Etsy Summit at Bristol

Few weeks ago I went to Bristol to attend Etsy Team Captain's Summit (a sort of a conference! :) ). It was great fun, I learned a lot, met lots of awesome people and absolutely fell in love with Bristol.

My hotel room was number 404, which probably made me way too happy :P

 

One of the things we did was go and explore Brunel's SS Great Britain. I love ships :O

 

Last but not least the ship's cat :D (one of three). Love a bit of awkward taxidermy... :P

Edinburgh Etsy Team POP-UP SHOP!

Apart from working n my own things I am also involved in the Edinburgh Etsy Team - as one of the leaders. My friend Fi of Fiona Heather is the team Captain. And this December with help from wonderful 20 members of the team we ran a POP UP SHOP in the Edinburgh New Town!

So here are some snaps of mostly my productsin the space ;)

 The best friends a girl could have: Fi and Dodo.

Solo Exhibition at Hula!

So at the moment I have a solo exhibition at Hula Juice bar & gallery! It's running through till 6th of January. Here are some snaps from the set up and opening night!

The vinyl with my name on it... Feels so good ;)

Calm before the storm! After people started coming I had no time to take any pics...

And this is one of my Christmas Cats on the window :) 

And, last but not least - this is a special print that I did for the occasion! Hula cat and dog :)

Going!

This is where i'm going.... Today! Goodbye internet ;) see you guys in a week! Although rumour has it there is wifi at the local pub. :)

When i am back I will start again on the weekly creatures. I am hoping to come across some while I am away ;)

What can a picture of measly strawberry plants get you?

The plant itself will eventually give you some strawberries. Until then all you can really do is take pictures of it I guess :) Well, this is what mine looked like at the time of photographing (I think about a weeks ago). And then I entered into Natalka's giveaway on instagram. The rules were to take a photo of a flower and tag it with Natalka's tag... Most of my plants just decided to give up their flowers so I took a picture of this, a bit for a laugh:

But my entry was accepted and.... Well and in the end I won! Winner was picked out of a hat, so at least the quality of my agriculture was not affecting the result ;)

So few days later this arrived in post:

...Perhaps one day I will be able to grow a flower like this :P But so far I need to satisfy myself with this. Which is not such a bad thing anyway ;)

You can see Natalka's fabulous shop here on Etsy. She makes lots of gorgeous embroidered jewellery. She also runs another shop with recycled computer parts jewellery and more :D Very cool.

Two pictures of yesterday

Recently I ordered some screens for printing. They arrived this week and upon opening the parcel this is what my eyes saw:

(very cute, eh :))

And then yesterday I went for a wonder around the town (weather was lovely and warm) and it turns out it was warm enough for even crocodiles to come out. Yep! :)

I hope your weekend was as good as mine! :)

Semestern 2

A prize goes to someone who guesses where *exactly* this is. Kinda hint in the title ;)

semestern

What more do you need than warm weather, lemurs and oversaturating pictures? NOTHING!

(look at that grass! it's almost toxic)

Two things I saw today

1. wrapped up antlers ready to ship in Mailboxes ETC. They were as big as me.

2. My brown ink has spontanousely gone mouldy. I have had it for 4 or maybe even 5 years - I admit, but I used it two weeks ago and it was still fine. Thankfully I had another brown ink that was unopened, but seriously? I am still a bit shocked. You can see the beautiful blobs floating in the bottle:

Bunnyrific

It seems that recently a large proportion of my facebook friends has obtained bunnies. (By recentely I mean probably over a year in some cases). So every day I seem to be bombarded with pictures like these:

(Courtesy of Sarah and Aisha)

And I am surely not complaining about this, it's like being bombarded with cat pictures only SLIGHTLY different. I remember in the olden days when I was 5 my granny used to have TONS of bunnies (before they became so last year and she moved on to guinea pigs). I remember of being terrified I will get bitten (but never was). But that is not only bunny related memory for me. Mostly it makes me think of this picture:

Albrecht Dürer is one of my drawing heroes. I think my soft spot are the superdetailed drawings and this was one of more important ones that influenced what I am doing now. I am not alone in being influenced by this image though, as so was Jürgen Goertz:

 This is a scupture which sits outside Albrecht Dürer's house in good old Nürnberg. Which I went to some 10 years ago (I think it was exactly that last November). And it was quite amazing.

So here is my bunny story for today. Now I am going to draw some!

from Sofia

Hello!
Couple of weeks ago I was pretty lucky to win Sofia Sobeide's giveaway! When it arrived at first I thought it was something from my friend Martyna, whose handwriting is very very similar. But then I saw that it was packet from Finland! Hooray! So it came in a miniature version of a pizza box, which upon opening revealed....

A paper bag from old comics. It was very very cute.

And inside the bag were...

A cute dog brooch and crocheted bunting! Bunting got immediately repurposed to...

...Become a Christmas Tree chain! :) It works perfectly on my sad synthetic tree :)
And then I found that one of the comic pages were actually an old Star Wars Comic. I didn't know Darth Vader could also speak Swedish! :D

Astro Cat

This is an absolutely fab print I got as a part of a swap with Aljona - the most talented young designer :). We have been on and off buddies for Etsy Christmas Bootcamp thing (yes, this probably is just a bunch of words that don't mean anything to You). The swap was probably the best thing that came of it SO FAR. You know what it's like, advice for an advice, eye for an eye, cat picture for a cat picture... I though the vintage style photo will be fitting for the nature of the print (read: I could only take photo with my phone and the wannabe hipster in me decided that using instagram is the best thing since sliced bread). I am utterly loving the print. The paper is lovely, the packaging was great, the little baby print that I got as a freebie was amazing too... All I need now is a frame fitting of this picture. And all YOU need now is your own copy OF THIS ASTRO CAT. You might now think this is a sponsored post or an advert. You are totally wrong. :) Young artists can't afford those!

The birch that really exists

 This is one of the 365 trees thing I am doing at the moment.This one is the number 67!

This is the original tree it was based on - not all of them are actually based on a real one, but this one grows near to where my grandparents live! :) (Also, mind my socks, haha)

So the tree thing you can follow on tumblr here: http://growaforest.tumblr.com/. I hit 70 today ;)

You never know when an adventure awaits you

I couldn't resist posting a cryptic cool title. Yesterday was a really cold and very very foggy day - almost like from Sweeney Todd. I went to see an exhibition by ECA students that have never exhibited before. Claire found out about it and I thought it could be fun to get out, although this type of exhibitions is normally in a weird place and contains rather modern type of art, which is not always to my liking. But days out with Claire are always fun and she is the best exhibition viewing companion I think I've ever had. The venue was the Old Ambulance Depot in Leith. I have never heard of the place. The Depot was in a gate, on one of the not-very main streets, and after a wee stroll around the area we finally found it. As I said, the day was cold, gloomy and this was some gray backyard, and we saw this:

 

 And to make things even better (not for the vehicle owner), on closer inspection I found this:

It was the most curious and surreal thing I saw all month I think. More surreal than any of the young ECA students work that then we proceeded to see. And I still wonder, what on earth was going through the parking attendants head when he was writing out the ticket?

I should probably also mention that I have a weak spot for three wheeled vehicles ever since I saw the Reliant Robin episode of Top Gear.

I'm Growing a Forest

It's early days, but bear with me!
This is my finger to give you a scale. My fingers are quite small.

Hello 2012!

A follow-up of yesterday's post, this is what I want to achieve this year.

1. I will focus more on Etsy, making more stuff and having an online presence. That is to say, yes, I will blog more.
2. I want to eat less rubbish and exercise more. I have had a gym membership ages ago and I really miss it! (not just for the sauna)
3. I will get a driving license. Being on a bus always makes me loose faith in humankind, thanks to troglodytes that are also on it. I don't expect to be able to afford a car, but this will be next in line.
4. I will get a heat press, exposure unit and all the other things I need for screen printing. And then I will screen print. Loads.
5. Revamp my blog and website looks.
   
   
   
   
   
   Photo was taken by the Chris.

Goodbye 2011!

This post is slightly inspired by this one from Liselotte. I wanted to do the same survey thing and I did, but some of the things seemed too personal and too long for anyone to read. So instead I decided to do a quick summary of what happened in 2011.

1. I graduated! No longer a student I feel free to roam and work on what I want. I am also not as skint as I was, but it's still far from being rich.
2. I designed my first line of brooches. Look here!
3. I got over the hand and some other health issues that I hope to leave behind forever.
4. I no longer live in a rented flat! (And also that doesn't mean I moved back with the parents, just moved in with the boyfriend).
5. I started learning a new language. Being fluent in two really is not enough!

It might not be all big things, but I feel like this was a very productive year (although it had a lot of faffing in it too).

This is the skull tree :) I am not a fan of fake trees but this was just a bit of a joke to carry the skull decorations, which I wouldn't put on the serious tree. (If you click on it to see the closeuo, you can see two  of the skulls on the right side at the very bottom).