It's here! My new precious!

I must now wait for it to charge (as you can see) so I can play with it.



Hm, must think of a name for her. (Now that it's here I can tell she is a girl...but maybe that's just because I haven't seen it fit with a super-tele-photo lens yet :-o !)

Well, my iPhone is Harold, my external hard drive is Regina, and my iPod Shuffle is Gertrude. Perhaps the new Precious is a Karen. Or a Denise maybe. Shame she's a she...I've been wanting to have a device named Jason.

Fun with boxes

Last August for Mike's birthday I bought him a gift certificate to go horseback riding under the Hollywood sign – something he'd been talking about wanting to do since we moved to California. I wanted to something cute to put it in, so I found this tutorial about how to make a gift box out of a cereal box. With a few modifications (mainly the tab in front to keep the top aligned correctly in the closed position), I turned out this fun little box:

I found it easier to decorate the box before I folded it, though I had to visualize which panels were going to end up on the outside and in what orientation, before penciling in a simple wood-grain pattern for a bit of a "ranch" theme. I thought the little horsey on top was also a nice touch. :-) (For some reason I had a little collection of plastic farm animals laying around!)

On the inside, I wrapped the gift certificate in a bandana, which I had picked up along with it at the ranch.

You would never guess this box used hold our Honey Nut Cheerios!

Some day my prints will come...

I can't wait for Friday! Not just for the usual reasons (I'm not even working this week)... But because this Friday we get our new digital camera!

See...there it is, right there in Keasbey, NJ!

Mike and I decided last year that our Christmas present to each other would be getting a nice digital SLR. Since we moved to California we've been trying to visit as many national parks as possible, and we were tired of coming home from these majestic and stunning places with lame little point-and-shoot photos. And I've wanted a nice camera for a long time just for my work, and for this blog since I started it, too.

We didn't actually get it in time for Christmas, but in January we actually started researching what we wanted, and decided on a Canon EOS Rebel T1i.

We found the best deal on BuyDig.com (which I had never heard of, but after a quick background check it seemed legit). I was glad to get the low price, but it took them like a week to ship it so I'm impatient to have the thing in my little hands!

In the meantime, the camera bag that I bought the same day off eBay arrived quite promptly:

I loved the retro look. The colors and the little mountain label remind me of some of the camping gear and luggage that we had when I was little. Also a big thing I read about was that you don't want a bag that screams "camera bag," i.e. "steal me," so I steered way clear of the all-black with a big "Canon" logo. The cool thing I didn't realize until I got the thing in the mail was, it also converts into a backpack!

Perfect for hiking. Eventually we'll need a bigger bag to store additional lenses and equipment we plan to buy, but this will still be great for taking just one or two out at a time.

So, after Friday, prepare yourself for greatly improved photography here on Eleventy!

What I've been up to at my day job

Unfortunately, playing around with yarn and ink and paper doesn't quite pay the bills... But that's okay, because I like my day job pretty well too. I freelance as an art director and graphic designer, and over the past several months I've been working a gig that I am very lucky to have been a part of. Most of the time I work on magazine ads, TV commercials, billboards, or online banner ads, where a company is basically interrupting your life to tell you about themselves. But this last project I worked on was to create content that people would actually be interested in enough to voluntarily go look at. Which, I think, not only makes it more effective, but also in a way, more polite. It's the difference between someone barging in and yelling something at you, and someone saying, "Hey, if you have some time, let's talk – how about I buy you lunch?" Except in this case, it's "how about I make you some cool documentary films about some of your favorite musicians?"

The company was Gillette, and the agency that hired me was called Greenlight. They're associated with Red Light Management, an artist management company with a long roster of big names, including Dave Matthews Band, Tim McGraw, and The Decemberists. With their understanding of both the ad business and the music business, Greenlight helped Gillette create and promote a short film series called "Uncut," about how different famous musicians prepare themselves for performance. The films actually turned out to be pretty good little documentaries. What I worked on mostly was the print and various online promotions of the films, and the website that housed all the films and a bunch of extras, like band photos and other behind-the-scenes clips that didn't make it into the films. They also have these funny little shaving "tutorials" so you can learn how to "shave like a rockstar."

Here's the trailer for the films, and if you have time, check out the site!

Wall calendar, brought to you by The Letter 'A'

I've been meaning to share this, and now that January's almost up, so I feel like a 2010 calendar will soon be old news!

A friend of mine recently acquired the initial "A" (via marriage), so for Christmas I made her this calendar:

It was a fun chance to play with my Dremel tool, and a nice way to get some more use out of a silk screen I'd already burned with the 2010 months and days.

I started with a sheet of plywood with an oak veneer from the hardware store, stained it with some Minwax in "Ebony", and made a rough tracing of where I wanted the 'A' to go. I then pulled up some examples of circus-y lettering off the 'net, and freehand Dremeled the letter. I must admit I impressed myself with my on-the-fly typography! I filled in the yellow and purple spaces with acrylic paint, and went over the engraved parts in cream-colored acrylic. As I mentioned, the numbers and months were from a silk screen I'd made for a different calendar, and I just laid the screen over and did a one-off print with regular opaque screen-printing ink. Finally, I looked at the thing and realized I'd forgotten to put the year! Duh... So, I improvised that bit at the bottom, using the same technique as for the 'A'. Glad there was an ample margin down there!

I'd like to put something up on my shop like this, where you can order a custom letter. But, obviously it's a little late for a 2010 calendar. Maybe I'll get some chalkboard paint and make noteboards. Other ideas?