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Today greeted us with 38 degree (100 F) heat and a smoky haze over everything from all the bushfires raging around the state.
Despite this, I started to get stir crazy about 2pm from being indoors all day. I think it's because I work from home, and there's a certain amount of being at home that one can handle before becoming desperate to get out.
So I braved the heat and headed down to Fitzroy - I'd run out of bead making supplies again (I never buy enough, out of lack of conviction that my necklaces will sell as well as they have). I also wanted to pop by the Rose Street Artist's Market to look for a Christmas present for Pete and to check out Wendy June's stall full of handmade toys and other gorgeous things. Her husband is doing a bit of programming for me but i'd never met Wendy before, and both she and her stall were really, really lovely!!
Some button badges that she was selling :)
I don't think she has an online shop yet but her toys are for sale at www.modamuse.com
At least we can shop online without having to brave the elements. Yay the internet!
I just drank a blackberry beer I found at the Vic Market. So yummy, and so good after a sweltering market shop tugging my rickety trolley full of vegies around. I feel like a real Aussie now. However it has rendered me unable to work (coding flash stuff, supposedly) so I'll write here instead :)
Last weekend was super productive. I found myself awake and up just after 7am on Saturday (!!) and made use of the time producing more jewellery pieces for the Modamuse shop. I mailed this lot off yesterday:
(best viewed full size)
I hope they sell as quickly as the last lot and I haven't missed whatever it was that caused all the others to sell like hotcakes! But there's some new designs of the blue dot necklace (which really needs a better name) and some matching earrings too, so fingers crossed :)
Also, I finally got to meet my screenprinter and have a chat about printing patterns. His prices were very reasonable and should be able to print the fabric in 50cm x 65cm pieces, which is definately big enough for people to work with. So that should be happening over the next week or so, hopefully :)
Also, thanks to those who gave feedback on the pattern size. I'm going to go with my gut feeling and scale the patterns up a bit, suitable for bags and pillows and lamps and dresses and all sorts of things. Very exciting :)
Hope you're all surviving the heat/bushfires/snow wherever you are in the world :)
Madness. The modamuse shop opened this week, and has already sold three of my blue dot necklaces. I can't believe it. It's so very flattering and confidence inspiring. Thankyou to those who bought them!! I will get on to making more this weekend, and might try a few different designs :)
Meanwhile I've been inspired to really get going with printing my patterns onto fabric. Some people have been giving me some really nice feedback and prompting me to do so, so I will dilly dally no longer :)
Buuuut, first I need some advice from all you crafty people out there. What scale should I print them at??? It's a tough decision: either print them with small, tight repeats, suitable for small patchwork and craft work, or scale them up a bit so that they're suitable for bags/dresses/lamps etc. I'm also not 100% sure which ones to print in the first place. I've chosen the fairly simple 1-2 colours ones for now, but I'm not sure if they're the most appealing. Any advice/suggestions would be much appreciated. The full selection is viewable here.
I did a few test prints onto A4 to try and figure out the scale. Here's what I came up with (Ignore the colours for now):
What do you think? Too small? Too large? I will have a large area to play with, around 50cm x 80cm per print which is pretty expansive, so ... I could turn them into funky large scale repeats instead. As you can tell, I'm at a loss! Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Wow, I got a huge amount of comments on the moo cards, thanks so much! Sounds like heaps of people are going to get some made too, which is awesome! Please send me a link if you do!
I had a productive and somewhat uncharacteristically 'girly' weekend - bought a yellow summer dress, took Pete's mum and aunt out to the city (managed to get a table upstairs at the decadent Koko Black - yum!) and then somehow found myself at the Shisuiedo counter of David Jones being one of 'those' women - seated in front of a mirror having a professional well spoken lady apply stripes of foundation to my face to find the perfect colour match.
If you know me at all you'll know that this is a very un-Lara thing to do. Firstly I hate the cosmetics section of DJ's, with all it's glitz and glam and painful fluoro lights. And secondly I haven't bought foundation or any 'real' make-up in hmmm, about 8 years. But ... I admit it was nice to be pampered like that, even though I walked away with much lighter pockets :\
Anyway, onto more superficial-but-in-a-different-way things. Time this weekend not spent emptying my pockets was spent on the couch making stuffs. I'm starting to feel a bit weird posting pictures here - I have to remind myself that I'm not a show-off-ee person, but that this is just a record for myself to keep which people happen to visit - does anyone else have to do that?
Earrings made by binding glass beads onto thicker wire, using thin brass wire. I thought they looked a bit empty in the middle so drew this peacock onto polyprop and suspended it in the middle. It looks okay in the photo but was a bit too full on, plus the 'permanent' marker wasn't so permanent.
So this was the alternative, a bit more subtle.
Sunday's doodling on the couch produced these little drops, and I immediately though - ooh potential pattern! Anyway my first attempt at making them into a pattern wasn't quite right - I basically filled up the whole space with drops. But then realised that opening it up a bit and leaving random gaps looks much nicer and more organic.
♥ to pete for coming up with the colourway above :)
The end. What a rant!
Unable to focus on my work (Friday) and taking advantage of beautiful morning sun in our living room (mmm, November), I've finally photographed and put a few more items in my Etsy shop!
Speaking of, I got an email from Etsy the other day saying V2 is about to be launched. Ooh how exciting. I hope they finally do the simple, intelligent thing of stipulating US dollars next to prices rather than assuming everyone knows. Or better yet let us choose currency! Then again, beggars can't be choosers.
Oh, and last night I had a go making my blue dot necklace with white wire instead of red. It worked well. I thought the white wouldn't show up enough on skin, but I tried it on and it looked fine - yay! Looks a bit more refined/mature than the bright red.
I take all my photos on the 30x40cm top of one of Pete's speakers, because they have nice wood. It's such a small space but you can't tell ;)Aaanyway hope everyone has a great weekend!! I wonder what Melbourne weather has in store for us this time -_-
The moment has finally arrived - I've put some items up in my etsy shop!! I was motivated in part by Jessica Lim of Modamuse, who has offered to have some of my items up in the upcoming Modamuse shop. How exciting!!
So I had to take that final, scary step and decide on some prices. It's hard! Very reminiscent of trying to decide on my hourly rate for web design back when I was a newbie. I really don't want to charge too much, but don't want to undersell myself either. Each of the pieces takes at least an hour to put together including the printed packaging, so I tried to base it on that. I asked around and got a few suggestions, and sort of averaged them out. But at the end of the day I'm still charging more than a lot of people of etsy, which is a worry.
Anyway any feedback or suggestions would be much appreciated. Note that all prices on Etsy are in US dollars but they don't actually stipulate that (which is a concern amongst lots of non US sellers).
the shop is here! --> kirinco.etsy.com
stuff for sale so far :)
Hello! Hope everyone had a great weekend - it was soooo warm and sunny here, which was extra nice because Sunday was my birthday. Now I'm 25! There's something strangely significant about that number. Like it's the end of one era and start of another. I know it sounds silly, but it makes me realise that I'm not going to feel 'young' forever, and is motivating me to really try and figure out what I want to do with my creative career.
Anyway, I might be a bit quiet on the blog front over the next couple of weeks - Pete and I have taken two weeks off work to do whatever we like with. Feeling a million times more relaxed already.
Lots of jewellery making has been going on and I should be able to post photos soon. I'd like to start putting things up on Etsy but first I need to figure out if I can get away with posting things as 'Letter' post rather than 'Parcel' post. Huge price difference, but 'Letters' have to be less than 20mm thick.
Okay, time go do some chillaxing :)
Ooh excitement - I just ordered a Gocco Stamp kit for cloth! I remember reading about this kit awhile back but completely dismissing it because I couldn't see how it could be useful. But now, now that I'm trying to tile my design across fabric and paper and using my no-so-good squegee method to make prints... I can see how being able to use the in-machine "stamp" method outside of the machine would be very handy indeed. It's discontinued stock (whyyyy???) but I managed to find one Australian place that sells them. My order isn't completely confirmed yet but fingers crossed nothing goes wrong!
I wish I had more crafty stuff to post, but as it often goes my 'real' work is taking priority. But holidays + birthday are coming up soon which should provide ample time to seriously knuckle down and get that etsy shop going.
Meanwhile, some earrings WIP. Just trying to figure out a construction method that lets the flowers dangle nicely, before I make the other one:
Ohhh, I've been working way too hard this week. All my clients seem to want everything at the same time. Some of them have the weird notion that I should be working on their project and their project alone. It doesn't really work like that. And it also doesn't work in that if they take months to get back to me with content/feedback and are suddenly ready to go - I wont have been sitting around waiting for them with a nice big window of free time. But ahh well, i'll try my best to keep them happy :)
{/rant}
Anyway onto more happy things. I've been inspired by the very talented Kristen Doran to start getting some of my pattern designs out there onto *stuff*. Fabric hopefully, and maybe also gift wrap. Although with gift wrap, you really need to print sheets that are about A2 in size, which means they need to be offset printed, which isn't cost effective unless you get a large run done. Sooo, maybe I just need to prove to myself first that my stuff is saleable before embarking on that journey :)
Fabric printing however might prove to be a little more acessible. I've found a couple of places online who offer digital fabric printing services, and you can order as little as 1m for sampling! I'm just waiting to hear back on prices. Fingers crossed it's not too spenny and looks good.
It's mum's birthday coming up, so I've made her some earrings - some from scratch, the others from some old jewellery of Oma's. At the ripe age of 61 my mother has only just gotten her ears pierced. My brother brought a pair back for her from overseas not realising that she doesn't have pierced ears. Boys! So I took her to Hairhouse Warehouse to get them done :)
