Even though I’m stuck inside playing a neverending game of Tetris with my possessions, it just got triumphantly sunny and warm after a few too many days of early-onset May Gray. And since I’m packing up for a few months away, I kind of feel like I’m going to camp. And that means one thing: Summer is here!

As you may remember, some time ago I traveled to a faraway land to eat beef donuts, blow glass, relive some childhood textile fantasies and take a lovely unexpected holiday in Scotland on the way home. I also attended an exceptional wedding, which you can now read all about in the May issue of ID.

What began as a summer speaker series held at the studio of celebrated Finnish architect Alvar Aalto evolved into a collaboration among an all-star cast of designers—Dai Fujiwara from Issey Miyake, the Bouroullec brothers, Hella Jongerius, Louise Campbell, Ilkka Suppanen, Miguel Fluxá and Jaime Hayón of Camper—which they decided should take the symbolic form of a wedding. But then it became more than symbolic, when Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engeström, a Finnish couple who now live in San Francisco with their baby Eliel, were tipped that there was a wedding in need of a bride and groom by their friend Laura Sarvilinna. Laura, along with Päivi Jantunen, are exceptional publicists for Helsinki’s finest designers (as well as my very gracious hostesses during my visit).

You can read the entire article including some gorgeous photos of the very lucky couple, and then be sure to check out the wedding’s website for more information about the couple and the designers, appropriately named It’s a Beautiful Day.

Oh, and Bridezillas, eat your heart out: Ulla-Maaria told me she never once picked up a wedding magazine.

After recording plenty of audio interviews, my first Straight to Video production for my good friends at Core77 features the delightful Elena Manferdini and her elegant MERLETTI<inter>LACE installation at SCI-Arc. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s up until May 11 and definitely worth the trip downtown.

I shot this with my new Flip Ultra, which I highly recommend (Mac users need to install this free plug-in, but otherwise, no issues whatsoever). Still working on improving the sound quality (I’m gluing acoustic tiles to my closet walls right now) and optimizing the export from iMovie, but overall, I think it turned out great. Thanks to Elena and everyone at SCI-Arc who shot my b-roll for me. See, that’s one of the benefits of having such a cool little camera: Everyone wants to play with it!

I’ve been waiting to write about outdoor apparel company Patagonia pretty much all my life. My parents packed me in the stuff for my first ski lesson, and ever since, I ‘ve managed to stay extremely faithful to their products. Even on a beer-burrito-bagel budget at college in Boulder where crunchy detractors were more than happy to point out my preference for “Patagucci.”

So when I finally got the choice assignment from Fast Company, you could say I was a little worried about my ability to remain objective. Heck, when I went up to meet with their sustainability team in Ventura, I was wearing a Patagonia shell and carrying a Patagonia backpack. It was like wearing the band’s shirt to the concert.

Patagonia launched the Footprint Chronicles quietly last year, short web videos that track the impact of five of their products. You get introduced to the woman who’s making your polo shirt in at a factory Thailand, and peer into the eyes of the Merino sheep who’ll be sheared for your crew in New Zealand. These videos are just the latest of these epic journeys that Patagonia loves to package for their fans. And the audience loves it. After all, this is a company that provides a guide to climbing schools on their website, a series of online essays detailing a grizzly bear’s migration through Montana, and a multimedia saga of surfer-filmmaker-brothers The Malloys driving a biodiesel truck from Bend, Oregon to the tip of Baja.

The key phrase for the Footprint Chronicles, as with all corporate greening practices lately, is transparency, and Patagonia vowed to show all of their findings, the good and the bad. But there seemed to be very little bad afoot at Patagonia. Employees Jill Dumain and Jen Rapp enthusiastically took me on a tour of an organic cotton factory where we all snapped as many photos as we wanted of the sunny, spotless warehouse blasting rock music. They hosted me for a day in Patagonia’s Ventura headquarters, a series of refurbished buildings where the bathrooms show you where to toss your paper towels for composting, free on-site day care lets employees hang with their kids during breaks, and the kitchen serves homemade, mostly-organic meals like fish tacos and cabbage slaw. If you want me to be objective, you should definitely not serve me homemade, mostly-organic meals like fish tacos and cabbage slaw. With this really awesome spicy mayo.

But after extensive mayo-free research, I decided that Patagonia is probably walking the walk better than any other company out there. Their colleagues I interviewed in the industry agreed.

I guess I’d always known Patagonia was a leader for environmental issues but I don’t buy their products for those reasons. I buy them because I don’t have to buy very many of them at all. My favorite pair of Patagonia long underwear pants—the very first thing I grab when I’m going skiing—are from 1996. And they still work great.

I knew about this last week but I swore to keep my big bloggy mouth shut:  The Curbed Network, parents of two of the best blogs in LA, Curbed LA and Eater LA, has birthed yet another spin-off, Racked LA. The blog about “shopping, neighborhood stores and the retail scene of Los Angeles” soft-launched quietly last week.

At the helm is Tasha Adams, the super-talented voice behind Blackburn & Sweetzer who succeeded in making the West 3rd district feel like the coolest neighborhood in the whole city. I must say I’m looking forward to the Sartorialist-esque Street Scenes feature. Who says men in Beverly Hills can’t wear appliqué? Welcome, Tasha!