esprit de l'escalier

Heart (part 2)

I haven't posted any Etsy love in a very long time. My list of favorite sellers has become unwieldy, and I don't page through it as much as I used to. (Which is probably a good thing. As much as I love supporting artists, the wallet is a little thin these days.)

Okay, so I'm not the greatest at making these little collages, but I thought I'd give it a whirl. Apparently I'm into orange and foxes - it makes me think of the Little Prince.

1. I love the simplicity of this necklace. Local Library little drop.

2. I love Katy Horan's work, here's her letterpress at Little Paper Planes.

3. Joanna Rutter has the sweetest pins and necklaces. I like the Mr. Fox pin.

4. I have been crushing on Morelle forever. I constantly keep favoriting different bags.Burnt orange truffle clutch.

5. How cute is this guy? Gaspard E. Pinopine stuffed fox by Ninon.

(Click the image to see it larger. I hate that Flickr doesn't give me better sizing options.)

Last minute valentine wishes

Went shopping tonight - best time to go to the mall as it was empty. Snagged a kick-ass coat. All of this made me even later in this post. I made some valentines this weekend, wish I could have sent one to all of you. Hope you had a candy-filled day!

Randomness and some etsy love

Today we had some sun throughout the day, which was glorious. I had forgotten how gray central Ohio was (according to this website we have 190 cloudy days on average per year in Columbus). But there was a visible sunrise and full sun at lunch, so I went to restaurant with large windows and sat in one, soaking up the vitamin d with my soup and salad and Fast Company.

I've been humming songs from Anything Goes all day. My Dad found our old tape of the 1962 recording - it was always a big hit on family car trips. I was a little wound up Sunday night and gave a little interpretive dance show for the family. I'm really happy my brother didn't think to tape it. I really don't want to end up on youtube that way. I'd rather have my lunacy kept in the family.

When I moved from Chicago, my fabulous roommate Natasha traded up with her new flatmate. She's living with a great girl named Jean, who's a painter. I seriously covet many of her pieces that hang throughout their apartment - lovely snippets of everyday life and Chicago. Well, Jean just opened an Etsy store where she has some cards for sale and this awesome calendar of places around Chicago. (You can find Natasha posing around Graceland Cemetery in October.) Check Jean's shop out.

More Etsy love

Now that I am a poor grad student, I should probably stop trolling my favorite shops on Etsy, but I can’t help myself. My favorite seller list now goes for 12 pages. I love looking at the creative and beautiful things people are making and putting out into the world.

I have to share a couple of my recently acquired favorites, or new shops that I am ogling.

One, have I said anything about Bonspiel before? I can’t remember. I love this shop, and Ellen, its owner/creator. She does some fabulous things with leather, but my favorites are her little changepurses. Her little purses are $18 and are very well made, with great colors and screenprinted designs. She uses lots of animals and leaves. I have bought five. My Mom has two of them with squirrels that she keeps in her purse for makeup and whatnot. I have a shiny gold one with a butterfly, that I keep jewelry in when I travel. I use my light blue with a salmon head on it for cash, while my yellow with brown pufferfish and coral design keeps my cards. I love them all so much.

Ellen is great to communicate with, and I can’t say enough about my love for her shop. Check out her new Multipass (again with squirrel) or her Foxy Little Leather Changepurse. If only…

As you can tell, I’m kind of into little pouches. They are like cute boxes, only portable and they fit in my pocket.

I’m also loving the pouches from DrikaB. Oh my god, are these bags cute. The colors! The patterns! I bought a purse from her this summer and love it (see above). Her bags are so well made - they are quilted and soft, but seem very durable all the same. I love the difference in texture from the bag and its handle of jute webbing.

A post about current Etsy love cannot be complete without a mention of the dear Mischievous Meg! Friday she opened up shop. Check out that shot above. This girl is like the sunshine whisperer. I am a lucky owner of it (and two others in the la robe rouge series). You can buy it and another print here for $16.

I love her takes on the ordinary beauty that surrounds her world. She makes me open my eyes more and is one of my inspirations with film. I recently refound her blog and am entranced - she's thoughtful and generous and I love getting to know her.

Here's another one of my favorite prints of hers. Her medium format prints are sublime.

Sigh... there is so much beauty out there. Watch your wallets...

Etsy Love

I have been saying that I would write about Etsy for a couple of weeks and haven't gotten around to it yet. I have had a hard time knowing how to start. I've known about Etsy since fall of 2005 but didn't really start buying anything from it until the beginning of last year. Since then I've bought a lot of things, from necklaces for myself and others, a plethora of magnets, cards, prints, more and more prints, bags, t-shirts, and have bookmarked many more.

I love that you can read about the people who make everything. You can often visit their blog and get a feeling for who they are. You can ask them to make special things just for you (by messaging them and asking) or bookmark items that you can come back and salivate over later.

I love that you can search by category, color, geographic location, and by word. Everyday is a different group of selected items, which is perfect for browsing. Every week has a featured seller, with interview. At the very bottom you can see the latest items uploaded onto the site.

You can see some items I bookmarked here. I tend to just bookmark the sellers instead, though, and you can see my list here. The best way to start exploring Etsy is to find someone you like and look at their favorites. I bookmark a lot, because I never know when something might be perfect for someone. I'm always on the lookout for the perfect gift.

Below is a picture from my cubicle. There are lots of little things I've bought on Etsy (or the internet in general) that color my walls and keep me sane. I encourage the Etsy-uninitiated to start browsing and building bookmark lists. It's a fun way to shop, and it's good to know my money is going directly to the producer.

Snow and art

Weatherwise, we've had it more than good the past couple of weeks here in Chicago. Instead of snow on Thanksgiving day, we have 60+ degrees! December, however, wants to make sure we haven't gone soft or forgotten what winter in the midwest means. Yes, at the best yesterday it was 60 degrees and today the world is covered in snow and the temperature is somewhere in the low thirties, but it is December, right? Shouldn't we be pleased with the weather we've had up to now?

In honor of today's weather, the roommate left a Billy Collins poem up on the internet for me. It begins like this:

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

Read the rest of "Snow Day" here.

Also, today is the last day of diptychs over at the Compound Word Project. I contributed a picture, you can see it on Monday's post. Each photo pair creates a compound word and we're supposed to guess the word the pictures create. I'm really happy I was able to participate this round. Thanks Shari for putting this together again!

I just got an email saying that those who can work from home should do so. Unfortunately everything I need to do I need fresh data from yesterday. Damn! (Plus there's been another fire on the Red Line, so I think I'm going to be late today.)

After the break is a picture of my still life from last night.

Let's start at the very beginning

Tonight I had my first session for my 4 week "first time drawing" class at Lillstreet. I'm taking it because I realized when I took my painting class this summer that I jumped in too quickly and needed to start at the basics. We started off with a couple of different exercises and then did a still life. I have definitely improved with the still life. Which is good. It's fun to get all smudgy with the charcoal and I have a tic where I squish the squishy eraser as I'm contemplating the scene and sort of bounce at intervals. Plus I think I have a drawing face (akin to the running face or the singing face— faces made when concentrating), and I'm pretty sure I stick out my tongue a little. All of this I find hilarious.

My teacher had her 13 week old puppy with her, Gypsy, who had big bat ears and was adorable. I told her about little Franklin and how he wakes me up every two hours with his omnipresent claws. She countered with the fact that every two hours she has to get up, dressed and get her dog out the door to do its business. I told her she won. That definitely put Frank's antics in perspective. And I know I sound a little cranky to some of you, but it's the lack of sleep. I do love the little hairball.

Beautiful Chicago Saturday

Yesterday I had a wonderful Chicago Saturday. The weather was beautiful (if a bit too warm) and it involved the Renegade Craft Fair in Wicker Park. I had been looking forward to this for a while, because it meant I was going to meet Ashley G of Kitty Genius in person (she's great, although a cramped vendor booth is not the optimal place to friend some one). I went with my crafty friend Shana (who had a booth last year) and we both spent more money than we had originally intended. I bought a print from Jaime Zollars, whose art I have been admiring for quite a while (though I can't remember how I found her originally, probably somehow through Tiny Showcase). She's also really nice— it was really neat to be able to talk to the artists, since I'm so used to looking at their work online. Shana and I both bought something from Jill Bliss, who is really great. Inside I was squealing like a teenaged fan because I think she's so great. I bought a datebook from her and she signed it for me (because I am such a nerd). I had my camera with me to take pictures of the fair but felt my nerdiness too acutely to take photos.

Shana and I lunched at Earwax (which has the flashiest website I've ever seen for a cafe/dvd rental place) and ended our afternoon with bubble tea. Fantastic.

The night included a viewing of Half Nelson at the Music Box. The movie was well made and heartbreaking. The main characters were played by Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps and they were marvelous. It's not a movie to wrap up things neatly or to give you an ending to have the audience walk out pleased with themselves and the moral of the film, but it's one that had my friend Allison and I talking about continually through our evening. It's a movie that makes you think without beating you on the head with it. Plus, Gosling, even as a basehead, is so pretty. As is Anthony Mackie, who seems to be sneaking into lots of films lately and is just great.

My first relief print (almost)

I had my first first-time relief print making class tonight, and boy are my arms tired. No really, they're exhausted, between the carving of a linoleum block and carrying a large oak armoire up the stairs the other day, my right arm is ready to go out to pasture. My class was really fun, though, regardless of my noodle arm. It consists of me, my friend Shana and another woman. Our teacher teaches various printmaking techniques at the Art Institute school and does a lot of woodblock and linoleum block prints. He's pretty cool. I jumped into this class because it piqued both my and Shana's interests, though I had no idea what I was getting into. I'm very excited. My simplistic doodles (I like to think I draw like a sophisticated 3rd grader) may lend itself to more simple prints. At least they'll be easy to start with. I decided to make a print of our dearly departed pooch, Miss Ivy. I drew my little shorthand sketch of her on the linoleum and now I'm chipping away wherever I didn't draw. We made rubbings after we'd been working for a while to check out our progress. Fun.

My endeavors with painting

A while back I discovered this art center in Ravenswood called Lillstreet. I kept meaning to take a class, but I never acted on it. (I'm such a Taurus in that way, very reluctant to *start* new things, but then throw myself into it once I start.) Well, I finally started taking some classes. My beginning painting class is just wrapping up. (I also took a day long workshop on narrative embroidery a couple of weeks ago and I'm about to start a four week, first time relief print class, I'm very excited.) I was nervous about the painting class, but decided to just go into it as a total experiment. I love color and wish that I had taken more art classes growing up. The class has been fun. Challenging, but fun. Last week's class, though, almost had me giving up. We were doing our first still life in black and white and mine was just a disaster. Of course I had picked the worst spot in the room. I was facing a light dead on and had all the objects in poor angles. (That's what you get for getting there late.) This week was much better. We worked with color for the first time, which I really enjoyed. (Though I get too bogged down in mixing colors sometimes. I'm such a slow poke.) Anyhow, above is my painting from today. Not the greatest, but a MUCH better improvement on last week. Next week we have a free paint period, if we want to come. I think I will, just to test the waters some more. I don't think I have the time or energy that's needed to devote to painting. I hope I come back to it, though.