Holiday sale, sold!

Well today was the big day, and a good time was had by all. The crowd was modest -- mostly family and close friends -- but who better to share with in the holiday joy, right? And they were good customers. I think that all of us sold at least a few things. I found buyers for a few of my t-shirts, cards, and calendars. It was fun to watch people shop my stuff in person. You never get to hear what people think when they're browsing your online store!

Here's me with my setup and my niece of ultimate cuteness, Monroe:


I think her favorite item at the sale was the free pigs-in-a-blanket!

Christmas memories: Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas

I love how Christmastime makes everyone nostalgic. It seems like every year one or two memories rise to the surface and hover there for the duration of the holiday season. Usually it's a different one each season, and it adds so much texture to life when that happens. This year for some reason I can't get the Jim Henson special "Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas" out of my head. You know how when you were little, whatever random movies or cable specials your parents caught on VHS become ingrained in your mind? Well this one was on our tape of recorded TV Christmas specials that my Dad brought out every Christmas, and then packed away at the end of the season with the Christmas decorations. Having it out only a month out of the year motivated us to watch it over and over, even more than kids usually do with their favorite videos. As the worn out tape got more and more warbly each year, the images and songs remained clear as sugarplums in our little heads.

As I'm writing this I wonder whether the seed for this muppet memory was planted by my recent viewing of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Though that used stop-motion-animated puppets instead of live-action muppets. Either way, there's nothing like a hand-made fox, otter, weasel, or catfish to bring a smile to the face of any human, regardless of age.

Brown paper packaged tied up with string

This morning I was feeling warm and happy (and maybe procrastinating a little on my upcoming deadline of Sunday's sale...), so I decided to do something a little bit extra special with the packaging on a custom Etsy order I was filling (a set of stationery and stamps).

An Unlikely Illumination: R. Crumb does the Book of Genesis

Every morning on my way to my current freelance gig, I pass the UCLA Hammer art museum. Recently, I've been intrigued by the displays featuring illustrations of the Book of Genesis by underground comics icon R. Crumb. I have yet to get myself to the gallery, but this morning I checked out the Hammer's website and watched this great video about the exhibit:

I think I'll make plans to go on Jan 24th for the lecture/walkthrough which I noticed advertised on the site.

I've had a vague awareness of R. Crumb from a young age, having grown up with two older brothers and a couple of cousins who were all way into underground comics. My vision of him was solidified by the 2003 movie American Splendor, in which Paul Giamatti brilliantly plays the comic book author Harvey Pekar. Crumb is portrayed in that movie as a sort of guru and collaborator to the main character. Still, I have pretty limited knowledge of this incredible artist, and I can't wait to know his art a little better through this ambitious project of his.

In an interesting way, it seems to me to represent how the relationship between art and the Bible have come full circle, with the supposedly recent form of the graphic novel actually playing a central roll throughout the past several thousand years. The graphic novel, which straddles the two worlds of art and literature, has struggled for full recognition in both. Which is odd, because its roots are intertwined with the legitimized academic histories of art and of literature. I remember several days in darkened art history classrooms learning about "illuminated manuscripts," which seems to me to be simply an art-historian term for the graphic novels of the Middle Ages. Virtually all the slides we were presented in class were of biblical themes. In more recent years, graphic novels have tended to be anything but biblical. Which makes the subject of this exhibit initially surprising, but with any further thought, it makes perfect sense. Not only does the incredible literary drama of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, naturally lend itself to graphic representation, but there is such a rich history in the marriage of pictures and the words of that particular text.

Well, thanks for indulging me if you've read this far – I suppose being taken back to art history class in my mind must have triggered a reflexive launch into "essay mode!" ;-)

Miniature S'mores

Tonight, I made this fun little recipe that my family came up with in theory a few months ago, but I was the first to have the chance to try it out:

They're miniature s'mores, and the recipe is about as simple as can be: one Teddy Graham, one chocolate chip, and one mini-marshmallow. I don't remember exactly how we came up with the idea – I just remember a conversation with my dad and my sister-in-law and I in which we were discussing having a miniaturized cookout, including kebabs on toothpicks with a single pea, a slice of baby corn, etc., and for dessert, these mini-smores. (This was on my same trip back to Texas that my girlfriends and I ate at Tillman's and had their famous table-side s'mores, which are simply amazing, by the way.)

So this afternoon I had the perfect opportunity to test out our idea. That same sister-in-law (who was also at Tillman's that night) was having a potluck party and food drive, where everyone had to bring, in addition to some cans for the local food bank, a dish that has brought them joy at some point during the year. Between that trip to Texas, and the multiple camping trips we've gotten to take in California's great National Parks this year, this party-food version of s'mores was the obvious choice. Here's what I did:

I spread Teddy Graham crackers out on a cookie sheet, making sure they were all face-up (and of course eating the ones that were missing legs or ears). Then I placed a chocolate chip on each little guy's belly:

(I actually did a lot more than this for the party – these photos are from when my husband came home from having to work the weekend and miss the fun.) I ran them under the broiler for about a minute or two until the chips started to get glossy, so I knew they were softened. Then, I pressed a mini-marshmallow into each melted chip:

And ran them back under the broiler until they browned on top.

And that was it! They were a hit at the party, and a home run with Mike when he got them fresh out of the oven.

Though I won't stop making regular s'mores when I camp, these are a great little snack for at home. For one thing they are just so darn cute! Also, the chocolate melts, which is hard to achieve with a big s'more. (It is actually essential for these – I don't know how else you'd get them to stick together.) And, finally, there's their calorie content: I figured it up from parsing down the info on the nutrition labels, and each little s'more is about 9.2 calories!

Holiday sale Dec. 13th, and for a good cause too!

Big news!! Our holiday sale is on. We had to change the date because of a conflict, so now it's at 11am this Sunday, December 13th, which means we'll be serving mimosas!

Also, we had the idea to use this chance to benefit the charity reDiscover, a group here in Los Angeles that helps teach both art and environmental responsibility to children. Companies donate their leftover materials that would be destined for the dump, and reDiscover uses them to create art projects for youngsters.

Here's the flier I made:

[UPDATE: a link to the hi-res version]

You can click to see it bigger (and pass it around!), but here's all the necessaries:

Sunday, December 13th

11am to 3pm

The Gallery at Radium/ReelFX

2115 Colorado Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404 (map)

Parking in back of building or on street

Many thanks to my friend Linda for putting this thing in motion, and to Elle and Nian for teaming up with us. Can't wait to see everyone there!

I want this: At-home Letterpress Machine

(Image from paper-source.com)

I saw this advertised a few weeks ago on Paper Source, and it's been on my mind but I haven't had the chance to look into it yet. If you can make custom plates, or have them made, this could be amazing.

Wedding Wednesdays: Kim and Zak

(Photograph by Brooke Schwab)

For lots of reasons, a giant sector of the handmade design world is occupied by wedding stuff. Design is usually only produced by hand for small-scale projects, and those are often for personal purposes rather than commercial. And if you think about it, the only time in most people's lives when they would privately commission a designer is for their wedding.

So, I'm going to start a new series called "Wedding Wednesdays", to keep an eye on what's going on with wedding design. Often that ends up being a reflection of general design trends in the handmade world. Plus, weddings are fun.

And speaking of fun weddings, today I want to share pictures from the recent wedding of my friends Kim and Zak. Kim is a very stylish bride – an avid reader of many design blogs, she was keeping up with wedding design trends long before she was even planning her own wedding. Lucky for both of us, we're best friends, I happen to be a designer, and our other best friend Melissa is also incredibly creative. So I had the honor of helping Kim shape the look of what turned out to be an unbelievably adorable and fun wedding.

As with many weddings, the invitations were what established the look for the rest of the wedding. Kim knew she wanted to use a red and aqua color theme, and she also told me she liked "birds and banners". And, the main thing she was going for with everything having to do with the wedding was "fun". Here's what we came up with:

Since I live in LA and Kim in Dallas, we couldn't do the printing together, but I sent her the files and she printed all of them herself on her Gocco machine, as well as lining the envelopes and assembling everything. She did a bang-up job, too, despite the design being very touchy when it came to color registration.

The four-page programs took the "fun" theme a step further:

(A side note: Kim was kind enough to let me sell these designs on my Etsy shop, so they are now available for customization for other weddings. In the last few weeks I've had to silkscreen more of the invitations myself because brides have been requesting samples – it felt funny to be making them after the wedding already happened!)

The rest of these photos were taken by Kim's talented wedding photographer Brooke Schwab, who did a wonderful job capturing the ultimate cuteness that we created!

Melissa sewed the table-runners, and punched the thousands and thousands of confetti circles. Kim had the idea of getting a bunch of button-style pins made to put out as favors, so I used the typography from the program to design a set of three. A group of us got together and made "moustaches on a stick" as props for the photobooth Kim rented. Also, from the photo at the top of this page, Kim made the adorable bird wedding topper, and printed the little flags on the cupcakes with her Gocco.

If you can believe it, this is just a slice of all the stuff that we made for this wedding. To see more photos, check out this post that Once Wed recently devoted to Kim's wedding (awesome!), and on photographer Brooke's blog.

Handmade Holidays

So I have a sister-in-law Kelly who owns this fab vintage shop in Pensacola, and for years she and my brother Andrew could only come for Thanksgiving either a few weeks before or after the actual holiday, because of the retail high holy day Black Friday. Of course the whole family understood, but now I think I get it even more. When you're a seller and not just a buyer, the craziness of the holiday season is multiplied by a hundred.

Of course the advantage of having your shop online is that you can do a lot of the work ahead of time, readying your new merchandise and promotions as early as you want, and set it all to post in time for Black Friday and its online equivalent, Cyber Monday. In my case, though, this year during that time, I was busy getting my shop up and running in the first place, and I didn't get to do much in the way of kicking off the holiday shopping season. (I've also had a slew of freelance work come in, which is fantastic, but just ill-timed as far as my shop work is concerned.) Oh well, at least I've got a shop at all, and I'll have another chance next year to do more special promotion for the holidays.

I do have one thing that I'm working towards this year which I'm really excited about. I'll tell you more about that later, but LA folks: save the date for the evening of December 10th! Stay tuned for details... [update: it's actually December 13th...info here]