaps working too much.
Well, that is it for me. Happy Solstice, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year. Much love!
Sarahjane
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