Sewing!

 I'm lovin' my new tote bag. It has a pocket, for your mobile, or wallet or to hang your glasses. Way cool!

Kids' Stuff

For these prints, I went back to cutting the designs from plastic sheets and printing from a template. It meant my screen was available for multiple prints and I could work faster.
I'm getting better at using the photo emulsion tactic, but it's rather time consuming! 

I will be using these prints for a variety of kids' related objects such as aprons, decorative pillows, and stuffies.

Summer Market Announcement!

This summer I'm bringing You & Mia to the streets of Vancouver!  So exciting.

In July and September I'll be selling my latest and greatest items at the Blim Monthly Markets (more info to come). There will be t-shirts with bikes, new children's aprons, pencil cases with Vespas, pillow cases with hippos, and hopefully some great tote bags for your groceries and other items that need to be carried around.

The Blim  Market is a great opportunity to see all the creative talents of local crafts people and enjoy a day of outdoors shopping. Hopefully the sun is shining.

Tribal Textiles in Zambia

I recently returned from Zambia. While there, I took the opportunity to visit Tribal Textiles, near Mfuwe.
Driving along a bumpy country road lined with trees, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, there is a signpost for Tribal Textiles. Turning off the main road, you are greeted by white-washed buildings, lush greenery overhanging wooden benches and stone courtyards. The air is cool and fresh under the shade. We stretched our legs, cramped from the long road-trip and walked through the shop and workshops.

Colors pop off of pillow cases and aprons. Bold geometric shapes and traditional patterns cover everything from bedsheets and curtains, to table runners and other home accessories. Everything is made with 100% cotton, designed and painted individually. I first thought the designs were created using Batik, like in Indonesia. But the designs are made using a starch paste that is sun-dried and then hand-painted. Baking the fabric makes it durable in countless washes. We arrived during the mid-day meal break so we missed out seeing the process, but there's a great little video (by Will Benson) that explains the How To part.

Enjoy!

Mama Olifant

Here's the elephant pillow I designed for Mother's Day. I was a wee bit late and only printed it the day before so it wasn't much use to my mom, or any other moms for that matter. Happily, it has been pointed out to me that it can also work quite well as a Baby Shower gift  (which can happen at all times of the year)! 

In short, the back is made up of an elephant stencil I cut out, while the front is screen printed using screen filler. I'm enjoying sewing pillow cases as they look very complete and finished at the end, and in reality it's just a bunch of straight lines! Print, print, zoom, zoom, cut here, cut there, and you're done! Voila!

Just for the fun of it, here are some of my other favorite elephants:

and to pull on the heart strings, here's a scene from Dumbo:

 Now, go call your mom and let her know how much you love her.

When in doubt, put a Vespa on it

I made a pillow! I know, not the biggest accomplishment ever, but I'm a novice in the world of sewing, so I'm excited! The stitches are (more or less) straight, and the pillow fits inside. What more would you want from a pillow case? Oh yeah, a cool image. So, when in doubt, slap a Vespa on it. 

The large front Vespa was done by cutting a stencil from my stash of overhead projector plastic. I didn't want clean lines, so I cut in and around the marker lines, making the final print like a sketch. I opted for doing both sides of the pillow using a stencil. It wasn't for any artistic reason, I just didn't feel like getting all the screen printing paraphernalia out and having to clean the screen afterward. Talk about lazy! 

Well, maybe not lazy, so much as I'm finding myself with a new found attitude of "just do it" (for fear of getting dinged by Nike, I should say "just get it done!"). My "just get it done" attitude means also that I'm opting for good over perfect and it's leaving me with many more items produced and while I avoid  the endless tinkering and over-thinking I just plow ahead and learn along the way.

It's a pretty cool pillow, if I do say so myself!

Painting

I find screen printing to be very controlled and with the final outcome to be the result of much thinking, preparation and planning. To shake things up I enjoy painting. So far, my painting extravaganzas have been limited to throwing painting on a canvas. The bigger the better with some of the paintings being 6x3 feet. There's no plan. There's no initial idea. I don't sketch anything and definitely don't aim to create anything visibly recognizable, i.e. a person, a house, a tree. I just choose a color I like. I quite enjoy adding that first dash of color on a blank canvas. It's similar to when you first lift the silk screen after pulling the paint through the stencil. "Aah, look how it has changed, there's a mark now! How fun!" This little initial mark of paint creates an energy or perhaps more accurately, a stepping stone for the next mark. Should the next blob of paint be close or far away? Do they connect or is it all separate? It's like a dance. And soon enough the canvas is full and I have no more paint in the bucket, but plenty on my apron!

Printing, printing, printing

So, to celebrate that the Vespa has been brought out from its winter storage I thought it was an appropriate image to try out stencil printing. Also, I needed to get away from my regular screen printing extravaganza.

There’s something fantastic about printing which I believe comes down to all those tedious steps I so criticize. You start at one point, presumably with an idea. Then, perhaps you sketch it on a pad of paper, and with that it changes. Your idea becomes a reality and the lines aren’t quite what you had imagined but a version of them. You correct, amend and finalize the sketch to your liking. Again, it has changed. In the case of stencil printing, you would then cut out the design from card stock or, as in the images here, from a plastic sheet. Again, the design changes as the exact-o knife slips or your hand wobbles. 

By the time you add paint, fill out the empty space and lift the plastic to reveal the final print your idea has morphed into a beautiful creation. It is somehow removed from you personally, making it easier to look at it objectively. 

For me, because I am my own worst critic and I’m exceedingly hard on myself, I enjoy printing, in whichever form, because of this objective view. The final creation is a version of my original idea but I like it even more!

A Handmade Stamp

As you may have noticed the Little Viking is gone. Last I heard she's out biking somewhere in the sunshine, drinking beer and trying to prove that the earth is indeed flat. In any case, you can't trust Little Vikings with your business.

So, I guess it's just you and me now.

I'm back to creating a logo/stamp for my products with the new shop name, You & Mia. I decided the best way to get a truly handmade feel is to, well, make it by hand. Go figure.

Linocut is pretty self-explanatory.  You do need to pay attention though or you may inadvertently cut out the wrong part of the pattern. Also, keep your free hand behind the cutting tool. It's easy to accidentally jab your hand as the tool slips out of the linoleum. Not a nice feeling. The natural thing to do is to mark the linoleum with your design and carve out the marks, only to realize you want to carve our everything else except the markings. It's that whole negative/positive print thing. Don't be confused. Just look at the photos below.

ABC's of Biking Tuning

It's Spring, which means Summer comes afterwuuuurds and that means beach, bikini, longer days and shorter pants (also known as shorts). Perhaps you've been cooped up inside all winter and if you think the gym is an unmentionable institution of the modern world, then go biking outside. But, besides the exercise benefits, do you really need an excuse to bike? I really can't say anything negative about biking. I love it. So, for practical purposes I'm posting this How Tuesday video from Etsy because I realize not everyone knows how to tune their own bike (me included, ahem) and having a bike with functional breaks is a good thing in my book!

Show & Tell

India Block Printing

Connecting the dots

As with most people, I am drawn to a variety of things, liking this, that and the other.  I go through stages of fascination for a certain sport, a certain item in my closet, a type of food, a political persona or a TV show, then with the change of season something else catches my eye and I become slightly obsessed (for lack of a better word) with my new found love.  I always think my obsessive loves are independent of each other, each existing on their own, flowing in and out of my life. And yet, somehow they are all connected.

I came across the video below, available on the Marimekko website and I couldn't help but smile. To me, this fantastic little video reminds me of my other big love, experimental film. Hands down, Canada's Norman McLaren is my favorite. Without the use of a camera, McLaren created a unique animation style: wobbly lines, and dots that take on a personality, chasing each other across the screen. I am fascinated by the emotional effect these sounds and simple lines and dots have on the viewer. How is it possible for something so visually simple to make the audience laugh?

 

Although I cannot express in words the precise connection and why I am drawn to both Marimekko's large, colorful prints and McLaren's animations, surely one can see the similarities when they are presented as in the videos above.

Cheating on the prints

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: screen printing is all about the preparation. You prepare steps 1 through to Almost Ready and the finally you get to pull the paint over the screen (so exciting) and lift the frame to reveal your...masterpiece? Too often I have lifted only to be disappointed that the paint didn't go through everywhere or I entirely missed the corner of the pattern. Great. As I usually print on t-shirts, it's not an entirely cheap loss. Anyways, so there I am, staring at my not-so-great outcome and it occurs to me that it's my design, I can do whatever I want with it. I'm the creator, if I don't like it, I can change it to something I do! 

I have fabric markers, fabric spray paint and 3D fabric paint that I can add to the original print. Sometimes it just makes things worse, which leads me to add more colors, more paint, more cover-up. Gah! In the end it looks like some hodge podge mix, like a Versace shirt gone bad. Real bad. At some point I have to give in and accept that long gone are any chances of saving the design but at least I tried.

 This print was one of the very early ones. Two kayaks on the water, as seen from perhaps Jericho Beach. The sky is a result of spray paint, so it bled onto the mountains. Then, I added waves or ripples on the water using a fabric marker. The kayakers are also done with marker. I should probably have stopped right before I started outlining the mountains, but the owner of the t-shirt loves it, and still wears it after 5 years! I guess it's a good sign that the image is outlasting the actual cotton t-shirt! Perhaps it's time for a revised version?