As much as I love that I'm required to take a class on 20th-century design, it's hard to sit in a dark lecture room while the weather's so lovely outside. So I was getting a little antsy those last few weeks at school, and the doodles, which had been politely hanging out in the margins for most of the semester, started to take over my notebook. At first it was just thumbnails of the slides - lots of mini floating chairs and tiny, grumpy architects - and then everyone around me. So these are a few of my friends paying attention in class when I wasn't.

When I knew that I would actually be moving to New York, and when I found my place in Brooklyn, and when I first saw my fire escape, I imagined it in the spring with a window box of flowers and herbs.

I spent Monday in the library leafing through Vogues from 1925 - another fun research project! - so my brain's full of flappers.

Patience or Fortitude.

I’ve been doing some research at the New York Public Library for a professor. Tracking down centuries-old newspapers, letters by American Revolutionary War heroes and articles about occult-sounding medical treatments has me feeling a little like Indiana Jones. Or some intrepid woman anthropologist…It doesn’t hurt that the building is incredible, with its maze of rooms filled with masses and masses of cloth-bound books, its spiral staircases leading to narrow balconies and cat-walks, its huge reading rooms with coffered ceilings that make you feel impossibly tiny but somehow cozy. Also, the place is guarded by two lions.

I ate a quick lunch on the steps, and drew even quicker sketches. One of them's looking a little more like a collie than a lion...

Day Trip: Barcelona Pavilion

but, man, I wish I could draw like Kate Beaton...