Call for Coops!

In support of urban farmers and locavore choices, we are excited about this new title. Submit your coop for the 2014 Calendar.

If you or someone you know has an innovative coop design in the Portland Metro area you would like featured in our 2014 Wall calendar, email images to creative@amberlotus.com.

Seeking 12 innovative, creative coops
for our 2014 City Chickens and their Coops wall calendar.

This is your opportunity to strut your stuff – and your chickens’ – and help Portland’s own Growing Gardens organization at the same time. Be one of 12 featured coops in this beautifully photographed treasure of unique coops and their feathered inhabitants. 

Submit 3 to 6 digital snapshots (500MB or smaller) of your backyard bird sanctuary to Amber Lotus at creative@amberlotus.com 
by Wednesday, May 30, 2012. Finalists will be notified June 15. 

Accepted Entries will:
• Enjoy a professional photography shoot of their coop and hens
• Be featured in the calendar
• Receive a print quality portrait of their coop for personal use
• Be awarded with six copies of the 12” x 12” calendar featuring their coop

Featured coop owners agree to:
• Be available for a two-hour professional photo shoot in late July or early August
• Provide a clean, fresh coop on the day of the shoot
• Provide a short statement about their coop and hens

All-Hallows-Eve

Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while “some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, it is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)”, derived from the Old Irish Samuin meaning “summer’s end”. Samhain was the first and by far the most important of the four quarter days in the medieval Irish and Scottish calendar and, falling on the last day of Autumn, it was a time for stock-taking and preparation for the cold winter months ahead. There was also a sense that this was the time of year when the physical and supernatural worlds were closest and magical things could happen. To ward off these spirits, the Gaels built huge, symbolically regenerative bonfires and invoked the help of the gods through animal and perhaps even human sacrifice.

The Haunted Realm - wall calendar

2012 Healing Calendar Picks

A message from the authors of Healing Mandalas wall Calendar.

“We are delighted that our 2012 calendar is at the top of Phylamena Desy’s page of picks. Thank you, Phylamena, Amber Lotus our publisher, and to the beautiful flowers that bring inspiration and healing to each month, we hope you’ll get a calendar to bless and empower 2012.”

Good cheer,
Bonnie

Healing Mandalas: Empowering Visions for the Year - Artists Bonnie Gold Bell and David Sun Todd

The Power of Now – September 2011

If you really want to know your mind, your emotion will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.
Eckhart Tolle

Now Avaiable for 2012

The Essential Rose — new 2012

The Essential Rose is one of 10 new titles in our line up this year. The International Herb Association chose the Rose as Herb of the Year™ 2012. The Essential Rose wall calendar is artfully crafted by writer and renowned gardener Ann Lovejoy. Beautiful, fragrant and delicious, roses have been a floral favorite for thousands of years. Most often associated with passion, love and beauty, roses are also one of the oldest known medicinal plants and are valued for culinary uses around the globe. Stunning photography combined with recipes and tips on cultivation, crafts and herbal remedies will enchant you all year long.

July 2011 – Vicissitudes – by Jason deCaires Taylor

Vicissitudes depicts 26 children of diverse ethnic backgrounds holding hands in a circle, representing unity and optimism. The piece took six months to make and weighs around fifteen tons.

Vicissitudes...ever changing art...by Jason deCaires Taylor

2011 Environmental Art wall calendar

As the sculptures are colonized by marine life, their human faces erode and become home to a colorful set of new inhabitants. The artist invites this process, allowing the sculptures to “engage with a vision of the
possibilities of a sustainable future, portraying human intervention as positive and affirmative.
“What I’m most interested in is the idea of change and process,” he explains. “It’s meant to mirror our lives. In the same way that children are meant to absorb their surroundings as they grow up, these under­water children will also be heavily influenced – they’ll take on the patina of their environment as they grow and change over time.”

2012 Environmental Art Wall Calendar

http://www.underwatersculpture.com/pages/gallery/vicissitudes.html

June 2011 — Today the answer is yes

Sunny June brings berries galore, from June-bearing strawberries to plump blueberries, succulent raspberries, and sweet-tart currants. Although many berries are available in grocery stores all year round, much-traveled fruit lacks the vibrant flavor and delicate texture of freshly picked, locally grown berries. Research proves what our senses know well: nutritional quality is at its height when seasonal food is eaten as soon as possible after harvest.

June 2011 - Year of Healthy Living

Members of the rose family, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries all offer valuable phytonutrients that benefit your health. Like a little valentine, heart-shaped strawberries are indeed protective of the heart, also offering anti-inflammatory effects (COX inhibition) with broad physical benefits. They may also help alleviate inflammation-related pain from disorders such as arthritis and rheumatism.
Red berries like raspberries, currants, and cranberries owe their blushing colors to anthocyanins, potent antioxidants that also fight bacterial and fungal pathogens.

Berry Tips
To preserve freshness, don’t wash berries until ready to eat them.
For best flavor, serve berries fresh and at room temperature.
Add a cupful of fresh or frozen berries to sourdough waffle or pancake batter.
For a quick and delicious dessert, serve fresh raspberries with a spritz of fresh lime juice and a little maple syrup.
Toss fresh blueberries with minced red onion, cilantro, and a splash of lime juice for a spunky side for fish or chicken.

Year of Healthy Living — June 2011
by Anne Lovejoy for Amber Lotus Publishing

Click on this Calendar
to pre-order Year of Healthy Living 2012 from Amazon.com

Environmental Art

As one of the most exciting art movements of our time, environmental art celebrates our connection to the natural world through beauty, science, metaphor and ecological restoration. It encompasses a surprising landscape of approaches from ephemeral “art in nature” sculpture designed to last only a few hours before returning to the earth, to community-based “eco-art” installations which clean up polluted watersheds and promote public understanding of local and global environmental issues.

On the cover:
VICISSITUDES by Jason de Caires Taylor
British sculptor and diver Jason de Caires Taylor brought creativity to his passion for the sea to create the world’s first underwater sculpture park of the coast of Granada, in the West Indies. Just one of several installations, “Vicissitudes” is a circle formed by the cement casts of 26 Grenadan children holding hands, that also functions as an artificial reef that provides habitat for marine life. “We’re just a moment in this chain, and nature is so powerful and incredible.” The artist adds, “you just have to be awed by it.” With nearly 60 percent of the world’s coral reefs under threat by climate change and human activity, the artist helps us care and movingly highlights our responsibility to future generations.

The Environmental Art 2011 wall calendar features fifteen projects drawn from the global archives of greenmuseum.org, a

One of the most exciting art movements of our time.

not-for-profit online museum of environmental art. They provide a sampling of some of the latest developments in this field to stimulate the imagination and promote the role of art in the creation of a more sustainable world culture.