Barcelona

I just received these photos from Mio, Chris's Japanese photographer girlfriend who we traveled with overseas, and had to post them. Such classic moments:


Eating freshly made xurros from a tiny old couple's shop in the back streets of Barcelona
(c) Mio Kisaca


Stone spiral staircase in the towers of La Sagrada Familia
(c) Mio Kisaca

Mio captured some fantastic moments on our trip. I can't wait to see the rest of her shots :)

This is kind of related - but it's strange when your blog no longer feels like a personal place where you can write about anything. Where you can talk not just about work successes but also the not so good bits. Like when sales are down, or when you feel creatively paralyzed and self doubt starts to creep in. When you do your quarterly BAS and think "uh oh... not a good quarter".

I write this at the tale end of a not so good week, which fortunately has passed and I'm feeling more optimistic. I have some ideas brewing, which is always a good feeling.

5 things

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

adventures with art clay

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.

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!

Rainy days & unoriginal artworks

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 :)

to do:

I have to-do's coming out of my ears at the moment:

- Go to the dentist (first time in 6 years)
- Take the car to get tuned
- Go see an allergist (I'm sneezing and have a runny nose every day)
- Make more jewellery for Etsy and Modamuse
- Send jewellery and bio off to Modamuse
- Find a financial advisor
- Do my BAS
- Go see accountant and do tax return
- Get some patterns screen printed
- Make a "how to do pattern repeat" tutorial

All whist juggling two huge web jobs due at the start of December! I did however manage to knock one big thing off my list, which was the pattern design submission to Rag & Bone. I ended up going all out and spent Sunday 'making mockups' - by which i mean photoshopping the patterns onto photos of my notebooks. They turned out pretty alright I think!



That said, the fairly brief reply I got this morn makes me think a) they're overwhelmed with submissions and/or b) it didn't really knock their socks off at all. They said they're meeting to decide next Wednesday, so fingers crossed for Shannon (who also submitted some lovely stuff) and I.

back to work

hmmm, I've got that post-holidays back-at-work blues. It's times like these that I'm markedly aware of the sort-of 'wrongness' of working from home alone, all day every day. I know i'll get back into the swing of things and before long it'll just feel like normal again... but is that really a good thing? to get used to something that's not-quite-right? Anyway not to worry, after my big client jobs are finished I'm going to start actively contacting studios for some part time/contract work.

In good news, my Ashley G prints arrived and they look great. I just need to find some of those simple borderless clippy frames to frame them. Does anyone know where I could find them??

No crafty photos today, so here's some shots of a cute, lichen covered birdbath at Pete's parents' place in Ballarat :)

Bookbinding with a sea view

Back in Melbourne today! Pete and I just got back from a short trip to Ballarat (to visit his folks) and then on to Fairhaven near the beach where we stayed a few nights and did bookbinding.

And what crazy weather we had. The first two evenings in Fairhaven were spent huddled round a roaring fire heater, and I could barely sleep for the cold. Then the next two days the temperature hit 30 and 36 C (86 and 97 F). 'Hottest October day in 90 years' they said on the news. We tried to cool down with a swim at the beach, but there was a very strong wind that whipped sand on our legs and the water was still freezing from winter which made our feet numb. We had fun anyway.

Anyway, our bookbinding project was a complete success! Photos and more details below:


My first book :)


I stuck a little envelope on the back enpaper for storing little bits and pieces (and to cover up a bubble, hehe).


I made three books all up - one A6 size and the other two about A7 - tiny but so fun to construct! And they only need about 5 sheets of A3 paper to make :)

Pete found a whole bunch of great tutorials online about how to do bookbinding. The ones that I followed (kind of mish-mashed their processes together) are:

Dave's bookbinding tutorial - easy to follow, good pictures
'Binding books' - lots of details photos
'How to make a simple hardcover book' - good diagram on binding signatures together
The Evilrooster Bookweb - heaps of info on different techniques and handy equipment you can make


The Evilrooster site had instructions on how to make a book press and stitching frame in one unit. You don't really need either of these, but they make life heaps easier. Here's the one we made, with me half way through stitiching my signatures together (note: the 'sea view' is in the background - it got washed out in the photo but it's there, honest!)


Signatures all stitched together, aka the 'book block'.


Petey stitching his signatures together by lamplight :)

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 :)

Sometimes you work on these really labour intensive projects that just don't end up working. Like these two prototypes below. I spent hours cutting little shapes out of poypropolyene, to find the end result just didn't make a good earring. Maybe the left hand one would work as a pendant with some darker coloured material.



The whole process can be pretty disappointing... but at least it's one step closer to finding an idea that works. If doing this stuff was super easy then I suppose more people would be doing it, and then it'd lose it's uniqueness and value. For that reason I kinda enjoy working on labour intensive stuff ... so long as I don't completely ruin my back working over the coffee table :)

Anyway there's lots of good to come with the bad. Firstly, the awesome Shannon has been helping me out heaps, suggesting I try to sell my patterns here and also offering to take some of my jewellery to sell at her sister's upcoming craft party. Thanks again Shannon!

Also I went on a bit of an impulse buying spree and bought these three prints from ashelyg's etsy shop:


Veeeeery much looking forward to receiving them in the post.
Aren't parcels great?

Meanwhile, I continued my purchasing spree by buying this design-nerdy hoodie from veer:


Ok, less spending and more doing - time to think up some new ideas that actually work this time. Wish me luck!

One year o' blogging

A very attentive commenter just made me aware that I've had this blog up for a whole year now! Granted the first few months didn't have anything interesting up at all but still... that's much longer thank i thought! Time flies when you're having fun :)

This week has been a bit craft-quiet due to catching a cold and being super busy with work - I've squeezed in a few days of freelance next week, at the good ol' Lonely Planet where Pete and I first met - awwwh. Will be good for me to be around other creative people again for a little while.

Meanwhile I was very impressed upon finding this Sydney based designer/blogger who's actually taking things to the next level by designing, screenprinting and making stuff out of her own fabric designs. It's great to find someone who's doing all of those three things at once. Nice designs and quite motivating :)