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Moss & Fog Fog Signals Beautiful things, once a week. Issue 41 · The People You Love Edition |
It’s dark by five in Portland, and gift lists are starting. So we made you one, sorted by the people you love. Also this week: a wheat with seven ears on one stalk, a logo you can hear and binoculars from the Empire State Building.
● 01 · The gift guide
Who Are You Shopping For?
We’ve been quietly building this one for weeks. Instead of sorting gifts by price, our 2026 guide is sorted by the people on your list: the host who feeds everyone, the friend who turns things over to see how they were made, the one who smells good, the superfan and four more. Each gets a gift for under the tree and one that fits in a stocking.
Most of it is small batch, and some of it we make ourselves. Our geometric tray is printed in our Portland studio, about ten hours each. And every order can carry a handwritten card, on us.
Find your person● The brave dial
How brave are you feeling?
Near the top of the guide sits a little dial: Safe bet, Bit of fun, Wild card. Turn it and everyone’s picks change at once. For the design obsessed, that’s the difference between a gold-rimmed ceramic tray, a candle stacked in candy colors by Yinka Ilori, and a glowing pink light made of layered acrylic. We always end up on wild.
 | ● Our pick If we could only give one thing this year, it’s the candle light that lives on our own table. Switch it to flicker and the glow wanders low and amber like a real flame, minus the drips. The candle light, $36.50 |
● New in from England
Christmas cards, cut and pasted by hand
Jo Hadley paints, cuts and collages little paper characters in her studio in the South West of England. Her cards stand up, fold out and pull apart like crackers, and they tend to stay on the mantel long after the holidays. They just landed in the shop, from $7.
In a hurry?
We put together six gift sets ourselves, from $25, each a little under the price of its parts. See every set
A handwritten card on every order, free. Free US shipping over $75 through December, and a free Moss & Fog tote over $60. About five weeks left to order for Christmas in the US: get yours in by Tuesday, December 15. Gift cards and printables arrive by email in minutes.
● On the site this week
Everything else we loved
Blé de miracle, painted by Eugène Graff for Vilmorin-Andrieux, 1880. Public domain
● 02 · NATURE
A Farmer Found a Sack of Seeds in His Attic. They Grew Into Miracle Wheat
In the early 1990s, Claudio Grossi climbed into the attic of his farmhouse near Parma and came down with a sack of seeds nobody had ever mentioned. He scattered them on a manure pile, mostly out of curiosity, and they came up about six feet tall. Single stalks split into as many as seven ears of grain, straight out of Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis.
It turned out to be an old branched wheat with a long paper trail, and a Paris seed house painted it in 1880. A local baker who still worked dough by hand figured out the trick to the bread: barely knead it at all.
One note, seen from above. From Apple’s Made by Sound film
● 03 · DESIGN
A Logo You Can Hear
Apple has redrawn the Apple Music logo for the first time since 2015, and it wasn’t really drawn at all. Fred again.. wrote a short piece of music, each note was sent through a shallow tray of mineral oil, and cameras filmed the ripples rolling over cutouts of the wordmark.
Too many notes and the logo stopped reading entirely, so the music and the picture had to be tuned against each other. A chart-topping producer, writing for a puddle. We love it!
That silhouette has stood on overlooks since the 1930s. Photo: Tower Optical
● 04 · DESIGN
Classic Landmark Viewfinders Are Up for Sale, for a Pretty Penny
You know the shape even if you never knew the name. Tower Optical has been bolting chrome binoculars to America’s best railings since 1933, and as its fleet moves to tap-to-pay, it is restoring a few coin-era originals from the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls and the Golden Gate Bridge for private homes.
The real treasure is the handwritten shop card that ships with each one, logging every post the machine ever stood at. One machine counted 55,388 views at Top of the Rock alone. On the site, you can drop a virtual quarter and look through one yourself.
Spring, summer, fall and winter. Same house, four very different yards.
● 05 · HOME
Step Inside the Interactive Whole Earth House
Our sister site Whole Earth Home, all about healthier, greener and less wasteful homes, now files everything in a little 3D house. Turn it with a finger, lift a floor and tap any of its sixteen rooms: washing in cold lives in the laundry, the furnace filter in the utility room. Change the season and the sun moves to where it really sits over Portland. More than 120 guides now have an address!
Ittoqqortoormiit, at the mouth of Scoresby Sund, East Greenland. Photo: Annie Spratt / Unsplash
● 06 · TRAVEL
The Hardest Places on Earth to Reach
Not every gift fits in a box. Our guide to the twelve hardest places on Earth to reach lays out exactly how to get to each one, door to door, plane by boat by boot. Ittoqqortoormiit, above, is six hours from Iceland’s Keflavik airport, if every plane and helicopter connects. Tristan da Cunha takes six days by ship!
Saving up for one of them? Nomad for Less is a free newsletter of insider tips for traveling far on a small budget. Subscribing through our link sends a little our way.
● Also this week
Quick signals
07 ART
A faceless wanderer who carries the whole studio on his back. Tim Storrier won the Archibald Prize with a self-portrait you never see the sitter in.
08 COLOR
Seventeen years, sorted by blue. On the site, the page sinks from sky blue to the deep as you scroll.
09 DESIGN
A car that makes you smile back. Fiat’s tiny Multiplina brings back the 1956 Multipla’s chrome moustache.
10 FOOD
A potato that tastes like roast chicken. Ten years of breeding, sparked by a chef remembering his mother’s garden.
11 ARCHITECTURE
A tiny A-frame built around one window. A daybed in a bay of glass, in 155 square feet.
12 NATURE
The Christmas cactus grows in the clouds. And most of the ones for sale are really Thanksgiving cacti.
Free and fiercely independent since 2009. Members keep the lights on.
Become a member, from $3● Curiosities
Small wonders from around the world
● Voyager 1 is almost a light-day away. On November 18, NASA’s probe will be about 16 billion miles out, so far that a message takes a full day to reach it. Not bad for a machine that left Earth in 1977! ScienceDaily
● Dinosaur blood, 115 million years on. Inside the leg bones of Aratasaurus, a meat eater from northeastern Brazil, researchers found mineralized red blood cells still sitting in the old vessel canals. Chemical tests turned up heme, the iron-carrying part of hemoglobin. ScienceDaily
● Europe’s old forests had elephants in the meadows. For more than 20 million years, Europe was mostly scattered trees, open woodland and flowery clearings, kept open by grazing elephants, rhinos, aurochs and bison. The dense, dark forest turns out to be the newcomer. ScienceDaily
● A grinning skull in the Antarctic ice. Seen by the Landsat 9 satellite, a rocky peak, a ridge of glacial rubble and a glacier on Vega Island line up into a skull in profile. Fittingly, it seems to be staring at a spot called Devil Island. NASA via ScienceDaily
● Buildings that look like they’re falling down. A new Skira book collects five decades of SITE, the studio James Wines founded in 1970, including store showrooms that seemed to sink into the ground or split right open. Their Ghost Parking Lot in Connecticut buried twenty cars under the asphalt. Colossal
● An animated film, made in a spreadsheet. London artist Maria Tomazou made a short animation entirely inside Excel, and admits it took ages. She calls the whole project pointless, which is exactly why we love it! Colossal
● Venice’s great rescue, going online. Sixty years after the flood of November 4, 1966, UNESCO and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini are digitizing about 110,000 documents and 6,000 photographs from the long campaign to save the city. UNESCO
● A beetle comes home to Wales. The short-necked oil beetle had been missing from Wales for about 60 years. Surveyors have now found its larvae at Castlemartin in Pembrokeshire, after adults turned up there in 2025. Positive News
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 Thank you for reading, and for every order this season. Hit reply and tell us the hardest person on your list! And if a friend would love this, forward it along. Forwarded this? Get Fog Signals free |
