This report was originally featured in the 2026 January issue of our newsletter, the Liminal.

I, on the other hand, was low man. While sweeping floors and cleaning some forgotten corner, I overheard a commotion. Another coworker brought me into a vast room where an enormous dog was chained under a table defending a bone. People were taking turns approaching and acting as if they were going to take his treasure. The dog would snarl, bare its teeth, and advance with wild gnashing and clanking. A large fellow approached with a leash, tried to wrangle the beast, had one of his arms mangled, and retreated. He stammered over to me in tattered clothes reminding me that I was low man, shoved the leash into my hand, and gestured towards the dog.

I was horrified. I would do it, but everyone would have to wait out me waiting it out. They agreed.

I carefully walked along the wall as close as I could get without seeming a threat, slid down, and sat. The dog didn’t notice me. I paid no attention to him. Hours passed. We could hear each other breathing. I woke inside absolute confidence.

The dream has always been to make a living off my art. My tangled and patient art. Documenting and somehow monetizing a pile of unrelated things. But how to make a mole hill from a mountain? Only related because I touched them and then stuck one of my signatures somewhere. I even stopped signing for a time.

It’s only ever made sense as a direction. The road disappeared so long ago, I can’t remember the shape of the horizon. In ruins there hides structure. Mundane tools in a garden shed. Code, SEO, system architecture… half a dozen other things in a patchwork. Fake it til you break it. Practicing is more fun than preaching anyway.

Scrub off the neglected parts before going underground again. It’s a shame too. The dogwoods are just beginning to open.

This poem was originally featured in the September 2025 issue of the Liminal.

In gardens lush, where flowers bloom,
wistful hands do play.
Cameras snap in light and gloom
to capture life’s array.

The fishing line, casts its charm,
and gentle waters flow.
Rocks and stones and earth’s strong arms,
its secrets softly show.

Aqueducts and machines construct,
purposes unseen.
And bicycle wheels, bringing near,
places blue and green.

Musical chords, painted hues,
and time’s elusive run.
In varied trades, the more they see,
yet called the Masters of None.

...in kitchens bright, great scents ignite
memories long gone...
The dabbler’s work is never complete,
still the Jack is often One.

An illustration and graphic I made together. The image is available as a t-shirt.

i love to make things. all kinds.

art things. light things. things for change and things for play. things for thinking and things for doing. things that feel good and things that feel bad.

i got an anniversary gift right before my marriage fell apart. i always liked the way the signs were spelled backwards in the hundred acre wood. Now i have a ‘ten cup’.


sometimes though, i forget little details while i make things. then i have to improvise.

right now, there is half of a poem on my desk about losing my way. it goes with a sign i made.

i’m supposed to post that poem, and then link it back to my website. but i procrastinate about my supposed to’s.

sometimes i think really hard and then make up rules for myself.

they can be healthy rules. sometimes they are unhealthy rules. i never know which kind until after i try.

sometimes i watch tv and it helps me stop thinking. it usually doesn’t last too long. recently it reminded me that i like to play when i make food.

sometimes i make things to remind me not to put my foot in my mouth.

and sometimes i remember the places i used to sleep, and then i make my bed.

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Many of the photographed pieces from this article have been featured in past issues of the Liminal.

This poem was originally featured in the first issue of the Liminal.

Read another poem…

I’ve wanted to be a musician for as long as I can remember.

There is something so elegant and transformative about art through song. And the practice and study… all in the name of playing.

I spent my teens and twenties among musicians of various stripes. Sweaty house shows in the nineties and aughts. Punk, noise, metal, electronic, folk, country… a few of them even made it through all of that to some recognition.

As for me, I can bang out several chords and roughly keep a rhythm. Never quite got the hang of singing while playing.

Never got the hang of singing at all.

In 2024, I was contacted by a woman who had seen some of my upcycled furniture in an art show.

She had an heirloom Kohler & Campbell piano, a gift to her great-grandmother from her great-grandfather on their first anniversary in 1916. She was a trained pianist and had passed on a music scholarship to get married.

Each generation afterward in that family had learned to play on this piano. It spent the next century moving from VA to New Jersey, California, PA, Seattle, & DC.

I was commissioned to turn the keyboard into a console table, giving the family’s musical legacy a new shape.

I was finally able to play an instrument.

Even if the music wasn’t the kind you can hear.

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This project was originally featured in the second issue of the Liminal.

More projects like this can be viewed in the Upcycling Gallery at foxandthistle.studio.

What do orphaned board games and repurposed picture frames have in common?

They’re sick of taking crap off of losers and players with one foot in and one foot out.

This kind of honesty typically shows up later in life.

After the puppy love of youth and the promises of tomorrow.

The conditional support that declares itself unconditional.

Too different? Fine.

Too busy? I get it.

Don’t wanna reciprocate? No problem.

There comes a point when making it known preemptively is in service to everyone.

Who has time to waste?

Do me the favor to deny me at once.

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foxandthistle.studio/pages/scrabble-and-shade

This series was originally featured in the Sept 2025 Harvest Moon issue of the Liminal.

My grandmother died the year I was married. On my thirtieth birthday, she had a stroke and became bedridden in her home. Thirteen days later, on my mother’s birthday, she passed. Inside those two weeks, her little house came alive again.

Pots clanging and screen doors slamming. Casseroles, coffee, and baked goods. Dogs. Children. Laughter. Growing up, we had gathered here like clockwork for Sunday dinner. Roast beef or turkey. Mashed potatoes. The rolls were always made from scratch. She and my great-grandmother would do their old dance, driving everyone else from the kitchen wearing aprons and waving wooden spoons. They hardly ever spoke to each other. One of them was mostly deaf. All of the kids playing games in the backyard under an enormous oak tree. The men gathering around the television. The dog stealing and defending soiled napkins.

Twenty years later, and we hadn’t skipped a beat. Same furniture. Mostly the same faces. And the same kinds of jokes. This was a place of love. My mom was still a few years away from retirement when grandma passed. The office she worked in had given our family a living plant arrangement for the funeral. It was a hoya with speckled leaves. I remember that. My soon to be mother-in-law somehow ended up taking it home and repotting it. After we were married, she gave it to us.

We spent the next decade renting a small bungalow just north of Washington, DC. The plant lived on a tall windowed cabinet I purchased from an auction. It contained cookware and liquor bottles. Over it was our wedding portrait. I arranged the long spindly vines around that picture of us. We had a dog who went from middle to old age in that house then died. Another who didn’t survive a year. We lost several babies there. Then we had a little girl. The marriage didn’t last long after that. The plant was there. It was watered. I may have wiped its leaves down once. I can’t remember. When we split, the plant came with me.

I put it high on a shelf in my bedroom. I talked to it. Thirteen years after my grandmother’s funeral, it bloomed. The flowers smelled like velvety chocolate.

Now it blooms every year. The vines continue to reach. But the roots have found their limit. And somehow through all the laughter and tears, of dinners cooked, visitors come and gone, and a thousand and one micro dramas. This plant. This witness. This companion. Should take me back to my grandmother’s kitchen.

She didn’t even have plants.

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This essay originally appeared in the 2026 Worm Moon Issue of my newsletter the Liminal.

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We’re getting awfully close to Valentine’s Day. That glorious holiday where corporate America doesn’t know what to do with itself, just after the feeding frenzy between back-to-school and Christmas.

And I know that some of you out there have been tangled up in a shitty relationship for longer than you’d care to recount or share.

Fear not! I have a poem for the occasion.

Busy with the Work
& busy with the Play.
Busy with the Others
& too busy for Today.

Busy with the Stories
& busy telling Lies.
Busy is as busy does.
I’m busy too, Goodbye!

This poem is a pointed farewell to someone who’s constantly distracted—avoiding sincerity, presence, or responsibility in a relationship. It speaks to the quiet frustration of being sidelined by a very important person who is always in motion, and always unavailable.

A blunt and poetic goodbye for those ready to reclaim their time, energy, and emotional clarity.

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Fox & Thistle Studio has this available as a small 3”x4” card on our website.

Suggested recipients include: partners or close relationships where one side has grown distant, preoccupied, or unwilling to show up honestly.

When enough is truly enough.

See this card and other original designs on our page Offhand Cards for Common Situations.

These were first featured in the July 2025 issue of our creative almanac, the Liminal.

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Where to find it? Can I thrift it?
How much to buy it? Can I lift it?
How to check it? Shall I take it?
If I don’t leave it, will I break it?

Where to keep it? How to fix it?
Shall I paint it? Should I mend it?
Can I wheel it? Should I strap it?
When I move it, shall I wrap it?

How to price it? Where to list it?
Advertise it? Frame it? Ship it?
Box it? Save it? Sell it? Cash it?
Haul it? Trade it? Store it? Trash it?

This poem was originally featured in the second issue of the Liminal as The Vortex of Questions.

More of our poems can be found on the Verses page at foxandthistle.studio

Candle snuffers have long been used to quietly extinguish flames, producing small and meaningful rituals in themselves.

Candlelight moves and breathes, revealing subtleties of the hidden reality where light and shadow meet. Modern lighting can mimic atmosphere, but it is in no way atmospheric. Changes in temperature, air pressure, and movement all affect how candlelight behaves. And dancing flames have been enchanting the human imagination in this way for millennia.

In our oldest oral traditions, stories were told by flickering light. Our heroes were mightier before a roaring fire, while beasts, devils, and demons lurked behind the darkness. Firelight allows duality. The brighter the flame, the darker the shadow. In this way, our hopes and fears were inseparable companions, and superstitions took shape around something just beyond sight.

In some cultures, blowing out a candle was considered bad luck: it might scatter wishes, blow away souls, invite unwanted spirits, or expel the protective light too abruptly. Snuffing was a safer, quieter, and more respectful method.

Even now, the tools carry the solemn memory of that care. A silver-plated snuffer, marked with subtle scratches and the soft patina of handling, holds the flame without smoke or drama.

Darkness arrives gently. Peace without light.

foxandthistle.studio/candle-snuffer

This piece originally appeared in the ‘Hothouse Flowers’ section of the October 2025 Hunter Moon issue of our monthly almanac, the Liminal.

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Fortnight literally translates to ‘fourteen nights’. This increment of time beckons from an age when the moon told us when to hunt, forage, and prepare for the seasons.

A lunar cycle takes 29.5 days, and one fortnight is very close to half of that cycle. In other words, after fourteen sunsets a new moon transforms into a full moon—and another fortnight brings the new moon back again.

Reading the heavens was once an active human skill—an essential tool. It signaled when to hunt, gather, and move. It guided migration and helped us anticipate months when resources would be plentiful or sparse. Those who could read the sky gained a distinct advantage by organizing societies, declaring festivals and wars, and coordinating trade. This was a framework for human existence, as vital as any other tool we've ever discovered or created.

But long ago, when the Gregorian calendar was being standardized, it was decided that yearly markers (like the longest and shortest day) would act as boundaries rather than midpoints to the seasons. It made our conception of the seasons arbitrary; our calendar stopped reflecting the sky and began to abstract our view of time.

If the solstices and equinoxes are instead treated as seasonal balance points, then the year can again be defined by sunlight. This restores the sense that the calendar is a map of the year instead of a series of days on a page. It charts our annual trip around the sun with a top, middle, and bottom, becoming a much more integrated orientation within our local patch of the cosmos.

Just as the solar calendar marks our seasons, our awareness of fortnights revealed to the ancients a way to track the months across the year. The rhythm between moon and sun was a dance. It revealed a pattern that shaped what was becoming our perception of time.

Viewing the entire year divided into fortnights allows us to observe the incremental changes all around us as the moon drifts across the seasons. It provides insight into celestial events such as solar and lunar eclipses, meteor showers, planetary positions, and more.

This method is especially useful for agricultural planning—tracking frost dates, bloom times, determining the best days to sow and harvest. It extends to navigation, travel, tidal movements, study and lesson planning, creative pursuits—the list goes on.

While serving the same practical functions as a traditional calendar, it also offers a more intentional approach. The Fortnight Calendar integrates with how we already tell time, but enhances our experience of it. It invites us to slow down, make room for new projects, and bring old ones to completion. But perhaps more importantly, it encourages us to live in the liminal spaces—between the doing and the done.

It gives our lives time to breathe.

Download the free 2026 Warm Arc Fortnight Calendar on our website.

Our creative almanac, the Liminal, follows the rhythm of this calendar. It is published with each new moon, and has become the structural backbone of the creative practice at Fox & Thistle Studio.

The 2026 Fortnight Calendar was originally featured in the October, 2025 issue of the Liminal.

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There are numerous accounts suggesting that the middle finger gesture originated in ancient Rome. Soldiers and gladiators reportedly used it to insult adversaries and spectators alike.

More than a thousand years later, in medieval France, the gesture evolved as a mark of contempt and mockery. French soldiers would sever the index and middle fingers of captured English longbowmen to prevent them from drawing their bows.

In response, defiant English archers would raise their remaining fingers, proudly signaling their ability to still fight back. This rebellious act eventually took root as the iconic symbol we recognize today as the middle finger.

Now, from schoolyard scuffles to roadside brawls, the gesture stands as a symbol of defiance, rebellion, and offense.

Subtle yet bold, our scrunchies hide that irreverent spirit right in your hair. Whether you're attending an event you'd rather skip or spending time with someone you'd rather not see, it's the perfect quiet protest—no words needed.

This was originally featured in the July 2025, Sturgeon Moon Cycle of the Liminal

See our full collection of Hair Scrunchies.