Daisy Janie

your name please

This fabric is annika, and a customer by the very same name purchased this over the weekend - which I think is utterly and completely cool!!

Side note:
If I had known that same-nameness might be the impetus to buy fabric, I would change the names every 15 minutes or as the opportunity arose.

Here's how it would go:
What's your name? Sue. Oh, I have a fabric named Sue.
Nice to meet you, Rachel. Did you know I have a fabric named Rachel?
Who's that? Kim. I should go tell her I have a fabric named Kim.

Side-side note:
I am seriously about to go off the deep-end for about 10 different reasons, not one of which is that the dogs are barking up an annoying storm at the UPS truck right now. holy guacamole - time to bust out the finger whistle and scare them right out of their fur............................aaaahhhhhh. done. shhhh. so quiet now. good scoutie. good georgie.

color inspiration: covered bridge

This image does not do justice to the inside of this covered bridge. The rich wood tones that envelop you as soon as you're inside this mammoth space are just spectacular. The gradient shades of warm earthy browns and cool muted grays shift with usage patterns and sunlight bleaching - and then to top it off, the symmetry and the engineering of the design....oh my! All from wood. Big, big pieces of wood. Was almost too much for Math Girl - I loves me some math! How about that glowing tunnel effect - divine.

Anyone else fascinated with bees' and wasps' nests? Shapes, symmetry (again), color, texture. Man, they're gorgeous! There were some doozies in here that looked like panflutes. A zoomier zoom lens will be needed to capture these next trip.

Just to show you I haven't gone completely flat-neutral on you, I took these pics on the same bike ride, too! It's a distlefink - a good luck bird that commonly appears in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art and hex signs. Isn't she pretty? Love her vibrant patterns!!

daisy janie designs on a kleenex box

My designs on a Kimberly-Clark Kleenex box - well, what do you think of that? I'm all for it! Want to know how they got there (cuz you know I can fill a couple paragraphs)?

A dear friend gave me an article from April '09 SmartMoney about the revamped K-C Kleenex oval box - I was interested in it as much from the surface design perspective as I was from the research perspective. In one of my former lives, I worked at a fantastic qualitative marketing research company in Chi-town - and our primary client was K-C. Can't tell you all the incredible studies we did for them, but they were related to R & D - it was always really amazing to see what new product rollouts were being considered. When I read the article from SmartMoney, I had a strong sense of what was involved in bringing these new Kleenex designs to market. And, in a turn of marketing genius, they spun the idea into a business unit where you can create your own custom-designed Kleenex box! So I did just that. (Did you think they purchased some of my designs? ;) Not yet, but I did sell a design yesterday to another client!)

Visit mykleenextissue.com, where you can design and buy your own custom tissue box. $5 plus shipping!

texture repeat answer

To anyone who guessed that the texture repeat posted earlier today was the front porch swing where I'll be permanently planted once the weather warms up, you were & are absolutely correct! Well, you didn't have to be that specific - but just a heads up that once I get the confounded broken battery on my laptop fixed, I will be laptop-mobile again and I will be on that porch swing watching the world go by in the reflection of my computer screen!

Anna and Jen did actually say the back of wooden chair or parkbench, and that gets two thumbs up, too! Lotta said carpet tiles, and it really does look like Flor tiles! Good call - the texture def has a velvety look about it that resembles a textile. Thanks for commenting ladies!

***just as I was posting this, another guess came in from Jackie who said a wooden porch swing! Ding, ding, ding!!

To get this look, I used a watered-down, varnish-added, semi-gloss paint in a dark plum. I brushed it on like a stain, 1 slat at a time, let it sit for about a minute, then wiped it off with a dry cloth. Now I just need to make some cushions to soften things up!!

texture repeat: what is it?

Any guesses? This one isn't very hard, but since I haven't posted a texture repeat in awhile, I thought I'd take it easy on you. The next one might not be such a breeze.....

the fabric workshop and museum

Took a field trip last Friday to Philadelphia. The Arts Center near my sister offered a group bus trip to The Fabric Workshop & Museum; my sister, Lisa Kelley and I grabbed the last 3 spots! Ladies ranged in age from 39-83 - and I think we were all equally excited.

We peeked around the gift shop first - love that wallpaper up top that's a print of a fabric. Lots of the items for sale looked familiar, but I didn't recognize any names - and of course, I didn't write them down! We took a small tour of the museum next, where we saw some of the most glorious applications of textile art (a 20' tall sculptural veil of silk flowers) - as well as quite a few controversial and provocative pieces (embedded in social injustice and such), too. I love museums, I love getting up close, I love learning about the story behind the works, I love adding new perspectives to my heart and soul. Some of the exhibits are pieces of larger installations, but the effect is not lost! (pics not allowed in the musee).

After the tour, we went to the screenprinting workshop. Ooooh. Aaaaah. Heart going pitter-pat fast as can be! After reading the ink & spindle blog for a few months now, the appearance of the tables and set-up was really familiar. These tables/spaces are used for art students, artists-in-residence and on-site educational programs. One of the artists there was working on a huge piece where she was drawing the design in repeat by hand. I've never seen this done in person - and I could have watched her all day!

The instructor gave us a tutorial on the screenprinting process from start to finish. Then we were allowed to create a t-shirt or a piece of fabric using either the screens they provided or creating our own with contact paper. Lisa and I just looked at each other. Fabric? Yup. Make your own? Yup. Coming up with a design quickly was fraught with pressure - Lisa and I both grabbed the most mentally accessible elements from our collections of designs. (Have you seen Lisa's incredible surface designs?)

Above: left - my design cut out of contact paper; right - Lisa's design ready on the screen. 
Below: Here we are gettin' busy...clockwise from left: Lisa screening; my sister Linda screening - she's so talented and has always been a major inspiration of mine; me & my scraggly hair pinning fabric down.

Above: My screen after a few prints.
Below: The final design. Modeled after my annika fabric

Will definitely be finding a way to incorporate screenprinting into my work. Maybe not today or tomorrow....but you'll see something!

Happy Monday one and all! Sun is shining, and I'm a happy girl!

donations for happily handmade giveaway

I donated these 11 teatowels to the Happy Handmade Giveaway, which starts next week. Pretty happy to see Nicole and Lindsay brought back the HHG. That event single-handedly catapulted my handbag business into profitable realms when I participated in 2005 and 2006. In addition, my mailing list jumped by about 600 people each time. Some people unsubscribe when the event is over, but that's still not a number to shrug off. This event really was the beginning of the beginning for what we commonly refer to as "indie designer" - they didn't make it up, but I really started to see the phrase cropping up so much around that time. More businesses had their own websites b/c etsy wasn't even on the radar - don't know how that will affect the event this time. It's funny how much of my time back then (like it was eons ago!) was spent emailing and exchanging links with other indie businesses. Now I fill that time with blogging and twittering and planning hostile takeovers of the fabric world - mwa, ha, ha, ha....

Are you participating as a sponsor? Are you going to enter? Lots of handmade goodness to win!

Find out more on their website.

happy spring!

a gold haze of blossoms soon to come on this forsythia.....a happy promise of spring

Hope the first day of Spring treated you well! I spent the day with my sister and Lisa Kelley (my Printsource boothmate) at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. What a rejuvenating, eye-opening experience! Just what the doctor ordered. I will post pics on Monday fer shur!

color inspiration: twisted thumbtacks

When I posted about Paula's journal a couple weeks ago, I mentioned thumbtacks I used to make out of polymer clay. These would be them. Twisting clay into marbelized rainbows never gets old. The result is always unpredictable, and it's pretty relaxing!

I am loving my new camera! Snapping away at anything and everything - completely ad nauseum!! Now I know why some places sell the body and lens separately - this one doesn't zoom as far as I'd like. Will have to buy another one for crazy up-close shots.

he's got ups

Almost exactly this time last year, Peanutman was obsessed with his pogostick. Must be spring fever giving him jimmy legs - he walks by his pogostick like she's an evil temptress and tells her, "I'll be back for you later." That's serious jumpitude. Matt recently found the Flybar 800 - a pogostick on steroids. I thought he was kidding when he told me the name b/c it sounded so much like the Nimbus 2000 from Harry Potter. But it's real....oh, it's really real. Comes with its own on-board allen wrench for tension & weight adjustment on the fly. The first time I tried it, I bounced right onto my backside b/c I was not expecting the height. Um, these guys in this youtube are doing back flips. Is it too overprotective to make him wear a mouthpiece and roll him in bubble wrap? Look how gargantuan it is compared to the pogo...mon dieu.