Our New Book


A Year Between Friends

Order Now

A Year Between Friends

3191 Miles Apart
Crafts, Recipes, Letters, and Stories

A Year Between Friends celebrates a friendship across 3191 miles, chronicling a year in our lives through photographs, recipes, crafts and stories. We are Maria Alexandra Vettese (known as MAV from Portland, Maine) and Stephanie Congdon Barnes (known as SCB from Portland, Oregon). We have been collaborating creatively for 10 years—sharing our love of photography, simple moments, and a well-lived domestic life both online and in print. A Year Between Friends was our most ambitious project yet, as we documented an entire calendar year, month-by-month, moment-by-moment. We could not anticipate what the year would bring, but simply committed to recording our everyday lives, pointing our camera lens at the light, jotting down our favorite recipes, sharing what we were making and doing, and writing each other monthly. As it turned out, life brought us some extremes of heartbreak and joy, but it was exactly these actions of chronicling our lives that sustained us and kept us connected, and A Year Between Friends is a reflection of that connection.

A celebration of friendship and creativity, A Year Between Friends features 400 photographs of our daily lives as well as over 25 handmade crafts and seasonal recipes, notes on simple living, personal stories, intimate monthly letters, and a foreword by our longtime friend and New York Times bestselling author Molly Wizenberg. Presented in a monthly format, readers will find some of our most and tried-and-true kitchen favorites as well as recipes from friends and family. Simple crafts to be stitched, knit, assembled, mixed, or thrown in the dye pot are featured throughout with an emphasis on natural and sustainable materials. Advice on simple living as well as personal stories about change, grief, and new life follow the tide of what the year brought to our lives. Forever our foundation, diptychs of our film photographs fill the pages and present our daily lives side-by-side, uniting us across the 3191 miles. It is our hope that A Year Between Friends provides both instruction and inspiration, and that you will be inspired to share it with your own faraway friend or begin to document your own life in this way.

xo,

MAV & SCB


Special Gift With All Pre-orders

It’s been a fun and long process been working on this book, and we can’t wait to share it with you! To thank all of you who preorder the book, we will be sending you an exclusive bookplate signed by both of us.! To receive a bookplate, preorder A Year Between Friends and fill in the form below. We can’t wait for you to see the book!

Fill out my online form.