In which she learns that taking photos of lighting is rather difficult

Wow it's been quite awhile since my last blog post. Most of my spare energy has been directed towards organising my next print run of fabric, which will hopefully be finished by the end of next week or the week after - my printer is really busy at the moment, which is a shame.

I've also been trying to come up with some new pattern designs but haven't been happy with the result. Maybe I've subconciously moved the bar up too high due to recent successes. I want my next pair of printed fabric designs to be just perfect. The right mix of unique + fun + nature-ee + modern + retro-ee :)

A few people have asked me recently if it's okay for them to use my fabric to make things which they then on-sell. My answer is simple - definately! In my mind that's the ideal use for it. I'd love to see my fabric made into real things that can then be sold on to happy customers. I'd make things with it myself if I had a more reliable sewing machine. That said, the first thing I did when I received my fabric was make it into some lampshades. The yellow works particuarly well as a lampshade because the colour isn't too strong and provides just the right amount of contrast when the lamp is on:





Take care and thanks again for all the support and very lovely comments!

More than I bargained for

After a long, busy day of cutting and packaging yesterday I was pleased to discover an extra metre of each fabric still on the roll! So for anyone who missed out last time there's another 2 quantities of each fabric in my etsy shop :)

But wait, there's more

Golly gee. I put my fabric up for sale last night and woke up this morning to find it all gone! That's one of the fun things about living in Australia - things happen overnight and you find out bleary eyed in the morning.

To those who bought some - thankyou ,thankyou, thankyou. It's all rather overwheming at the moment but also such a relief that things have turned out so well - I could have been left here with bolts of fabric lying around the living room. Thankfully not so.

AND, to those who missed out, there's more to come!! I'm about to get another batch printed which should be done mid next week. I think a third colourway is in order - willing to take suggestions!

I'd better run. So much to do. Thank you all so much again for all the support, and for all the lovely comments.

Finally!!!!

My fabric is finally here! I ran to the printers last night to collect it just as they were closing. I couldn't sleep properly for thoughts of fabric, fabric, fabric. Seriously. Anyway, here are the 4 designs, and they're up in my Etsy shop. Whew!


'Flowing Dots' in lemonlime


'Flowing Dots' in hazy blue


'Riverstones' in lemonlime


'Riverstones' in hazy blue

And so the nervous waiting begins. Please, if you have any feedback or advice please get in touch, I won't take offense :)

New Moo

My new set of Moo cards arrived this week! I still think Moo cards are the best thing since sliced bread. 100 cards with up to 100 different designs on the back all for only $25 USD sent anywhere in the world. You can't go wrong.



My justification for getting a new batch printed was that my old ones said "interactive and graphic designer" which is too limiting these days so these ones just say "designer". Ooh how fancy.

I got an email from Nicole today suggesting that Craftree would make a good print. I hadn't even thought about it, but I think it's a nice idea. My local giclee printer can run off A3 canvas prints basically on demand, so I decided to put a few A3 options up on Etsy. here's just a couple:



I put some of my girls up A3 size also, just to see how they go.


Ooh and have you seen Etsy Mini? It's an Etsy widget that creates little thumbnails of your shop items that you can put on your blog. I've got one on the right hand side of my blog. Very handy.

The Final Four

I haven't mentioned anything for a couple of weeks but the fabric printing is going ahead as we speak! It's due to be finished early next week and I am _so_ excited. And nervous. But mainly excited. Below are the four pattern and colourway options that will be available. The bottom design was a big favourite in the poll a few weeks ago, however the top one got hardly any votes at all (i reckon you have to see it printed to get the full effect). But it was the lovely Jenny from Amitie Textiles that helped pursuade me on that one, saying it was her favourite and offering to buy 10m of it for her shop. Yay!


(each square represents about 22cm squared)

Also i'd like to send a BIG thankyou to Krisen Doran who's been such a great help along the way, giving me heaps of advice on the process and being a great sounding board :)

Autumn

The weather is slowly starting to turn cold over here. I'm trying to fend off memories of cold hands and cold feet and tense shivering with thoughts of electric blankets and scarves and gloves and finding the perfect coat and possibly splashing out on some Camper boots. God by the way I'm talking you'd think the weather actually got "cold" over here but really it never drops below zero. I'm just a cold frog.

A new pattern in theme with Autumn:


And some more of that high contrast 'stylish' stuff. I can't really think of a practical purpose for this one however. Maybe wrapping paper?


"Craftree" hehe.

Wilkins & Kent

Here is where I indulge in some gratuitous showing-off of a new piece of 'designer' furniture in our apartment. In fact it's our first & only piece of designer furniture, and our first proper joint purchase:





We made the mistake of walking into Wilkins & Kent whilst looking for a coffee table and both fell for it instantly. The Wilkins & Kent boys make such beautiful furniture and their whole store on Brunswick Street is full of wonderful things.

This morning I was joking around making the pattern below, titled "I Can Be A Stylist Too". It's supposed to be in mock of current design trends (I'm not really a 'stylist' kind of designer), but I showed it to Pete who said "hey, that actually looks cool". So it stays :)

Thankyouse

Firstly, I just want to thank everyone for the overwhelming amount of feedback on the pattern decision. And it was definately overwhelming! I spent so long struggling and stressing over which patterns to print and it kept me awake with racing thoughts for a couple of nights. But I've finally made my decision and am just waiting (somewhat frustratedly) on the fabric. I am SO itching to get moving on this!!

Meanwhile I got the coolest package in the mail today. This is Nicole upholding her part of the patterns-for-handmade-book bargain, and my god did she uphold it. I had a giggly old time unwrapping each part of the package she put together for me. Soooo gorgeous, every bit of it. And check out that wrapping paper!


In the forgeound is the beautiful handmade book she made me. It features different patterned papers front and back, fabric lining, a velcro buttoned pocket at the front containing a Certificate of Authenticity (with a familiar pattern on it, hehe), and pages and pages of different found papers waiting to be drawn all over.


Thanks again, Nicole :)

options, options

Would anybody be so kind as to tell me which of the patterns below they'd most like to see screen printed onto fabric?

I've chosen the ones that I feel would work best as a 1 colour print. I'm going to print two patterns for my first print run, and am off to Charles Parsons (thanks Kristen!) this arvy to buy some fabric. Ooh the ball is finally rolling!

Design*Sponge

Eeee, I woke up yesterday morning to find a bunch of etsy sales in my inbox and this great comment from Stereotte: "dude, did you know your prints are being featured over at Design*Sponge????" Haha! Wow I never thought that would happen!

Finally finished

I have never felt so much relief putting a website live than I did last night. I've been working on a monstrous Flash project for most of the past year and. its. finally. over. whoo!



For anyone who's interested in what I do for my real day job, you can check it out here. I'm not 100% proud of this project mind you. It might be visually impressive (albeit clunky) but I don't think it does what it's supposed to do as well as it could - which is provide 'young people' with information on some very serious topics.

I don't think such a heavy focus on 'cool' was appropriate here ... but I lost that debate with the art director ;) Who knows, I could be wrong. We'll wait and see how successful it is.

Anyway, the best thing about finishing that project is that it leaves me free to do some things that I've been talking about doing for ages. Today I finally went and visited 'Print Ink' - a screen printing studio who print fabric yardages (who also happen to be around the corner. How I love N.Melb). I was very impressed. They were exactly what I'm looking for and were such lovely people too! The prices were reasonable however require me to be fairly confident and commited about printing my designs and trying to sell them. Ahh well, whatever happens it should be a heap of fun!

Small & Round and happy

Yay for impulse purchases off the internets. I just bought these two prints off one of my fav artists - Jeremiah Ketner of Small & Round:


They're available in his shop for $30 US each. Limited edition of 30 screen prints. Sooo cute.

I feel like I'm totally cheating here by posting more pics of my prints that i've already talked about, but I haven't got anything else to post about this week and I think they look cute all framed up. I put together these two pairs of prints for a friend. One set is for her, and another for her best friend who she met up in a treehouse.



Also, here is one of the first 'real' drawings you get to do in the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book. You get to cheat a bit by first placing a sheet of perspex on your hand, tracing the shape of your hand directly onto the perspex, and then copying that onto paper. You then add the finer details and some shading.



I was really happy with the result, and I love the way the book's exercises seem so easy and yet leave you feeling pleasantly surprised by your achievements. That's a little retro button i'm holding :)

riverstones

Back to pattern design for a bit. I'm tending to favour designs that can work with a limited colour palette - a single colour even, so that when I finally get around to printing them I can do a 1 colour screen print.



A splash of colour variation:


Bit sleepy so the words aren't coming tonight. I've been working my way through The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain recently though. Has anyone else tried it? It's fantastic so far and although I can already more or less draw, there's heaps of insight into the drawing mindset and how to 'see' like an artist does.

Sleep time, g'night :)

A quick thankyou

A very quick thankyou to Irene from bloesom blog for not one, but TWO posts about my work!! If you haven't already, head over there and check out her blog - she posts about some amazing design stuff (so naturally i'm flattered to be included). Some of her posts are in Dutch but most are in English too :)

Almost There

This little girl wasn't originally going to make it all the way to the digital inking stage. She just sat in my notebook, because I wasn't completely happy with the way her dress fell and the balance of branches on the tree.

However a close friend of mine happened to be over when I was getting the other treehouse print done and told me that she met one of her closest, bestest friends up a treehouse! So she wants to give the two prints to her friend as a birthday present - very sweet, and very flattering.



Okay back to work! I'm working on this epic, epic flash website job that's due to be launched in two weeks. And then i'll be free! freeee!!

Poor Failed Craft Project

Sitting on the couch yesterday watching the movie Russian Dolls (with all those gorgeous cosy parisian homes) I felt inspired to make something for our apartment. We have those kind of ugly light fittings that sit on the ceiling covered by an oyster shell thingy (oh how i'd love to have hanging lightbulbs that I could put funky lampshades on) so I decided to make a sort of lampshade thing that sits flush on the roof and covers/pretties it up a bit.

I spent about 7 hours working on this project up till 1am, always thinking "once it all comes together it'll hold it's shape better... it'll be okay". Well, the only way you learn these things is to try and fail.

Lesson learnt: If you want to make a lampshade you need a solid frame that can hold it's own weight. A frame made out of polyprop doesn't cut it. Behold:





Okay it might look _okay_ in these photos but in real life, hanging from my ceiling with the light on it looks like a saggy, unrefined mess. Maybe it's rescuable if I line the inside with some stiff wire? What bugs me most is wasting that kimono fabric - I might have to cut this fella up and rescue the pieces.

printing fun

Inspired by the positive response to my prints over the last week I got another small collection printed today and popped them in the shop. It's been heaps of fun - very uplifting.


My latest drawing 'treehouse' was thrown into the mix and I'm happy very with how it turned out :)

Thanks so much for the support everybody, and have a fantastic weekend.

treehouse!

This girl, her happy places always seem to be around trees :)



Maybe she'll get printed tomorrow...

blown away

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 ;).

canvas printses

I don't consider myself to be a 'proper' artist by any means (what does that mean these days, anyway?) but I thought it'd be nice to get some of my recent drawins printed onto canvas at good old imagescience and see how they go in my etsy shop. I just love the way things look printed onto that canvas:









Hmm, I don't know what i'll do with them if they don't sell - it'd feel wrong to have them up on my own wall, and weird to give them to friends unless someone asked for one specifically. Anyway, just rambling now - we'll cross that bridge when we come to it!!

Meanwhile, I went to mum and dad's last week and collected all my old screenprinting stuff out of the garage - most of it guiltily unopened and unused - screens, emulsion, ink, squeegees. Hoping to have a screenprinting day sometime soon (maybe with miss wendy if she's keen) and make some of that patterned fabric myself. Geez I've been talking about that for ages, I just need to go and do it!

uppercase

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.

A small world indeed

Ahh it is a small world indeed. Today I took myself for a walk to a crazy antiques place I keep passing in my car and have wanted to check out for ages (Wally Johnson's on Dudley street) and on my way back I turn the corner and bump into Shannon from Auntie Cookie! We'd never met in person before but I recognised her from her blog. Aint that great. Okay that story probably sounds a bit farfetched but we were previously aware that we lived in the same area, so it's not all that weird.

Anyway, the antiques place didn't have anything I could afford, but I took a pic of these cute little bowl/ramikin things. Some Melbournian should go get them! (if you're willing to pay $7 apiece).


('scuse the crappy nokia picture quality)

More patterns! Still going through a seaweed phase it seems :)

Armchair love

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...

Freshly Blended Patterns

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!!