sewing for children

Here is the blog of a woman who created sewing kits for children as a thesis project. The kits are designed to gradually build skill, and they are very appealing.

found via designsponge

one thousand paintings

Have you seen onethousandpaintings.com ? I found it last night via del.icio.us, but I guess it's on Boing Boing too. This guy did a thousand simple paintings of numbers from one to a thousand and he's selling them online with a set pricing structure so that the more paintings are sold, the more they cost and the base price is based on the number itself.

It's an interesting project for sure, and he's making tons of money rather rapidly.

What do you think?

a chain of not so great events

I haven't posted in a while because a bunch of not so great things have happened. Scott got bitten by a black widow on Saturday, and we had to go to the e/r and wait forever, so long that the bite had all but disappeared before he even got in to see the doctor. He is fine, nothing really happened, it seems that the spider didn't inject any venom.

We were up until about 1 am and then my daughter woke up at 4 am with a stomach flu! Ack! She's fine now too.

I got sick too. Also I lost my camera!! Also I was not able to go to L.A. for Sarah's graduation.

google notebooks

I found this link via OneGoodBumblebee. Google has come out with Google Notebook, that allows you to research things and clip them into a notebook. Very exciting. I'm going to start right now!

sketchup

Sketchup is so much fun, and it's free from google right now. You can very easily make 3D models, texture them, and add shadows. You can put them on google earth, or share them with people using 3D warehouse. The tutorials are easy and fun, easy enough for kids. My son has been making some amazing stuff. Here is what I made this morning, it's a model of our living/dining area, so that I can play around with furniture arrangement.

silkscreening tutorial

This is an excellent silkscreening tutorial by Shannon Gerard on No Media Kings. Really, it's very good and in depth. Plus No Media Kings is a great project by Jim Munroe the author of the excellent "Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask" that I know I have written about on this blog before. I checked that book out of the library, read it, loved it and checked out all of his other books. And now he is giving that book away in e-book form on his site. I also loved his book "Everyone in Silico".

pineapple guava blooming in the garden

It's cloudy and cool and overcast today and it looks like rain, which is odd for this time of year, but good for the garden. The kids have friends over and are playing happily in the other room. I'm cooking a big batch of vegetarian baked beans and I have bread dough rising and I'm wearing an apron. All of these things make me feel happy.

I might start on a new painting tonight, a series actually.

I've been doing nothing much but working these days. I realized yesterday that I have uploaded almost 300 photos to my flickr stream this week and they are all eBay pictures.

Here's a good one:


a vintage circle skirt of Australian product graphics.

El Amor

El Amor Plaque, originally uploaded by monster town.

poppies

These glorious poppies are growing at our house!

tra la la

I didn't even open my computer all weekend, except once to look up a companion planting chart.

The weather has been glorious and I have been outside working on getting the garden planted. This yard is small, but I has lots of lovely plantlife packed into it. I have mostly been thinking about the vegetables. In the two raised veggie beds so far, we have planted 5 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, 2 kinds of basil, 2 kinds of parsley, 2 kinds of cucumbers, 2 kinds of peppers, golden beets, lettuce, carrots, 2 kinds of beans, and a watermelon. I have never had luck with watermelon, but Zelia really wanted it and who am I to say no.

It's been a busy week for us. Scott flew to L.A. and had meetings all day on Wednesday, Sylvan got round two of his braces put on (yes it's possible to get braces twice by the time you're 12!), the kids went to Marine World with friends and then we did Petaluma River Cleanup on Sunday.

I opened up an eBay store last week and worked on trying to make it look decent, which isn't easy when you don't really know html. Now I need to work on stocking it. I'm going to put a lot of my little things, like the 1950's new old stock eyeglass frames that I found, and my huge collection of vintage patterns, and also my higher end vintage clothing.

This was all inspired by this post on Risa's blog, where she talks about some pretty dresses on the fancy vintage site, the Frock Now if you go and look at Risa's entry, the middle dress in the bottom row was mine! I sold it to that lady for an embarrasingly low price, and it's a killer dress, and now she is selling it for $575.00! Which is probably what it is worth, so I decided to experiment with selling my best vintage for what it is worth.

The first expensive thing that I'm putting in my store is this elaborate Zandra Rhodes creation that I found last week.


Every inch of the surface is covered in beads and embroidery and it's amazingly well made. It's also in perfect condition, and I'm considering pricing it at around $1,200.00 . Here's the listing. I'm quite pleased with how the logo and template that I made turned out.

May Day

Spring and I walked down to the big protest today that was right in our neighborhood. I absolutely loved it. It makes me happy to see thousands of people of all ages speaking out together.


The middle photo is one that I took from the roof of the corner market. A neighbor and I got a ladder and climbed up there so that we could take a good crowd photo. I wanted to show the crowd. And this photo was taken after people had been steadily walking that way for more than half an hour. There were really thousands of people.