it's been a while huh... well i guess i've got some 'splaining to do; i may have been traveling...again.
those of you following my funny shop via the facebook page heard that i took a wee road trip to le big pomme a couple of weeks ago.
i hadn't been there since maybe 2001 so to go back even for a few days tickled my bum ticker pretty hard. i don't remember much of my last visit in NYC except for the huge wall of flowers, pictures and miss you letters left for the ones that were taken with the twin towers of the trade center. i've changed easily 5 times over as person since my last being there and although i have always been a shutter bug nearly my whole life, this time i had a few obsessions i could not help but to go shutter nutty on. i even took my old slr Yashika camera for some selected shots, thankfully finding my 35mm color rolls the morning we left.
my eyes kept going up an down the streets we walked through and i tried to catch everything that caught my eye. obviously being in textiles, the texture seen in such an old city like NYC made me smile loud. and for obvious reasons i was really drawn to two main things: layers of stickers on walls, mailboxes and especially traffic lights and the good looking old bricks of buildings. which only triggered another thing i kept an eye out for, painted billboards.
we were perfectly happy just walking around and taking everything in but we decided we should spend a little money and take a day at the Natural History Museum by Central Park. the handful of times i've been in new york city, i had never been in this museum (or the park for that matter) and i was nearly floored just walking to the ticket booth. i'd only seen teeny parts of it in movies like the royal tenenbaums or the squid and the whale, but to walk through it was really something else. the dioramas were greater than the ones i saw while in victoria B.C and it felt like it would never end. i can say that this is the first time i fully enjoyed my time there. to top things off, one night i happened to find an Olek crochet bike!
i couldn't believe it and stared at it for at least 10 minutes until the rain started again to shoo me under a nearby awning.
when i got back, i wanted to start on some new crafts for the next craft sale since the last few had gone so well but i had something much more important to take care of first.
i mentioned a while ago of a ladyface friend, craftmate and classmate Brittni Joy who had launched her etsy site earlier this year. her shop may be empty for now but she has a hugely awesome reason for that: she got married! yep. the ultimate L-bomb :)
i was super happy of the news 'cause good people as neat as her and her sweety pie deserve it. she posted a sneek peek at their new apartment a while ago and i knew i just had to make them something for their new home.
near the end of last year, we had a funtastic workshop doing burn outs on different types of materials which i completely fell in love with. i knew i wanted to work with burn outs again but with my goldfish memory, i kind of forgot about it especially with all the summer happenings i had going on. when i decided on making something for brittni's new walls, this process came back to mind.
just weeks before starting on this, i came across a small roll of vintage graph paper at a thrift store but it wasn't like a graph paper i'd seen before. it had the same qualities as vellum which i thought was perfect to do this with. I found a pretty cutsie and completely fitting lyric from Breathe Owl Breathe's Shovel, laid it out and then with several incense sticks and a few hours with my ipod, i carefully burned out all the letters. i then backed the vellum paper with a soft yellow linen i scored in a fabric giveaway earlier this summer. the yellow screamed brittni and i thought with it being a soft tone of it, it'll fit into most decor colors she may choose.
everything seem to have gone of without a hitch on her big day. i kind of maybe wish i was there to see their faces when they open the gift, not at all because i'm nervous if they like it or not but maybe mostly 'cause i'm a dork and i like seeing people's reactions with presents.
after her ceremony, other ladyface friends and classmates Natalie and Tiffany and i decided to pop over to the beehive collective craft fair they held over the weekend. it was the last day and actually the last couple of hours but i was glad to even show a little face time. there were so many wonderful things and friendly faces.
i finally ran into the lovely Rosalyn and saw her new line of teeny woven necklaces, saw Katie and her wonderfully hand printed silk scarves and talked about how nice it is to have your own space to make a mess in. i wish i could have bought way more things but i caved with Keiley's cutie pie fox head brooches and of course a beehive tote.
so what do i have brewing up for the next craft sale? to be completely honest, nothing too big at all. I wanted to make itty bitty stuffies but i'm still working out the kinks of some patterns. i decided to just make something a little more simple and more in tune with going back to school...and that is all i will say for now :)
internally yours,
sister valentine
No comments:
Post a Comment