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I'm quite blown away - all of my prints have sold. I got more printed today and two of those have sold already again. It's such a flattering response, and inspiring for me to keep drawing and see what happens.
In other news, my close friend bought me back these fairly lights from Thailand on request. They were insanely cheap - $6 AU, although i've seen them online selling for $25 US! I've finally got them working by having to attach an aussie power plug because it came with a thai one (which I did myself, very proudly ;).
I've been dying to blog about this since Wednesday, but Pete's camera suddenly went 'blind'. It displays black, and takes pictures of black! So i'm back to my crappy old Ixus for now - 'scuse the poor quality. Anyway, I was roaming around Mailing Rd in Canterbury the other day which is known for its old worldly shops and antiquey stores, and at the back of one antiques store i found something i'd always wanted:
It's an old printers typecase drawer - yay! Just the sort of thing you hope to find when rummaging at the back of those places. And how cute it looks with little ornamenty stuff in the compartments! For any Melbourne peeps who want one too - there's about 6 left in the store, selling for $40 each. Not bad.
Hey I have a question to ask. Does anyone know who makes the beaker/mug thing drawn below? I found it on a blog somewhere and thought it was ingenious (so much easier to hold that a useless teacup handle!) but didn't bookmark it :(
Update: It was on Sia and Bloesem's blogs - thanks Sia!! The cups are by Mokkatanten. After all this effort I should go out get some :)
I had to laugh because their stockists were located in Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam ... and Brunswick. Yep, good old Sydney Road, Brunswick, 10 mins from my apartment.
What a crazy tropical weather weekend. Pouring with rain outside but sitting with the air-con on inside. Good weather for drawing though. I had a lot of fun working on the detail of this one, and it's great when you can combine two things you love, in this case drawing and patterns :)
However, again I'm having the same old trouble with choosing colours. It's one of those abilities that can turn a mediocre piece into a good one, or a good piece into a great one...
I just completed my first ever commissioned pattern design job! It was heaps of fun. Nicole from freshly blended needed some patterns to compliment her new brand, site and packaging, and in return she's making me one of her beautiful hand bound books. I'm very excited.
What is it about collaborating with someone from the craft world that feels so much more satisfying and enjoyable than collaborating with someone from the graphic design world? The reason struck me when I was writing an email to Nicole about this very topic, and I wonder why I never conciously registered it before. The graphic design world is male dominated. The craft world is female dominated. I'm making some massive generalisations here I know, but to me the graphic design world often has a hard edge and can be quite competitive. The fact that there is so much ephasis amongst 'top' design studios on winning design awards is a testament to this. On the flip side the craft world is soft and nurturing and encouraging, and has helped me to flourish creatively.
Thinking back on the contract jobs I've done in studios around Melbourne (admittedly not that many), only one place had another female creative. Crazy.
Anyway ... /rant. Hope everyone has a great weekend and doesn't become a puddle in the heat or an icecube in the snow.
P.S. - thanks to Jem from Imagescience for mentioning my blog and website in his newsletter!!
Well, for the first time ever i've been 'tagged'! Stereoette tagged me to do '5 things'. The rules are as follows:
1. someone tags you,
2. you post five things about yourself that you haven’t already mentioned on your blog,
3. you tag people you’d like to know more about.
I tried to think of some more witty/interesting things but they'll probably come to me when I'm not thinking about it so much! Here goes:
1) I can't stand ticking clocks. When I stay over at other people's places I take the batteries out.
2) When growing up I was an avid fan of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, and the first website I ever made was a fan site about the series. I used HTML frames and thought I was so clever.
3) I once worked as one of those annoying people who hand out perfume cards at Myer. I had to wear a tight orange top that said "make someone happy" which triggered lots of oh-so-original responses from men like "you can make me happy, luv".
4) Lately at about 3 in the afternoon I jump rope for about 5 minutes and do weights.
5) I just had 9 fillings done over the last few weeks and have 1 more next week (my last, thank god). Floss, people.
Shannon, Kristen, Julie, Anna, Helen - you're next :P
Looking back on my childhood, there was a distinct trend of me jumping from one crafty pursuit to the next to the next. Mum found this a great source of amusement and birthday/christmas present ideas. One minute it'd be china painting, the next candle making, then flower pressing then fimo modelling then bead looming then soft toy making and so on.
The one thing that I did manage to stick with for a considerable amount of time was ceramics. I think i did it for about 6 years. Too small and weak to handle the wheel I just did freeform modelling - mainly dragons and wizards and castles - all that stuff I was mad about at the time.
Anyway, it's become really obvious to me (and maybe to you too) that this trend has continued into my adult life, well in the last year at least. Drawing, painting, gocco printing, jewellery design, pattern design, bookbinding ... and now I've found a new one - silver clay modelling!
Has anyone else tried Art Clay Silver before? It is awesome. It's a type of modelling clay made up of silver particles that you mould into any shape and then fire on a gas stovetop. The result is 99.9% silver. Madness. I bought myself a starter kit from The Bead Co the other week and here's the development of my first piece:
The piece still in clay form. It was quite fiddly to model and I found that I had to keep wetting the clay so it wouldn't dry out when working with it - basically it was just like working with normal clay -similar consistency and drying behaviour.
Firing the piece on the gas burner (it's covered with a mesh cage in case it explodes)
The final piece, polished up (kinda). I can't take full credit for the shape though - it's partially based on a piece of jewellery I saw somewhere that's got stuck in my head. (edit: ahh, now I know where! it was Kyo Hashimoto's work!).
It'd be awesome to be able to keep dabbling in a range of crafts as my job. I think that's why I'm so reluctant to join a studio and be boxed into one role - web designer OR graphic designer OR textile designer OR OR OR. I can't imagine a studio job that would let me do all the things I love. And I don't see myself as being particularly good at one thing over all the others. Hence I'm still working from home on my own. Lonely business but very rewarding. I imagine that there are a lot of crafters out there who face this same problem. How have you tackled it?
