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strawberry sauce

We all know the pleasures of eating strawberries and some extol their aphrodisiacal properties, but none so well as Madame Tallien. Born to the aristocracy, given six names, and raised by nuns, this strawberry lover survived a march to the guillotine, bearing the fruit (ten) of multiple lovers and husbands (including the notoriously seedy and filthy Napoleon Bonaparte), several stints in prison and all of the great political and social shifts of the late 1700s. A style maven and risk-taker throughout her life, she insisted on bathing solely in the cure-all juice of strawberries.

A Lesson in Geography and Modesty

There’s nothing like a worldly person to remind you you’re not.

When I meet Merveille Kasongo, her body language reads like one of those signs on the back of a semitruck that warn: “Stay back 200 feet.” Her arms remains locked at her sides and without smiling she looks directly at me with big dark eyes lined with lashes so thick I wonder how they could be real. My brassy American sensibilities are, of course, injured.

A Lavender Fibers Project

Words and Artwork by katherine sandoz Photography by Chia Chong  in the bowl:  hundreds of silk, cotton and linen leaves and blooms ready to be sewn and wired into abstract […]