HaveMoreCake Designs

Butterflies!

2011-07-06T23:25:00.003-04:00

Another week--another pattern. This week's theme on Spoonflower was butterflies with a limited palette. The following were the only colors allowed, though there was no requirement to use all of them.

As usual, I did not give myself enough time to play around, but here is my butterfly pattern.

Fireworks or Flowers in the Sky

2011-06-29T20:20:00.000-04:00

Another pattern for Spoonflower

Musical Whales

2011-05-04T22:31:00.001-04:00

Musical Whales is a new pattern I completed last night, just barely in time to submit it to the Black & White "fabric of the week" contest on Spoonflower.

Musical Whales Pattern

When the black & white theme was announced, I immediately thought of the piano keys. How that evolved into whales, I know not.

Musical Whales Pattern Detail

Let me know what you would like to see made out of this fabric.

Bird Frenzy - First Peek

2011-04-28T23:02:00.000-04:00

I have been working on the birds on and off for a long time. It is finally starting to converge, and I am so excited that I just cannot keep it to myself.

Spring Is Almost Here

2011-04-03T22:12:00.000-04:00

I first started sketching ducks and ducklings after watching an episode of BBC's Planet Earth depicting baby Mandarin ducks leaping out of their nest in the tree. I am still working on the ducklings, but the duck led me to create this greeting card.

The bright colors will hopefully make you think of spring, even it is still snowing or sleating outside.

Designing Socks

2011-03-12T00:23:00.000-05:00

I decided to participate in the sock design contest, held by Oregon based company, Sock It to Me. Below are the five designs I have submitted.

Here are a few variations that did not quite make the cut—the contest allowed 5 submissions per person.

The finalists are supposed to be announced on Monday on the Sock It to Me Facebook page!

A Little Late Night Screenprinting

2011-01-09T23:29:00.000-05:00

Here is a preview of the little sea shell cards I have just screen printed. More photos to come when my SLR is back from the shop.

Winter Flowers and Owl Matryoshkas

2010-12-10T23:06:00.002-05:00

In the last three years, I have been making greeting cards by hand. I had a great time learning how to make linocut prints and trying out screen printing. Yet the experience shows that the precious month between Thanksgiving and Christmas might not be the right time to try out any new techniques. Combining the usual holiday time crunch with my hopeless tendency to procrastinate results in lots of stress and less then perfect product.

This year I chose to curb my urge to do some screen printing. Instead I am digitizing my designs and printing them out on my inkjet. Delegating to the printer gave me a bit more time to bring my designs to completion sooner. The current themes seem to include owls in the shape of matryoshkas (those nested Russian dolls), largely inspired by burrowing owls, and patterns--both are now available in my Etsy shop. The plan is to work on nested owls next.

Reeds in the Back Bay Fens

2010-09-09T18:14:00.001-04:00

The Back Bay Fens is a beautiful park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead to be part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system. Olmstead turned saltwater marshes and swamp into a beautiful green park that surrounds meandering Muddy River.

In many areas of the park, the river banks are overgrown with reeds. While plans exist to remove these non-native, invasive phragmites next year, today they are still swinging high in the wind, providing refuge for a variety of birds, animals, and occasionally homeless people.

Green in spring and golden in the fall, they whisper gently in the wind and always shine brightly against the sky. I realize that they need to be removed, but still I find them majestic.

A few greeting cards with my attempts to capture the beauty of these tall grasses are now available in my Etsy store.

Fields

2010-08-07T21:24:00.000-04:00

Every winter my husband and I visit Walla Walla--a small town in Eastern Washington, known for its sweet onions and more recently for its wineries. The town is surrounded by fields, everywhere as far as the eye can see. Mostly wheat fields.

Nick and I love to drive out into the fields. We get out of the car at the top of a hill, look around, breath in the icy fresh air. It is a bit idylic really.

I love the multitude of lines that transform the baren farm fields into patterns. I finally tried to capture those patterns. First my fields were snowy.

Then I went back to Walla Walla in July, and the fields were green with ripening wheat. Now my fields are green too.

The Towels Project

2009-12-26T20:03:00.007-05:00

Silk screen printing cards was so entertaining that I decided to try silk screen printing towels. The idea was that printed flour sack towers might make good holiday gifts for the family. Printing trees on the towels went smoothly. I started with printing the design just twice, but quickly switched to printing it three times on each towel.

Printing the mushrooms turned out to be not so easy. I originally planned to print the entire trio of mushrooms on each towel, and spent a long time simplifying the design and carefully cutting out a stencil. But the stencil turned out to be a bit too big for my screen (I know, I am just brilliant), and it started falling apart right during the first test print.

At this point I almost gave up, but then decided to block off the two most problematic mushrooms, and continue with one promising one. In the end, I think the tree towels look better than the mushroom ones, but hey, I think mushrooms are a very appropriate print for a kitchen towel.

Frogs

2009-12-25T19:32:00.005-05:00

While on vacation I spent a few hours sewing frogs. The Purl Bee pattern and instructions were very easy to follow. I embroidered the eyes instead of using beads, to prevent any babies swallowing any beads. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of filling the frogs with rice which rendered them unwashable. Not very smart on my part.

Hopefully, I can find a more versatile next time I make baby toys. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Trees

2009-11-21T14:49:00.002-05:00

I decided to explore silk screen printing. As a first attempt, I cut out a little tree design from regular paper, and taped the paper to the screen. Then I screen printed a few greeting cards.

Lessons learned:

Regular printer paper is too thin--the paint started seeping through it very quickly. Next time I will use freezer paper instead.
I really should have fixed the placement of the screen on the card (just a few pencil marks would have been enough) before I started printing. Centering the screen on paper was very difficult.

Patterns in Adobe Illustrator

2009-09-22T09:10:00.008-04:00

After over a week of tinkering with shapes and rectangles, I have finally succeeded at creating a truely seamless pattern in Adobe Illustrator. (If you are wondering how the pattern in my previous post was created--by copy/pasting the shapes several times at regular distances.)

My pitfall was losing a few invisible rectangles. Let me explain. (If you are not an aspiring Adobe Illustrator amateurs like myself, the following details may not be particularly exciting.)

In order to define the bounding box for the repeating design, I had to create a rectangle that has no fill and border. Of course, you cannot see a borderless colorless rectangle unless you hover over its edge or select it. In the process of creating my pattern multiple times in the same document, I inadvertantly left a few of these rectangles behind. Since a design for a pattern can only have one bounding box, these multiple rectangles were no doubt confusing the tool. Last night as an act of desperation I started browsing through the layers in my pattern, and that is how I discovered that I had a few more invisible rectangles than I expected. Once I deleted all but one, my pattern generated correctly.

First Pattern Attempt--Sea Shells

2009-09-11T18:13:00.006-04:00

Summer has been busy, and sadly I have hardly done any arts and crafts. But now I am trying to get back into the swing of things.

Since I LOVE looking at different patterns (e.g. fabrics, wallpaper, etc.), I decided to try and design one. I seem to be on an ocean/sea shell theme kick right now.

Mushrooms, Mushrooms, Mushrooms

2009-03-22T22:39:00.004-04:00

Last week I spent time drawing a few mushrooms... Without any specific goals in mind...

City Skyline

2009-02-17T21:03:00.005-05:00

I went running along Charles River yesterday, and the view of Boston from the Cambridge side of the river inspired me to paint.

Little Flower Cards

2009-01-14T22:14:00.004-05:00

Last weekend I stumbled across some blank card stock still left over from our wedding stationery. Oh, the beautiful soft textured deckle-edged Fabriano paper--I just could not let it go to waste. So I printed the cards using a small linoblock I cut back in December. I decided that these single cards would make perfect Thank You notes for all the gifts I received during the holidays. Coming soon to my Etsh shop.

Hand Decorated Christmas Tree Ornaments

2009-01-04T21:22:00.005-05:00

I lament the end of the holiday season. To help me (and you) transition into the regular work week, here are photos of some of the ornaments my super-talented cousin-in-law, Britney Drumheller, made for everyone in the family. Britney also designs clothing and jewelry.

Thanks, Britney!

Snowy Christmas in Walla Walla

2008-12-28T00:37:00.005-05:00

Some photos I took while on vacation in Walla Walla, Washington.

Everything Handmade News

2008-12-06T18:53:00.015-05:00

I recently learned of Boston Handmade, a group of local artists, artisans and craftspeople. Boston has granted them a temporary storefront in Downtown Crossing (505 Washington Street). They are open November 28 through December 28, Thursdays through Sundays, 11am till 7pm. If you are in the Boston area, check them out. I stopped by the store today, and it was busy busy busy. It was nice to see Tactile Baby items at the store, since I met the artist at the MathWorks craft fair.

My Vasilek Peacock card received a positive and rather encouraging review in the Modern Sentiment blog. The blog is written by a fellow Etsy shop keeper, who makes a variety of items including cards, clothing accessories, and handbags, which you can find in her Modern Sentiment shop.

Last but not least, my friend just started a new Etsy shop, selling the cutest hand knit items.

The Craft Fair Report

2008-12-06T18:14:00.003-05:00

Thank you to all of you who stopped by my table at the craft fair yesterday. I received tremendous support and lots of encouragement from coworkers and other crafters at the fair. So the fair was a success in every way.

Here are some quick stats for those of you who are curious: I started out with 101 cards (89 + 12 seconds), and sold 56 (52 + 4 seconds).

The snowflake was the top seller by only by one card. Nick and I expected that it to be a runaway winner. More surprising was the fact that people seemed to be more attracted by non-blue snowflakes—the golden/orange/red ones that I made more as an experiment rather then for public consumption. The close second was the peacock card. I think people liked the fact that this card comes with a printed envelope.

Thanks to my friend Helen who watched my table for awhile, I got to walk around and check out other tables at the fair. A lady next to me was selling super cute handmade wooden toys as well as other baby items. A fellow MathWorker was selling great looking handmade tote bags. Another lady was selling necklaces handmade by women in Uganda. (All the proceeds from her sales were going back to these women and the villages they were from.) The individual beads in these necklaces were handmade from recycled magazines!

Of course I cannot list all the tasty and beautiful things sold at the MathWorks fair, but it was great to see what "artsy and craftsy" things my coworkers do in their spare time.

Snowflake

2008-11-29T16:20:00.006-05:00

Preparing For The Craft Fair

2008-11-28T23:32:00.001-05:00

Optimistically I signed up to participate in the Craft Fair held every year at the MathWorks, and it is coming this Thursday. In the past several weeks I have been pushing the limits drawing, cutting and printing in the evenings and over the weekends. I have not posted my progress because that would take precious time away from the drawing, cutting and printing that I could be doing instead (like right now!). So, if you, your family or your friends work at the MathWorks, please stop by the Craft Fair on Thursday! I will try to post a preview of the new cards before then.

Swirly Buffalo Is Back

2008-11-05T22:45:00.005-05:00

This is the design I made for our personal holiday cards last year. The buffalo was very relevant at the time because we were getting ready to visit Yellowstone National Park for New Years. Looking at the swirly buffalo now makes me think about our trip.

Cards with this buffalo holiday design will be available in my store as soon as more card stock I ordered arrives in the mail.

Vintage Fabrics Lead To Peacocks

2008-11-03T23:27:00.004-05:00

Recently I have come across a vintage fabrics blog and a multitude of vintage fabrics photos. Inspired by the beautiful swirls, flowers and paisley, I decided to try making some cards using the same style.

Here is the first pull from the block above. It was not meant to be green, but I decided that any color will do for the test run.

A peahen and another peacock are coming soon...

Little Red Rooster

2008-10-27T23:19:00.006-04:00

A software developer by day and an aspiring artist by night, I decided to make my crafts available to you. I would like to see what you think.

I just listed my first item--Little Red Rooster greeting cards. Each card is a linoleum block print, a medium I just recently decided to try out.

I have no good explanation of what inspired me to make a rooster, other then my several-year-old dream to embroider red roosters on our white kitchen curtains. To my husband’s delight our kitchen curtains are still plain white, but at least I got my wish to make little red roosters.

One bird inspires another, inspires another… So look forward to more birds coming to the shop soon.