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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?
I had a fantasic christmas. A great day with my family, which included a Skype session with my brother's family in the States, sitting in our respective living rooms opening presents in front of a TV eqipped with a webcam - it worked surprisingly well :)
I received lots of gorgeous thoughtful presents from my boy, and from my folks I received the classic Breville Wizz that almost everybody's mum had whilst growing up and which has barely changed in design over the last 20 years (i see that as a good sign). We made pasta dough with it and used our pasta maker for the first time. Home made pasta is oh my god ... sooooo, so good! I think I will be getting right into it and this could become a pasta making blog, hehe.
I am now also the proud owner of lots of great craft/melbourne/design books, including Handmade in Melbourne, and guess who I found inside! What a nice surprise and now I can put faces to the names - congrats girls!!
Back tomorrow-ish with more - hope you're all having a great break!! :)
This is why I love Christmas:
Yeah I know, I'm supposed to say that I love Christmas for all the family togetherness and sharing (which I do) but what I really, really love is the look of a pile of presents all wrapped up pretty and under the tree. I love gift wrapping. I love buying lots of little things for people as an excuse to wrap them all up individually. So much fun.
Shannon has a great post on her blog where she sums up all her achievments from 2006. It's such a good thing to do - to look back over the year and see how far you've come.
I'm not usually one to be very realistic about my own achievments, but when I look back myself I can see a massive difference between the Lara today and the Lara one year ago. A year ago, I had very little confidence in myself and my work. A year ago, I didn't draw. I didn't make & sell jewellery, and didn't even make patterns. Oh, and I didn't have a Gocco, either! Earlier this year I was really struggling to work from home on my own, emotionally. It's still hard, but heaps easier than it used to be.
And here's the part that I'm hearing echoed all over blogland at the moment - I'd like to send out a huge thankyou to all of you who have been reading and supporting and inspiring me along the way. It's really made a world of difference. I don't think I would have pursued any of it (esp. jewellery design and pattern making) if it wasn't for all your encouragement.
Have a fantastic Christmas everybody and see you in 2007.
Although I've done some weird and wonderful things with my Gocco, i've never actually done a plain old proper run of cards. So I decided to Gocco print my xmas cards this year, but they were a bit of a disaster colour wise.
The problem all started when I absent mindedly squeezed out too much blue ink onto the mixing palette. Not wanting to waste it I tried to make a green out of it anyway by adding not-enough-yellow. The end result being that really gross middle-green colour that looks completely boring coupled with plain old red. See below left:
The project was partly rescued by scraping off all the ink, mixing it together to form a muddled greeny brown colour, and printing the design 1 colour:
Oh, it's supposed to be a partidge in a pear tree... if it's not obvious :)
As the title of this post suggests, not all my printing experienced this week have been woeful. Sometimes it's better to leave things to the professionals, like my favourite printers ImageScience, who specialise in high quality inkjet prints onto lovely archival cotton papers and canvas (and happen to be across the road!).
I had a bit of leftover canvas real-estate from another job with which I printed these:
I'm thinking of putting them up on Etsy and seeing how they go. I have no idea how much I'd try to sell them for though. They're 11cm x 16cm plus the white border. Any suggestions welcome!!
Well, that's all from me for now. Hope everyone is on top of their xmas shopping and not too stressed out, and I hope you all have a fantastic christmas and new year!! I'll be back in the new year hopefully with some new patterns and projects and fun stuffs! xo
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!
If you're in Melbourne and looking for a filing cabinet, go past those outrageously priced office furniture stores and straight to Dallas Trading on Macaulay Rd, North Melb. We got an awesome solid metal ex-office one for only $80,and she aint half bad looking either. And she has wheels!
They have some other antiquey furniture numbers too, like these cute little nested tables we scored for $80 also!
Craft: magazine is awesome - arrived in the mail yesterday! I'm not sure if i'll actually make anything from this issue (although they do have a good screenprinting tute) ... but somehow just having it makes me feel more connected to this otherwise intangible online world.
Bad skin? Flaxseed oil! Well it's certainly working for me. I started taking it a few weeks ago and I can definately see differences. A smoother complexion and no little breakouts. I went through roaccutane crap-ness back in my teenage years so this. is. sooo. nice.
Meanwhile, keeping sane under work pressure with a bit more drawing practice. Nothing too speccy but it's fun to play around:
Well I think I'm over my little slump. I blame the weather. I know, a bit of rain is supposed to be a good thing, but I'm a warm weather creature.
Thanks for the nice comments on the little pics - glad nobody else thought they were as unoriginal as I did. But then again who's going to post a comment saying "yeah you're right, these suck". I quite enjoyed drawing the maple leaves though - it's fun when you learn to draw a new thing, so I had the idea for the painting below. It didn't turn out quite right - it's a little obscure I'm thinking and missing the details that make it immediately obvious that she's lying on the ground covered with leaves.
I had a bit of a breakthrough with my drawing this weekend (at least I think so). I've always found drawing people a little difficult - mine are always lack character and the proportions are all wrong. But this time I tried something a little different - drawing them in their underwear first :) This made things so much easier. I could focus on the body shapes and positions first, and then add clothes later ... or not at all. Who needs clothes when it's a warm spring day and you have apple print undies?
oh oh, in the midst of being a sad-sack i forgot to mention something - some recent talented people I have a-stumbled upon who you should check out:
Julie Knoblock - very talented illustrator and all round crafty person, based in Melbourne too - yay! And she's apparently just bought an acre of dirt. I'm jealous! (seriously).
Dawn Irvine - new talented pattern designer on the blogk (sorry, lame play on words there). She seems to always be churning out very cool designs. Looking forward to seeing them applied to stuff.
Magic Jelly / Karena - South Australian based illustrator printmaking chicky with way too many gooco inks for her own good.
There are many many more but I'm just going to limit myself to three for now :)
hey. it seems that i've taken a bit of an unexpected blogging break. just haven't been in the space for it, which is sad. last week i started feeling down, and thought it'd go away, but haven't been able to shake it, and still can't figure out what the problem is. I think it might be routine. Routine is awesome and is often my bestest friend, but it seems to have turned on me now that it involves scripting these two flash websites ever day for a couple of months. Where's the creativity in that? I think it's killing me.
I've been keeping myself vaguely sane by painting mini artworks on the back of little Laminate swatches that I pilfered from Bunnings. I saw an artist on Flickr (I forget who, sorry!) doing something similar and thought it was a great idea. And being so tiny they're not intimidating to paint on at all.
They're a bit unoriginal and illustrator-ish in my opinion, but practice and inspiration should fix that :)
I was reading Loobylu the other day and she mentioned that November is National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) - where for the whole of this month you post something every day. I woke up this morning and realised that I have inadvertently done just that. Problem is, I don't think I can keep it up. The fact of the matter is that I'm just not a good writer, and am painfully self concious of this fact at times. I'm also quite crap at coming up with names for things like blog posts, pattern designs and my jewellery. I read other blogs full of smooth, witty lines that make their day to day activites much more engaging, but when I write about mine, they just sound mundane. That said, not be self defeatist I'm going to make an effort.
I spent most of yesterday making birthday presents for one of my closest friends. When looking for wrapping paper I found one of my patterns printed on a sheet of A3 that I got Pete to sneakily run off at work.
I'm starting to learn the lesson that a mockup speaks a thousand pictures :) The pattern looks so much better in context rather than as a flat graphic.
We had a visitor today - one of these fellas:
It was such a nice surprise. One of the few things I've missed from moving to the inner city is a bit of wildlife - especially of such a colourful variety. Anyway he didn't stick around long. I dashed up to grab him something to eat but he flew to a neighbouring tree. I thought I could tempt him back with some vita wheats (do birds even eat vita wheats? i don't know but it's all we had) but he and his little mate soon flew away. I hope he comes back.
Tempted to buy a hanging seed thingy to see what it brings.
Hope everyone's having a lovely (long?) weekend. I love the way that Melbourne + horse racing = public holiday :)
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 -_-
We did the artsy thing last night and went to the opening night of Pete's friend Eveline's exhibition. It was really quite good. A small space, and hot inside because of all the people, but her little artworks looked great scattered on the wall over the top of my favourite thing - trees!
originally uploaded by love pad
If you're handy to the city, get down there and check it out - Level 1, 12 Waratah Place (hers are upstairs at the back). Her illustrations are really beatiful, emotive, fine detailed pieces of work. They're selling for up to $200 each which I figure is pretty good for an original. I just bought a postcard set though to keep me happy :)
originally uploaded by love pad
