People of the Omo Valley in Ethiopia.
Photographs by Hans Silvester. Check out his book! I've been wanting to add it to my library for a while.

yes

the whole time i kept thinking there was a piano accompaniment, i swear it sounds like there are at least two instruments, but no

minerals

Thank you for the inspiring find (above) carly waito
and thank you for your paintings (below)

an awesome book

I happened upon this book i can't even remember how which was the problem. Yesterday something someone said reminded me of it and i have been searching and searching. I am going to buy it, and email the link to everyone I work with at school, it's so great!

book project

These are the pages of a small book project created as a gift for someone's baby shower. Painted backgrounds White on white collage for the characters.

i'm taking ukulele lessons

a rug

this is a rug

dia de los muertos

halloween

helmet customizing workshop

I'm so excited and stressed about the helmet customizing workshop I organized at my school! It's tomorrow! The fabulous artist Danielle Baskin of bellehelmets (work seen above) is coming to teach the kids about being stylish and safe on the streets by custom painting their own helmets. A fabulous company based in new york has donated all the helmets! Let's hope it all goes smoothly.

sugar skull instructions

click to enlarge for easier reading!

new print

it's one from a little while ago, and for some reason I never thought about how much I would love to sell prints of it until a coworker of David's (sidekick) asked me if I could paint her something of a weiner dog. and I thought to myself... "i've got one of those".

coming soon...

fully illustrated (by me) sugar skull making directions. stay tuned!

tis the season

it's about that time of year! so i whipped out my sugar skull molds! i'm going to have a skull decorating party this year so i can focus more on the ofrenda for dia de los muertos this year. I think total there are 33, not quite as many as last year. maybe i'll taking a piping class and then sell them next year. oh, and they are a super convenient decorations for our sweet halloween party. i will photograph decorations and such ! halloween!!!

c is for covet

I think I am in love with all things by Stewart + Brown. Here are a few! I am hoping to add these to my strained fall wardrobe soon!

Thank you Modish for bringing this amazing line to my attention!

amazing children's spaces

Over at the Lulu Bird there was a great post about a beautiful children's space in Japan! It got me thinking of amazing places designed for children I have experienced, and could think of nothing but St. Louis's City Museum. A sort of sculpture park/discovery zone.




You can climb outside (3-4 stories up). I can't wait to go home for the holidays and stop by!!

new painting

The hospital my aunt works for is having their annual auction, so she asked me to donate some art. I had no idea what to give them and after a lot of pestering they at least gave me a theme of something for a kids room. easy peezy. so i donated a print of a previous painting and i did an original of a stegosaurus. i miss him being on my desk. Easy peezy only explains the creating part. Mailing was another story. The stegosaurus wasn't huge, but ups said packing supplies along would cost $75. $75 you gotta be joking. So I had to go and track a box down. I went to staples (i had already been there earlier that day getting ink to print the keen to be clean one) and they didn't have one i could buy so i managed to convince the manager to let me take some scraps! :) THANK YOU STAPLES!!

oddities

David found this one for me today. The research has been difficult. I know it is a woodblock print by a man named Giovanni Battista Nazari, born 1533, who wrote Tre sogni della tramutatione metallica (Three Dreams on Metallic Transmutation) and some other pieces. Tre sogni della tramutatione metallica is about the pursuit of the secrets of alchemy. Interesting...

c is for covet

I created this treasury on etsy in treasury west! come take a look!

even more wax carvings

Five new wax pieces! The first photo shows the pieces inspired by the mandrake botanical illustrations I wrote about below! I can't wait to take them to get cast. i have one more pendant i would like to work on, and i have another bracelet and ring set that i would like to make but i think i need a larger piece of wax! bummer.

twins

This is not two eggs! This is what came out when David cracked open one egg to make me some breakfast!

wax pieces

I just completed two new pieces of wax to cast. I'm not casting until I complete all the pieces I've drawn up. Three bracelets, three rings, four necklaces! Not bad right? Here are two of the three bracelets.

new hobbie

This past Sunday I went to a hoopilates class! It's the love child of pilates and hoop dancing. It was so much fun. Small group setting which was perfect since we all most likely looked ridiculous trying to keep the hoops up. I'm going to keep going and I'm hoping to find some hoop dancing classes as well...another story. However, I bought my own hula hoop made by circlecandy. Check it out!

oddities

This image I recently found while researching more antiquated science texts like the gessner book i blogged about earlier, which inspired my first sterling silver piece of jewelry. This illustration is from The Naples Dioscorides circa 625 a Greek herbal text! Crazy! I had no idea that illustrated texts dated so far back. This is a mandrake.

the hydra

So I finally finished my piece from the jewelry class I was taking!! I wore it all weekend and have to admit that I am incredibly proud of myself!

and the pic below is of the mold I had made. I am hoping to sell these in my shop eventually, but the plan is to make more sterling silver pieces before I list them all!

I've also been thinking about having an illustration for each piece of jewelry that I make, you know like the illustration that inspired it! So perhaps i need to work on a hydra illustration, which is kind of perfect because I am suppose to be creating a new piece of art for a child's room to donate to my aunt's work's auction. Julia, my cousin (whose mom's auction it is) has a toddler, who is hilarious and apparently loves dinosaurs! He calls them (spelled how it sounds) guy+no+cores= ginocaurs. Hydras pretty close right?? :/

experiments

i am starting to get the hang of this whole experimenting thing. i'm starting to accept disasters as steps forward and not a waste of time. my newest experiment is linoleum block printing on shrink plastic for some jewelry pieces. Here they are prior to shrinking!

art endeavors

So i have been taking a jewelry making class for two weeks now. It's a lost wax carving class! taught by Jennifer Sarkilaht owner of Odette New York at artist Lena Corwin's studio.

Some of Jennifer's jewelry to give you an idea of what it lost wax carving jewelry looks like

We just finished our first piece of carved wax and it is being cast this week! My inspiration came from this great website called Turning the Pages Online. It has all these old books that are too delicate to be handled so they have them almost animated online. My favorite is Conrad Gesner's Historiae Animalium!

They Hydra:

I can't wait to get it back!