Mountaineer Day and New T-Shirts

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The last email that went out to JustZen’s customers and fans…

I might have mentioned it once or twice (or 100) times that part of JustZen’s operation – the corporate head-quarters – are up in the mountains high above Los Angeles. But don’t think of shiny chrome and glass sky-scrapers when you hear ‘corporate head-quarters’ – we are a very small mountain community of about 5000 and the highest things around here are the mountains.
Little bit of completely irrelevant trivia: we are at 5980 feet elevation which makes it just a bit over a foot per person 🙂
So, but why do I tell you this? This weekend, leading up to the forth of July, we have the Mountaineer days here in town with a fair and carnival, lots of food vendor and the whole town is in a festive mood.
This is the first time we take the opportunity to show our town that we exist and what we have to offer.
In order to have something new for the summer, we worked hard to get our new item – flared t-shirts with cap sleeves – ready.
And we even managed to get quite a few ready for the web site, so that not only Wrightwood can have them.
So, here’s how they look…


We sure hope you like them – we do  🙂
You can either click on the image above to get to the page for all our t-shirts (including the men’s t-shirts) or, as usual, you can View all New Items we added since the last update.
So, if you are in the greater Los Angeles area, it might be a good opportunity to learn about this little gem in the mountains. If you are a skier or snow-boarder in this area, I am sure you know about it – Mountain High is just around the corner.

Cheers,
Merlin

PS: If you should manage to come up, swing by Gigi’s booth and tell her I sent you, I might get some nice treat later for dinner.

Summer Scarves – Really? Scarves in Summer?

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Bringing ice cream to the Eskimos?

Hiring the fox to guard the chicken?

Offering scarves with the summer right around the corner?

All that seems to be pretty silly, right? But then again, there are the summer evenings, or a cruise to Alaska, or many other occasions we can imagine where having an accessory like one of our amazing scarves handy might come in – – – well – – – handy.

Let me first show you what we are talking about…

Aren’t these absolutely cool? Obviously the neck is not the only place where they can go, think of your waist worn as a belt, and maybe a bandana, if you find yourself at the beach and you happen to have one of these with you – – OK, how likely is that to happen?

Anyway, you get my drift – and considering that Mother’s Day is coming any moment now, I better leave you alone so that you can go and find one – or a few – of those summer scarves – – – – – – – –  silly – scarves in summer?!

Cheers,
Merlin

PS: Gigi will be in Moscow this weekend. No, not the on in Russia, the one in Idaho – at the Renaissance Fair.

Hanky Hem Skirts in Gauze Cotton

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Merlin here from JustZen, with a deep philosphical thought from my son (who is now starting to make his mark on twitter):

If the world ends in 2012, would school all be for nothing?

Fortunately I don’t buy into all those doom-sayers (and youngens who don’t want to do their school work) – my experience being that I lived through the Y2K without a scratch – and that means that we are making more amazing new mudmee tie-dye items.

This time I want to announce a new item we added to our line – a Hanky-Hem Skirt.

These are unusual in that we started with an eight-piece segmented skirt with each of these segments in a bit different color and then we did our mudmee tie-dye magic and transformed them into something you have probably never seen before – like this…

or, to take a closer look at one of them…

and if you like what you see, head over to the page for these mudmee Hanky Hem Skirts and get one (or a few) for yourself – – –

and let me know if you have some deeply philosophical thoughts yourself that I could pass on to my son 🙂

Hammer Pants

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Merlin here from JustZen, with just a quick note that we are adding a new type of pants to our line:

Liberating Hammer Pants!

For now we have just a few to find out how you like them. So, if we get overwhelmed with orders we will have to get busy and make more, more, more.
Here are a few of those pants

and if you like what you see, head over to the page for the Hammer Pants and chose one for yourself.

Cheers,
Merlin

PS: Gigi has a very big trip ahead of her – she will go up to Idaho, so if you are in that neck of the woods you might be able to meet her. Details coming up soon.

99 New Mudmee Tie-Dye Skirts

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Even though we at the JustZen corporate headquarters are located in Southern California, we nevertheless are expecting heavy snow this coming weekend (we are high up in the mountains) and so we thought we just show off all the wonderful new skirts we just added to JustZen.com before we all get snowed in and lose power.

So, hold on to your chair, you have half a second for each skirt – and there will be a test later on…

One Giant Jack Fruit

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Have you ever seen a jack-fruit that big?

OK, maybe there is a bit of exaggeration built-in.

But in reality, this beast was somewhere between 20 and 30 pounds and getting started breaking it open was not an easy task. But we finally got it cut in half and then we started, under the watchful eye of jackfruit-master Gigi to dissect it and learn what is edible and what better to discard.

There is a lot of waste and this video gives you some idea on what work we had to do to get to the good part…

The yield of one half of the jackfruit looked like this:

One bowl of fruit

and something for either cooking in salt water or maybe – it’s worth a try – roasting…

A smaller bowl of jackfruit seeds – supposed to be nutty

Season’s Greetings

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With great appreciating for all of you who made our Wearable Art Tie-Dye such a big success, we are grateful that you gave us the opportunity to create something that we like to do and you like to have. We are specifically thankful that this also allows us to support our foster children in the developing world.

Thank you,
Merlin, Gigi and Zen

Tie-Dye and Hair

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There was an opportunity to close the loop!

Tie-dye is, to some degree, synonymous with hippies. But what other characteristic is unavoidable connected with hippies? Long hair, of course!

And here we are at the musical ‘Hair’ – a musical icon for the hippie era. Your’s truly, growing up in the 70s certainly had the album  (on vinyl – remember those big 30cm black disks with grooves on them which stored the music?) as well as long hair to know what it was like.

And I even met and became friends with the guy who played the main role in the German stage production – so – I am connected!

Now, that we are running JustZen.com, with a type of tie-dye we often call tie-dye 2.0, we connect with quite a few hippies of those days.

Last week we got an order from Pat for a hoodie and a shirt with the question if we can manage to get this out in time to be worn at a stage production of – – – HAIR!

Certainly we made that happen – we just had to, and Pat promised to send pictures. Pat reported that the show has been excellent and that pictures were coming – and – today – we got one – she and her granddaughter at the San Francisco state show of Hair.

Thanks, Pat!

And this picture also goes into our ‘customer gallery’ – in case you don’t know – once we have filled up a gallery with 50 images, we have a raffle for all those who are in that gallery.

UPDATE: Pat sent another picture from her phone…

Colder Weather – New Hoodies

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… drum roll … with some good news!

We finally managed to get some new items ready and will start adding them to the web site. The first of those are hoodies – just in time for the colder weather that we even notice in Southern California.

I want to try something new with this email and show you a few actual new jackets – with direct links to the item on our site, in case you are interested.

I am aware of the problem and want to point that out – you know that each item I show is a one-of-a-kind. That means that it might not be there any more when somebody else came by earlier and put it into his or her shopping cart. But not to dispair, there are more to chose from, these few are just a sample to wet your appetite.

Without any further ado…

Red Hoodie in Size Medium

Purple Hoodie in Size Medium

Turquoise Hoodie in Size Large

If none of those fits the bill you can look at All Our Hoodies, and then select the size you need from the selection box right there at the top of the screen. Then click ‘Search’ and we will show you all the hoodies in your size we have available.

And that’s all for today – be mighty!

Oh, yes… just not to be misunderstood – hoodies are getting all the attention because we added new ones – but there are my more – and different – things to be discovered – just start at the top…

Nomad Artists

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I can imagine that many artists like nothing better than creating their art without being bothered to do anything else. The ideas situation is that connoisseurs of their art come to them with a pocket full of money and leave most of that with the artist when they leave.

Unfortunately this ideal situation is often no met in the so-called real world. Artists often have to find those who appreciate what they create, and some have decided to become nomads to accomplish to do just that.

At JustZen we have taken a two-pronged approach to show you what we have to offer: There is, one, the JustZen website with the potential reach of the whole world, but also, two, to reach out and physically go out and meet people. Yours truly has mostly taken job number one, and Gigi has become the nomad to travel.

Once in a while this author is allowed to leave the keyboard and go out and see the world as well. This was the case when Mammoth Lake had its Festival of the Arts this just past labor day. It was decided that this long trip and the hotel was not to be wasted for only one person and one purpose, but that webmaster and junior staff would go as well and that the trip would be expanded a bit to see the sights.

The setting of the festival was in a beautiful wooded park and nomadic artists from all over the area congregated. These nomads are a not so very big group of special people and after a few years of traveling to diverse art festivals and shows, the faces you see become familiar, and friendships develop.

Setting up starts the big buzz, people are busy preparing for the show and putting their best foot forward – then the day or days of the actual fair with lots of talking, demonstrating and selling.

Once the last visitor to the show has left, the festival is over and a very unusual mix of feelings and emotions spreads throughout the grounds of the show. You can feel excitement of some who had a very good show, some with not so good mood who wished they had done better but overall there is a feeling of comradery and togetherness. Yet there is also a bit of a feeling of emptiness and loss, as it’s all done now and this shared experience is over.

Cars a brought in, replacing the crowd of visitors and all the pieces of art that did not find a new owner are packed up.

Some of the artists are amazingly fast with their break-down and so the festival site clears out more and more. Some, with more elaborate displays, need a lot more time to pack up, disassembling displays and folding down canopies.

Gigi with all her many items from mudmee hoodies to hairbands is often one of the late completions but this time junior staff was there to help and here we see that the canopy is already packed up – one of the last items to get into the nomad’s wagon – while other artists are still packing.

Packing has become an art in itself, a honed skill over many festivals, to efficiently and effectively stow everything in a vehicle as small as possible. Here are the last items to fit into the last crevices of the wagon.

The next day was ‘reward’ day. Yosemite is less than an hour drive away from Mammoth Lakes and it was the destination. First was a stop at Mono Lake and then it was into the park – and a beautiful park it is.

But in the next picture you can see that Gigi just has to have a task – here she made sure that these two rocks remained separated. The author was not quite sure why that was important, but it was something that Gigi thought was necessary. Also notice that Gigi does not wear Mudmee Tie-dye all the time.

Before you may go back to your scheduled activities, one more visual impression from one of the most amazing lakes at Yosemite at over nine thousand feet elevation showing yours truly and the junior staff.

Since getting back from that trip we have been busy again and added plenty of new buddha bags to the web site – over 70 to be exact – so, if you have been waiting for the right one to come up on site – it’s time to take a look.

Gigi went onto her biggest trip ever and is – a the time of this writing – September 24 – in Idaho. Last week in Boise and this week at the Thousand Springs Festival of the Arts in Wendell. Her booth number is 18 – in case you are in that neck of the woods.