hummingbirds

A friend/colleague of mine recently launched Stick Meon - a range of very cute removable vinyl decals. I'm not supposed to post about it till she updates her website with funky new product photography (some of which is courtesy of Auntie Cookie's pretty house) but I couldn't resist after putting up a little freebie she gave me:


Hummingbirds decals by Stick Meon



It's times like these I really wish I had a 'proper' camera. These shots could look sooooo much better.

front door

Another house themed drawing. This is how I picture the front door of my dream home looking:



I'm not such a big fan of this drawing because the colouring in is a little cartooney... but ahh well - give me that front door, those window boxes and that grey kitty any time :)

little village

Mmmm, I love long weekends. Especially when I have time to do some drawings. I haven't drawn in ages, and at the moment all I seem to be able to do is draw houses and bits of houses. I am a bit obsessed.


Sia's Little Village

I named this one for a lovely someone who likes anything with houses on it :)

It's not intended to be fabric, I just love that texture in the background of basically anything :)

bits & pieces

not much to blog about this week... my hunt for the perfect base cloth has been a series of ups and downs, but I got a phone call yesterday with much potential... so I'm excited. More on that soon.

Meanwhile some cool stuff to look at:

- Imelda has found an awesome Japanese fabric/homewares/zakka shop called Cocca. Check it out.

- Bianca has just released some cute notepads and stationery sets that you can buy here.

- And last but not least, Danielle from Of Paper & Thread has joined our 'yardage mafia' and has just released her first batch of hand screen printed yardage - yay :)

A token photo:

My more-colourful-than-usual desk. With Salsa the cutie keeping guard.

P.S. - Lots of Bulokku fabric is still available in the shop!

Couldn't resist...

I know it's borderline narcissistic of me, but I couldn't resist purchasing this gorgeous Peg Bear Salsa from Jhoanna of One Red Robin. It is just tooooo cute!! He will sit in my office and keep me company. I hope she makes some more of these cuties!!


Peg Bear by One Red Robin

Hey come to think of it, he makes a great form of advertising for my next shop update! I have a couple of rolls of bulokku in robins egg and burnt orange that I've been meaning to put up for ages now. I just wanted to get the new shop 'broken in' first. So the next update will be this Thursday at 9:00am Melbourne time!

Thanks to everyone who bought some of the fabric mix packs and also gave me some critical feedback on the new shop. I've now included a 'sold items' section like on etsy so people can see what they've missed. Any other suggestions - keep them coming!

xo

Good mail day

Often I find myself compulsively checking the mailbox 2 or 3 times a day. Even when I know it's too early for the postie to have come, or impossible for him to have come between then and the last time I checked.

But today when I got back home (after putting in my first ever pair of contact lenses - OMG so good!) I was finally rewarded with some much anticipated exciting mail:


These gorgeous prints from the yumi yumi etsy shop. Much much better in person - I need a better camera!!


Some much awaited swatches from www.pickhemp.com. Piles and piles of beautiful hemp/linen/organic cotton based fabric swatches. And decent prices too! Only problem is that the shipping costs might really blow the price out. Just waiting to hear back on that now. Fingers crossed!!

new homes

Firstly I just want to say a quick thank you to everyone for their lovely comments about house hunting. I feel heaps better about it today and we're back on the prowl. Meanwhile I'm having a great time focussing on my new internet patch o dirt: the new shop! Which I can now reveal the ever so secret location of:

www.laracameron.com/shop

I bet that wasn't too hard to figure out. I fact one clever chicken already did, and has signed herself up for a customer account already. So get in quick before she buys up the whole lot! hehe.

New shop & fabric mix packs ahoy!

Tomorrow morning is the launch of my new shop! I've done a bunch of testing, tried to break it in every which way, and so far so good! The main thing I was concerned about was two people trying to order the same thing simultaneously, like what used to happen on Etsy. And sure enough, the shop software would actually let two people check out the same single item at the same time! Gawd that was a recipe for disaster, so I've changed the code to fix that.



Anyway it'll be just a small launch tomorrow with a bunch of fabric mix packs. The shop will open at 9:00am and I will do a post here to tell you the URL :)

emotional rollercoaster

I'm feeling really bummed. I just found out we missed out on the place we liked. Only one party put in an offer higher than ours. I didn't realise how much I'd pinned my hopes on it till now that I'm feeling really really crappy. It didn't feel like this the last time we missed out on a place because we knew it really wasn't right - that time we felt relief.

I should look on the bright side - that we're actually in a position to be looking. But I just want that home, a place I can do things to, paint, change light fittings, nail things to walls. And floorboards. How much I desperately want a space with floorboards.

Okay, time to go gather some perspective. This zeitgeist movie/documentary is good for that. You definitely must watch it (trust me, once you get past the intro it gets very good - in fact you really need to watch the whole thing to get their point).

movin' shop

I've been a bit quiet on the blog front this week. First week post holidays has found me right back into the swing of things, and feeling guilty about a lot of unreplied emails. Sorry to anyone who is waiting for me to get back to you - I will do so soon!!

During work hours I've been doing some contract work for another studio (which I rarely do these days), but outside of work hours I've been doin' some other exciting things, one of which is building myself a new online shop!

Yes, Etsy - you have been a good friend to me ... I wouldn't have been able to do any of it without you ... but frankly I'm sending you way too much money each month, and your friend PayPal too, who charges me whatever they like to convert from USD to AUD. No more! I'm, going to love having full control over the design of my shop, not having to pay any fees, and best of all be able to list in AUD.

The other exciting thing that's been going on is more house hunting! We found another place we like and put in our offer (it was a silent auction type thing) on Saturday. We find out on Monday. I just have a feeling we might get it, because when i said to the agent "we'd be happy to let it go if it went for more than that" she replied (possibly off guard) "oh the vendor would be ecstatic if it went for more than that!" Okay time to stop thinking about it and exercise detachment...

On a non money related topic, here's a token photo to go with this post:


Some embroidery hoop fabric swatches I put up on my wall a few months ago. Yay for 3M hooks!

purse v 2.0

Despite the fiddliness of attaching the frame last time, I really enjoyed making the Japanese kit purse so decided to make another with some of my own fabric:



Thanks to the lovely commenter Michaela who directed me to this tute, I discovered that you can also attach purse frames with fabric glue. Which sounds messy and disastrous, but really turned out to be quite easy. Especially with aid of UHU all purpose adhesive, which is jelly like and quite forgiving in the early stages (eg you can shift the fabric around and wipe the glue off easily before it sets).



If I can get my hands on some good purse frames here (I bought the one above in Nagoya and it's much slimmer than any I've found online), maybe I'll put together some kits. With fabric, interlining, purse frame, pattern and instructions... what do you think?

little book & linen

Check out this gorgeous little book that Pete's mum made for me for Christmas. It reminds me of something straight out of a Japanese craft book - that sort of sweet, neutral & natural aesthetic that they've got going on lately:



The little thumbnails don't do it justice, so click to see a larger version and all the little handmade pieces inside (including "pilot Pete" as a little bub, hehe).

Kind of reminds me of this gorgeous Japanese linen site.

Speaking of, it looks like I'm back on the hunt to find another good supplier of linen/cotton linen. I love the linen I've been printing on recently, but my supplier has run out of the lighter, cream coloured one (used for Bulokku). It's really hard to find decent, natural looking linen. I want something with a nice slub in it and natural colouring... rather than all even, mass-produced looking and bleached/dyed. Hmm....

Hello 2008

Hello 2008. I'm looking forward to seeing what you have in store for me this year. I've been doing a lot of thinking and I reckon I'm definitely going to keep growing the textile production side of my business. Get into production of homewares etc and see how it goes. I've found someone who can possibly do sewing for me, and that is very, very exciting :)

It feels like forever though that I've had time to sit down and actually create some new designs. The last few days have been quiet, so I've had a chance to play around with some of the ideas that have been stuck in my head. I'm not 100% on all of them yet, but it was fun to sit down and play again:








UPDATE: just replaced this last pattern with the above - much better :)