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?

How every Warner Brothers movie ends (no spoiler alert)

Why don't we end our movies with a "The End" title card anymore? It's such a grand way to close a story. Plus, it allows us to effectively carbon-date a film based on just six letters worth of typography – thanks to this collection I stumbled onto while chasing some internet rabbit trail today. Nice work!

These next two remind me of Ed Ruscha paintings. (I realize that what I mean is the Ruscha paintings remind me of the old movie titles.)

This one makes me think of Mike Teavee:

That last one looks almost modern, doesn't it? Only by comparison – it's from 1964 (John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn). Of course, there is the Marlboro man there in the background isn't there?

Okay, The End!

I'm (almost) back!

Howdy folks! I've been rather quiet lately so I felt a little update was in order.

After the craftsplosion that generally characterizes my pre-holiday preparations each December, we headed to my in-laws for Christmas. Upon our return on New Year's Eve, as I reflected on what I wanted to accomplish in 2010, I was surrounded by the carnage of Dremel dust, carved rubber stamp shavings, and scattered screen-printing supplies from all my gift-making. I decided that part of the problem was that my workspace was not conducive to my project flow. I am a big believer that "a place for everything and everything in its place" is essential to keeping tidy, and that wasn't happening in our upstairs office-studio area.

But perhaps an even bigger problem, I just didn't find the place creatively inspiring. Thus I constantly found myself bringing projects down to the living room or dining room, where we've taken more care to make the rooms aesthetically pleasing. And as long as I was spreading my supplies all over the house, not only was I messing up our living spaces, but it was making it impossible to keep things organized upstairs as well.

So, since then I've been head-down concentrating on redoing my studio to be both more organized, and just a pleasant, inspiring, creative place to spend time. I'm now close to the end of that project, and I look forward to returning to the real world, where I try to focus on more than one thing at a time – including posting on the blog! (My tendency is to want to completely immerse myself in a single task at the expense of the rest of my life, but I decided to make an exception for this project, because I think my husband was getting close to imposing sanctions on my crafting.)

So, stay tuned for some fun features of my new studio space, and perhaps you'll get inspired for the re-organization projects on your own list!

In the meantime, here's a sneak peak of a pegboard I made to organize all my sewing stuff: