In an introduction to pieces by Catherine currently hanging at Confederation Centre Art Gallery, I read this today:

Our first Island Focus shines a spotlight on the work of artist, educator and activist Catherine Miller (1963-2020).

Heretofore I’d not seen Catherine reflected posthumously like this, and it came as a something of a shock, the finality of it all, especially in the context of her work as an artist. 

“That’s all,” it says. That’s a lot. It took some of my breath away.

Curator Pan Wendt wrote a very nice introduction to the two pieces of Catherine’s work, finishing with:

Her exhibition Catherine Miller: Changing Environs, shown at Confederation Centre Art Gallery in 2013, included the work Rising Sea Level, P.E.I., five woven wall hangings that use rusting iron nails to represent the shifting terrain of Prince Edward Island in the context of climate change. In 2018, while fighting the effects of cancer, Miller embarked on a more personal project, documenting her day-to-day preoccupations and activities in hanging texts woven from cotton and silk thread. In both projects, making art became an exercise in concentrated, creative resilience in the face of overwhelming challenges.

I’d never seen the two pieces as being thematically similar, but Pan is right: she followed her work on the deeply political overwhelming challenge of climate change with deeply personal reflections on the overwhelming challenge of living with cancer.

It was indeed “concentrated, creative resilience.”

The two pieces on view are ones Catherine was particularly proud of, and ones that involved hundreds of hours of labour.

For the first, Rising Sea Level, Catherine hand-wove five panels from undyed cotton, working rusty nails into the fabric in an outline of Prince Edward Island, with the Island shrinking, due climate change, in each successive panel.

Catherine Miller Rising Sea Level, 2010; undyed cotton, hand-drawn nails, plaster. Gift of the Estate of Catherine Miller, 2024.

She auditioned many different types of nails before she found the ones that rusted as they did in her imagination.

For the second piece, Lists of Life, she stitched words over fishing net (using a dissolvable medium for initial stability).

Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

The lists are ones I recognize from the life we lived together. It’s both odd and delightful to see these  artifacts immortalized.

Some are a testament to the emotional labour she bore (labour that, more often than not, was opaque and unrecognized, both by me, and by the community around her), like this one:

Detail from Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

Others are a testament to the things she never got to do, like this one:

Detail from Catherine Miller, Lists of Life, 2018; cotton and silk thread. Combination Purchase and Gift of the artist, 2019.

Again, “that’s all.”

While the larger Together With Time exhibition will be on view until April 5, 2026, Catherine’s contributions will rotate out as part of the “Island Focus” section by the end of November. I encourage you to visit them.

(It’s fitting that this exhibition is the last to be mounted under the tenure of retiring gallery director Kevin Rice, who was  such a strong supporter of Catherine’s work).

One of the standard questions they ask at the admitting desk at Queen Elizabeth Hospital here in Charlottetown is “have you had any fall in the last three months?”

Ever since I broke my arm in July, I’ve had to answer “yes.”

What I didn’t know, until recently, was that answering yes meant that I got a special purple coloured wristband to wear in the hospital:

As it’s now been more than three months since I had that fall, today, when I went to admitting in advance of my physiotherapy appointment, I answered “no.”

This answer meant that I got the standard white wristband:

I was never consciously aware of how or whether healthcare staff change their behaviour  when they saw my purple wristband, and I certainly didn’t notice any difference today once I went over to the other side. But it’s good to know there is a system in place to provide additional support for the falling- prone, even if, as in my case, the fall was largely self-inflicted

Earlier this year, we prepared a guide for our Home Exchange guests that, among other things, points them to shops and restaurants in the area that we like. 

One recommendation is Bookmark, and when my friend Valerie was reading the guide this morning, she reminded me that I need to update the store’s address, as it has moved around the corner.

When I looked the new address up, and found that it was 111 Kent Street, my typographic brain went into creative mode. 

This afternoon I went over to the print shop, and tried my best to translate what was in my imagination into type. 

Here’s what I came up with:

I went in daunted by the task of angling the “ones” to resemble a falling stack of books, thinking I would need some specialized typographic furniture to pull this off, but I was able to do it through creative use of rectangles.

The bookmarks that resulted, printed in yellow on white card, look like this:

This was absolutely, positively not an original idea: my mother worked for many years as a librarian for Wentworth Libraries, the rural library system serving communities around Hamilton, Ontario that has since been amalgamated into the Hamilton Public Library. 

The library system’s logo was a brilliant riff on the same theme, a stylized capital W (for Wentworth) formed from books:

I love that mug: it reminds me of the tiny Carlisle Public Library, at the time located in the back of the Community Hall, where I spent so many hours as a kid (see also).

Once they dry I’ll drop the Bookmark bookmarks round 111 as a gift for the hardworking staff who just moved a bookstore.

My education as a letterpress printer was helped greatly by printing coffee bags for ROW142, the coffee shop up the street from the print shop. Our arrangement was simple: I printed the bags, they plied me with great  coffee.

There is no greater printing education than figuring out all the fiddly bits of printing a complicated coffee bag with multiple thicknesses. And then figuring out how to do that reliably over and over. I loved it. And I learned so much.

When ROW142 was about to give way to what is now Receiver Coffee, moving just up the street, I memorialized the move in a special limited edition coffee bag. 

Receiver posted this lovely tribute to that bag, and the move that begat it, on Facebook earlier this week:

You may have noticed a new piece of art hanging behind our counter on Victoria Row:

“WALK THIRTY NINE STEPS.”
Peter Rukavina, 2014

At first glance, it might look like just a framed coffee bag. For us, and perhaps for some of you, it’s much more than that. This piece was part of a very limited run of hand-pressed bags created by local artist and printmaker Peter Rukavina in late May and early June of 2014.

Peter had been designing and printing bags for us back in the PRE-ceiver days. So when we made the move down the street to open our very first Receiver Coffee location on Victoria Row, he marked the occasion with this thoughtful, conceptual piece.

The phrase “WALK THIRTY NINE STEPS” isn’t just a literal nod to the short distance we moved—it’s a subtle metaphor for progress, belief, and the small but meaningful steps it takes to turn an idea into something real. It reflects both our physical journey and the emotional one: the leap of faith it took to open our doors, and the creative energy that continues to drive us.

To our team, this piece is a daily reminder of where we started, what we believed in, and how far a bit of passion and persistence can go. And while it may have originated as functional design, we think it stands on its own as a quiet, beautiful work of art.

We hope it speaks to you as much as it does to us. Sometimes, the simplest works carry the greatest meaning.

Back at you, coffee friends: we were there together, at the beginning of our respective crafts, and we’ve both come a long way. Thank you for the tip of the hat.

This is a story about how I designed and printed a postcard that illustrates typographic ligatures. I will mail you one.

Lisa and I were browsing the printmaking section of the Mount Allision University Library in Sackville a few months ago, and I came across a reproduction of Ligatures, by British artist Stephen Hoare:

Ligatures in typography are when two letters are combined into a single character so as to improve spacing. 

One frequent candidate for “ligaturing” is the lower-case f. For example, here’s the word “wifi,” in Futura Bold, on the left without a ligature, and on the right with “fi” as a ligature:

Longtime readers will know that I love ligatures: they are the Kaliningrad of typography, one I first became enamoured of in 2009 when I came across the book Typologia by Goudy in a Copenhagen library. I returned to the book in 2015, when I wrote about the discretionary ligatures in Goudy’s University of California Old Style.

Seeing Stephen Hoare’s work prompted me to want to take my own ligatures out for a ride: I acquired a font of Futura Bold from Letterpress Things in 2015, complete with ligatures for ff, fl, ft, and fi. I set about making a postcard that both used them and illustrated their function.

This was my first typesetting and printing job since I broke my elbow; until this week I wasn’t certain I could lift the chase into the press; turns out that I’ve regained enough strength and range of motion to do just that.

The design I settled on shows the non-ligatured version of each letter combination, their combination into ligatures, and words that include the ligatures:

Mail Me a Postcard

I’ll happily pop a postcard in the mail to any reader who would like one: just email me your postal mailing address, and I’ll send you one “naked” as a bona fide postcard.

I have largely been away from creative work for the last 3 months, as my broken elbow made working with my hands variously impossible, difficult, or uncomfortable. But I’m building range and strength, and so I went to the studio today for a quick project, just to dip my toes in creative waters.

I took a print experiment by Lisa and her friend Tessa from the discard pile and bound it into a vertical notebook:

I discovered that bookbinding—cutting, folding, sewing—takes more strength than I imagined. I did it, but it took my right arm to its current limits.

The bookbinding was a little rough around the edges, but, boy oh boy, was it good to be back.

City of Charlottetown Tree #9301, the sugar maple in front of our house, is nine years old this year. And, this autumn season, it is in fine form:

For comparison, here’s the tree on the day it was planted, in June 2016:

Charlottetown’s own Nancy White released her album Stickers on Fruit in 2002. From the title track:

Stickers on the berries, the red and the blue
And of course they put stickers on the vegetables too
Well call me thick and call me lazy
But dealing with the stickers has made me crazy

Stickers on fruit
Stickers on fruit!
God, I hate those stickers on fruit!
Take me away to the institute
Where I won’t have to deal with stickers on fruit!

I bought some oranges at Sobeys the other day; sure enough, every orange had a 4012 sticker on it, a number I had to type into the self-checkout machine when I checked out.

I wondered, unpacking the oranges, who assigns these numbers? Is it Jeff Jenkins? Sobeys? The government?

Who assigns these numbers is the International Federation for Produce Standards:

IFPS is composed of national produce associations from around the globe. The long-term objective of the federation is to improve the supply chain efficiency of the fresh produce industry through developing, implementing and managing harmonised international standards.

In the IFPS system, number 4012 is the record number for large navel oranges (4013 is the code for small navel oranges, 3107 is the code for medium ones).

From the IFPS User Guide (a fascinating read if you like reading about standards and labelling schemes):

What is a Price Look-Up (PLU) code?

IFPS PLU codes are 4 or 5 digit numbers which have been used by supermarkets since 1990 to make check-out and inventory control easier, faster, and more accurate. They ensure that the correct price is paid by consumers by removing the need for cashiers to identify the product; e.g., whether or not it is conventionally or organically grown. They are primarily assigned to identify individual bulk fresh produce (and related items such as nuts and herbs) and will appear on a small sticker applied to the individual piece of fresh produce. The IFPS PLU number identifies produce items based upon various attributes which can include the commodity, the variety, the growing methodology (e.g. organic) and the size group.

The 4-digit IFPS PLU codes for produce are assigned randomly within a series of numbers within the 3000 and 4000 series. The 4-digit codes are for conventionally grown produce. The prefix of ‘9’ would be placed in front of the 4-digit conventionally grown code for organic produce. In the future, the IFPS will begin assigning IFPS PLU codes utilizing the 83000 and 84000 series; however, unlike the “9”, the leading digit “8” will have no significance.

The Canadian member of the IFPS is the Canadian Produce Marketing Association.

PLU Finder is a nice little website that wraps some helpful consumer information around each PLU code. For large navel oranges, for example:

Fish tacos are $6 at Fin Folk Food in Tracadie every Tuesday. 

They are very good.

And very popular; here’s the parking lot at supper time yesterday:

Not only are the tacos very good, but the view is even better:

Lord knows I’ve had my disagreements with Mr. Banks, the proprietor, over the years. But it’s hard to argue with what he’s created here.

Justin Vernon and Jim-E Stack dig in deep on the Bon Iver album SABLE fABLE for BBC6. It’s a masterclass in modern music producing.