GLAZING IS AMAZING PT. 2

My first ceramics class has officially come to an end. I didn't sign up for the next round of classes in time, partly because I didn't have the cash, and partly because my schedule might be slowly killing me. But I am now officially on the waiting list for round two, and really hope that someone reconsiders their ceramic dreams so that I might take their place! Obviously the inability to be involved has made the whole thing more appealing to me. Plus, there's something kind of meditative about making things out of clay which is very enjoyable. I would like to improve!

The best line I overheard during this round of classes: "I'm making stands for our snow globe collection." Of course you are! And yes, I also find it funny that I made small bowl after small bowl, vessel after vessel. How many fragile containers does one woman need? Answer: A LOT. I like plants and have one million errant bobby pins and hair elastics. And who doesn't need a comically tall, thin vase to hold all the singular flowers they receive? Answer: I DON'T. But I do like the way it looks.

ART CRUSH: LEFT FIELD CARDS

I recently connected with Amelie Mancini, a Mets fan/painter/printmaker from France who now calls NYC home. This beautiful set of letterpress postcards is from her edible all-stars series - baseball players with food names! She also has a series of bizarre injuries cards, as well as a tribute print to The Kid (Gary Carter) with all profits donated to The National Brain Tumor Society. Check out her card shop & paintings for more.

Anyone want to receive a postcard in the mail featuring a baseball player with a food name? Despite the fact that I am terrible at sending out friendly personal mail (cards/notes/etc) I'd like to write a few messages to 5 of you. If there are 5 of you interested out there in web-land, that is. Leave me your email address in the comments and I will contact you for your address.

Guys, it's almost baseball season...

SPRING INTO ACTION.

The past few weeks have been all about printing, sewing, picture taking, editing, and snacking. The end result? New Falconwright items are available now!

At the risk of repeating myself (more details on our blog) we're both really happy with this small leather army. These guys are bright!

We also took some more lookbook pics, which involve a babe (Michelle), pinball, french fries, bubble gum, Toronto, digital cameras, disposable cameras, and chocolate mint shakes.

Big ups to Tim Smith, Michelle Smoliniec, and The Pinball Cafe. And lastly, the biggest props of all to my very hard-working, very funny (especially when she's tired and hungry) partner in crime, Danielle!

ART CRUSH: KAYE BLEGVAD

I've long admired this wee skulls ring by Datter Industries (aka Kaye Blegvad) via my ever expanding Etsy favourites list, and finally brought it into my home and onto my hand. It arrived in the most simple/perfect packaging (red string!), and looked even better then I had imagined it would. I've worn it every day since. A new talisman to ward off evil spirits? Sure, who couldn't use that! Here it is modelled by Tara Bursey's plaster finger, which usually hangs out on my bookshelf and isn't weird at all.

Kaye Blegvad is a London born, Brooklyn based illustrator and maker of things. I love both her illustration and jewelery work a lot. She draws sword carrying ladies, hairy legs, healthy living, touches on themes of luck (one of my not so secret faves), witchcraft (another favourite!), and illustrates her day to day life in a way that is not just visually pleasing, but funny too. Art with a dark heart and a bit of humour to it really hits me in the guts in all the right ways.

Check out her shops (illustration and jewelry) and portfolio!

Her beautiful business card also features a hand. As does mine. I think this is a pretty good sign that we should probably be pals...

SNEAK PEEKS, SONGS, SUPERIOR PINKS.

I adopted 3 new plants this week, and I'm hoping I can put the Great Spider Plant Tragedy of 2011 behind me with some healthy new plant life. Will tragedy (aka my inability to keep indoor plants alive) strike again? My house is really deficient in the natural light department, so it's really only a matter of time. Updates on the future Aloe Disaster of 2012 pending.

Falconwright leather all cut, lined up, and ready for printing. There are some bright new colours on this table, but the black and white keeps their secret for now...

Pattern printing time. Rinse and repeat! Lines, dashes, triangles, woven squares, art deco haystacks, slightly askew v's, and more. Deadweight is feeling jealous of all the time I've been spending with Falconwright. Deadweight needs to toughen up.

My new highly technical set up for burning screens. Dear Charlotte: the glamour of my home set up in full force! Old broom handle to hang bulbs from, crappy mint yoga mat to stand on while I print, paper all over the floor, vegetable oiled transparencies, etc.

Opening a fresh paint container for the first time is one of my favourite small pleasures in the print zone. They never unscrew as easily again. I recently decided to try out some Permaset inks, and this glow pink is far superior to Speedball's neon pink in almost every way (almost because it costs twice as much).

And lastly, while we're in black and white mode, my band recently made a video in our practice space. It's called Fine Lines and will appear on an upcoming EP release! New songs, forest murals, chicken lamps, calm boys, serious faces, deep breaths, frantic instruments - this video has it all (well, all of that).

GLAZING IS AMAZING.

These are a few things from my first couple of ceramics classes all glazed up (and in the case of the last photo, oxide-ed up). The first one will house a new plant in the near future, the second ones have taken over for some boring old ramekins in the salt and pepper department, and the little city at the bottom will turn into a small army of garden markers come spring. Edges = rough. Lessons = learned. Status = beginner. I'm really looking forward to my second attempt at glazing this week!

DEADWEIGHT X LEMONADE: NO.1 (DOGS)

My pal Caitlyn (aka Lemonade) and I have started a collaboration adventure. We plan on releasing different projects over the course of the year, and this is project number 1: a collection of 6 dog postcards featuring some of our very favourite dogs! Though my very favourite dog is the golden lab, which I didn't draw? Major oversight on my part.

We just happened to draw our dogs facing in the opposite direction too. This was not intentional and I wonder what it says about our brains? You can purchase this set of 6 postcards at the upcoming Love & Rummage show at The Workroom from Caitlyn (who will also be selling a bunch of other excellent items of her own - cards/prints/etc). After Love & Rummage we'll put some up on the web!

So, send your favourite dog loving friend a greeting! Or if you're like me and can't have a dog of your very own at this point in time, keep them for yourself, name them all, and get real weird about it. We got together last night, tied them up into packages, and the verdict is in: we're both really happy with how they turned out. This is Caitlyn (and her excellent hair) showing off the goods.

UNDERGROUND.

The past two weeks have been a frenzy of activity. My phone tells a calmer, darker, more moody-filtered (and badly lit) version of that story though: 1. Leather shopping for Falconwright. 2. Practicing for this show on Friday! 3. The left side of my work table featuring: a lizard painting by John Malta and a ceramic skull by Julie Moon. 4. The right side of my work table featuring: coffee and neglected recording devices. 5. The Bird and Banner scarf which hangs above my bed. 6. A completely typical subway shot. If only my station was built into a real castle. Frank's Castle. 7. Ceramics class. Our class symbol? A a crescent moon. This is the only non-underground shot. Apparently, I've been spending a lot of time in basements...

DAMN WRIGHT.

Spent a large part of this weekend with good friends, taking photos and eating prop cheese. Then the rest chained to my laptop. The end result? Falcowright's shop is now live! Check out the lookbook on our new website for more pictures! YEAH.

This is the first time I've ever helped plan a photo shoot of any kind, and it turned out way better than Danielle and I had imagined. All thanks to Tim's expert camera wrangling and Shayna's whole being a knockout thing, of course. Hot damn!

That last photo up there of Danielle and I only begins to illustrate how happy we are to have made it through the weekend without any major setbacks. Big ups to my partner in crime - you're the best.

LATELY.

After the ridiculously wordy last post, here are a few quiet pictures from this week: printed some packaging for Falconwright, picked up some wool to attempt a scarf (black, of course), and begun setting up my home studio.

NOTES ON A NEW YEAR.

Welcome to day 5 of 2012. I'm typically slow to digest time in general. And the whole hype surrounding the end of the year (sorting through the best and worst moments of our lives, ranking and listing them in order, etc) always leaves me feeling a little weird. But I will attempt to embrace that sort of business this year with the awesome power of LISTS! Incredibly wordy lists.

Cool Stuff From 2011:

1. Kept myself busy with Deadweight. Took on design jobs (City Of Craft, album art, etc), did a series of illustrations for my first national publication (The Walrus), sent cards to some cool shops and Etsy orders all over the place (hitting the 100+ sales milestone in my shop!), started a line of leather goods with a good pal (Falconwright), and generally become more focused and comfortable with my design style. Thank you so much to everyone who has supported me this past year - it means a lot!

2. Challenged myself to try to be less reserved (attempting to tweet and blog more, however lame, was part of this exercise). A happy bonus of this attempt was meeting some really cool new pals. I also joined Facebook this year, one million years after everybody else in the world, and guess what? I don't hate it!

3. Upped my spice tolerance in foods (ha). I will continue this mission by using the ridiculously hot (but totally delicious) sauce my friend Shayna gave me for Christmas.

4. Went camping for the first time and loved it. Can't wait to go again. #bears

5. Started a savings account. The important word being started. It's truly embarrassing how little I have in there, but it's a start.

6. Did something fun for Halloween. Finally.

10 Goals For 2012:

1. Be less distracted by the Internet/TV/my phone and more focused on the company of the people around me and the tasks at hand. Sometimes I see people hanging out together and someone is on their phone and I'm like "ewww," but then I realize I am just as guilty of doing that exact same thing.

2. Build onto my current tattoo, then add another to the mix. Frivolous and fun.

3. Don't dwell on sad feelings. To anyone who reads this blog, I likely appear to be a pretty happy person, and I am, but I also struggle with a pervasive sense of sadness that always seems to lurk around me at all times (oh, and I tend to be a bit dramatic at times - can you tell?!!). I don't really plan to start airing that business out around here, but it can be a struggle. Life feels long and hard to me a lot of the time, despite all the great/wonderful/exciting/inspiring things all around me. I'd like to spend more time focusing on all of that good stuff, and wasting much less time on the other stuff. But I'd also like to use this as a bigger source of inspiration for my work - make more meaningful illustration/print stuff and less greeting cards! How did I even begin making greeting cards? It's a mystery....

4. Cook more! Sounds simple enough, but it's hard to execute when you tend to busy yourself to a point of ridiculousness. I hope to make time for cooking, like I make time for everything else. I've started with this soup, a recommendation of Danielle's, and it's impressive. If you make it, you will not be unhappy about it.

5. Continue learning new things. I start a ceramics class this month and I can't wait. Other things I'd like to learn: how to use illustrator, how to use a sewing machine, how to knit, flexibility, everything.

6. Seriously consider a new career path. I have a day job on top of this design stuff. It's not realistic for me to quit my job and do this full time, but on the other hand it's not desirable for me to continue spending 8 hours a day doing something that isn't challenging or inspiring me. That being said, part two of this goal is to take my day job for what it is at the time being - a very reliable way to pay my bills and put food on my table - and stop feeling so entitled about deserving anything else. It takes time to figure out where you want to be in life, right? So many people have a job they don't like, and so many of them likely do not complain about them endlessly (and those people might have kids, or responsibilities that are much larger than my own). I think it's good to remind myself that things aren't half bad and nobody really likes the sound of an alarm clock in the morning.

7. Make more music. My first artistic love/pursuit/hobby was making music. I went to college for music production, and I moved to Toronto to work in a post production studio. Until I almost immediately quit because talking about gear bores me beyond belief (as did recording voice overs for commercials and the shitty starting salary/work hours). I was also 22 when I up and quit that job - so I certainly wasn't thinking clearly. I still make music with my band, and we do plan to release some music this year (which I'm pretty pumped about!), but I don't put nearly as much time into it as I would have liked to last year. Home recording 2012.....bring it on.

8. Be a better friend/partner/person. I have a really wonderful network of excellent people all around me. And a dude that always makes sure I have full glasses of water and cheesies. For someone with very little family in her life, my friends are invaluable to me, and I want to let them know that ALL THE TIME. But not too much, because that would be annoying to them. "Alright, alright, we get it!"

9. Plan a trip. Somewhere, anywhere.

10. Hit a home run. Mark my words - this is the year!

Honourable Mentions: win the lottery and buy a cottage and move there forever, learn to tolerate cilantro so I can go out for more Mexican food, draw people more often, collaborate with Caitlyn, build a better backyard garden and DO NOT let the tomatoes take over again, enjoy salad (jokes!), spend time with more dogs, go to more Jays games, curb my mild ocd tendencies by learning to trust ovens and alarm clocks and door locks, buy more records.

Ok, that was all terribly indulgent! But I guess my friends can now say "Sandi, you are totally letting your tomatoes take over - I thought you said you wouldn't let that happen again? Liar!!!"

I'm looking forward to 2012. I hope you are too. Let the games begin.

ART CRUSH: STACEY ROZICH

My friend Tim got me this incredible Stacey Rozich print for Christmas. So good. Rozich is a Seattle based illustrator/designer and all of her work is excellent. Lots of angles, shapes, colours, and dark horned characters. She also animated characters for The Shrine/An Argument video by Fleet Foxes. If you haven't seen it already, it's definitely worth a viewing. The visuals really compliment the song - the whole thing feels very haunting and rich.

The Shrine / An Argument from Sean Pecknold on Vimeo.

GRAB BAG.

Christmas snuck up on me again. It always does! Back in November I made a vow to get all my Christmas stuff done (mainly shopping) by December first. Yeah right, Falconer. But now these dudes are hanging out on our clashing, slightly crooked Christmas tree and the holiday magic is happening. Man, did Dennis ever hit a home run when he got these guys last year!

I recently did a few design elements for Yule Britannia. Elizabeth makes delicious treats: figgy pudding, sticky caramel sauce, ginger cookies, spiced sweet nuts, etc! She delivered some treats to me at City of Craft this year (sweetheart) and it was all incredible. Available at The Mercantile on Roncesvalles.

Scenes From The Basement: 1. New rolls of leather to cut and print - dark grey, smokey grey, black, mint, plum, and cream! 2. Making peachy messes. 3. Compiling test sheets full of various patterns and colours (for future Falconwright wrapping?). I love the way these test sheets are layering up, all chaotic but still kinda pretty. Maybe the kind of pretty that only a mother could love, but still.

And speaking of Falconwright, you could win all 3 of these items by leaving a comment on this blog post by Friday December the 23rd at midnight. A winner will be drawn on Saturday the 24th!