you can never have too many...

isn't there some sort of saying that goes "you can never have enough friends"??? well friends (especially graphic design friends), i have found a website that will make you happy you read my blog. its called dafont.com and it is chock full of free typefaces :)

enjoy!

productive weekend

i would say the weekend has been productive, knit-wise. i really wanted to learn cables this weekend before school starts, so i got my bit of handspun handpainted yarn that i won from ebay and made it in to a cable hat. i just have to say i now love cables! they are super easier than i thought and look very complicated. i'm in love :)

this picture with it on my head is actually an indoor picture, where the light is a little yellow. i would have adjusted the colors, but my face then looked a weird sickly blue.

here, i present you with a picture in the daylight. i would say that these colors are more true than the yellow-light ones. also, here you can see the matching neckwarmer that i made for the cold days ahead (or when we go to michigan for christmas!)

this pic i had to show, because it is my dayflower scarf, fully blocked. this is my most satisfying finished object to date!

some stuff to post

first things first: i promised my friend mike that i would post some gradient mesh vector illustrations i did in illustrator. here ya go mike!

this is the original photo (maybe they're not visible this small, but check out the awful half-tones in this scan)



and the gradient mesh rendition:



if you want to see a bigger picture, please click on the image.

i didn't spend a whole lot of time on the background and the sea because i wanted to really concentrate on the legs and hand. also the sand looks totally fake but one of the requirements of this assignment was to use a pattern fill, so i thought the sand would be the least intrusive to the smoothness of the overall image. let me know what you think!

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my second post is about knitting (naturally). today i finished up this lovely scarf, whipped up in two days of feverish knitting. it is the dayflower lace scarf, the pattern of which you can find here.



here it is shown pre-blocking (for non-knitters, that means i haven't flattened it out yet). when its done blocking i will take another pic, because it shows the lace off so very nicely.

and last but not least, my world of knitted toys fish. they're super quick to knit and cute and i love to make them them out of my scrap yarn :)

creepy movie

i have now seen the single most creepy movie of my life. forget zombies, exorcists, serial killers, blah blah blah. i just saw open water and it was freaky. freaky 'cause it could totally happen. i could see being there in the water, getting stuck out in the middle of the ocean on accident. and the ocean is a scary thing. a very scary thing.

anniversary!

a couple of days ago, marco and i had our second anniversary! we have been married two whole years. i am so happy to have such a sweetheart for a husband... *swooon*

we went back to wente and had a looooong two hour lunch. the food was amazing as when we first had our reception there. we're so lucky to be so happy together! (knock on wood!)

i made wall art!

it's not much, but i made this little piece of wall art for my bathroom, which has some ill-positioned bars for towels and has weird wall space as a result of it. so i made this frame with starfish. i just distressed a frame, wrapped the carboard in the frame in green vellum, and then i glued some starfish i had onto it. i love it! i'm proud :) (err, it looks crooked, but that's just the pic)

and this is what i made

i sent this to aliciasjoy for the instant swap 3!

instant swap 3

i got this from alison in the instant swap. she is so super talented! and i LOVE the goldfish! she totally tuned into exactly what i would have picked out of the items she has made.

i organized this little instant swap trois and its going pretty smoothly. everyone has contacted me and it seems like everyone will get their stuff! that makes me think there could be a future in instant swapping. i'm thinking of organizing the instant swap once a month, given i have time. if you are interested in the idea, here is the craftster thread to get to it: Once-a-month Instant Swap.

my faith in the USPS has been restored!

so i had a swap item to send my partner Pink Mafia (aka rachelle) and i sent it on the 25th of july. rachelle is in hawaii and I'm in california, except the package went to montana for like, two weeks (i found out through delivery confirmations). then it came back to california and hung out here a bit. then we didn't know anything about it but now three weeks later it finally got to her in hawaii! this is what i knitted for her, i call it the Pink Mafiosa hat and wristwarmers :)

ahh to be young and crazy about dressing up...

so marco and i went to my friend from school stefan's birthday. stefan is a little crazy about halloween (like me) so he wanted to have a halloween dress-up party. but my other friends thought that was lame so instead it was an 80's/halloween party. so you could come dressed up in a halloween costume or in an 80's costume or in an 80's halloween costume.

i personally luuuuurve dress-up but felt uninspired for this until the last minute. i tried to think of something cool i could be and figured on an 80's metal band groupie. i remember my childhood fondly, where i lived under the watchful gaze of hair band posters, so i figured this would be it. plus i had the whole get-up (shamefully, i actually own and worn all the stuff i'm wearing in this picture, but thankfully never all together-- and the hair was for costumes only) and didn't have to put any more money into it. that's always good incentive.

so i present to you, the DEF LEPPARD (my absolute favorite hair band of all time and the one i look most upon with fond memories) groupie.

um and here's marco, looking like he needs a parrot in his fall-back costume for every halloween and costume party, marco the pirate.

the faux wood iPod case/cozy

inspired by faux wood craft foamy stuff, i made this iPod case for my naked iPod. it's pretty sturdy and altho this is a prototype (ie, badly sewn), it looks ok to me. i might make a better one later on... (hooray for summer breaks!)

over, but incoherent

it's over!!! my typography class is over. i turned in my last assignment, a book fully designed, illustrated, and written by me. i forgot to take a picture of it, darnit! but anyhow its over and i have three weeks to go until i start fall semester. fall should be interesting, because they say that this one class i'm going to be taking, Visual Communications, is some sort of life-altering experience. i welcome life altering experiences, so i'm looking forward to it.

in other news i'm in like, a million swaps between now and the end of my vacation. ok well not a million, but i'm in

1. the DIY swap (where you make a kit of your craft, ie knitting for me, and send it to someone you are paired up with) where my partner, amyshrugged, will be sending me a tutorial on hard-bound or leather bound books,
   
2. the Pet swap, where i'll be knitting for my partner's chihuahua,
   
3. the Name swap, where i have to make an item based on my partner's name,
   
4. the Pick Your Partner swap, the one i'm organizing! my partner, starsix, wants me to make her something knitted... i know exactly what i'm making her... but i'm not telling!
5. the Turtle swap; HHH (Heather of my past knitting/sewing swap) put this one together 'cause we both LOOOVE turtles! i don't know what kind of turtley thing i want to receive or what i want to make, but it should be interesting :)
6. and the Flower swap in which i'm to make something for my partner (706designs) based on her love of yellow flowers, red poppies and lillies (weird thing is, i love those flowers, too, and another weird thing is her name is sandra, too!)

it's a lot but it promises to be fun :) i just gotta stop joining any more swaps or i'll be knitting day and night.

oh and another discovery... the wonderful world of wists, a site that bookmarks pages for you throughout the internet... i have a christmas list here ;) and a swap wishlist (the kind of stuff i want from my swaps) here.

ONE MORE DAY

ugh. remind me never to take a summer studio class again. it was so fast paced! all fifteen weeks rolled into seven. CRAZINESS! i did get a good teacher with a wonderful sense of composition, though, so i think he helped me refine my own compositions and taught me good things. monday is our last day of class so i'll be FREEEEEEEEEEEE!!! until september when the craziness starts again!