Wood panel prints are here! I’ve been hard at work making 3 sizes – the sweet 3x4s that look adorable tucked alongside your books on a shelf, the 6×6 square & a new bigger size – 8×10. I love the look of the glossy resin on top.
They’re on display right now at BC Place for the Home + Garden Show (on until Feb 26th).
Valentine’s Day is usually a pretty low key event around here. I’m not particularly romantic myself & the artifice of the holiday has always left a bad taste in my mouth. When I was a kid though, I remember spending hours picking out the perfect valentine cards for my boy crush and my best friends from those big books of cut out cards. My mom, being the pretty great lady that she is, insisted that if I wanted to give 1 person in my class a valentine card, then I had to give EVERYONE in my class a valentine card. She was sure that I was pretty and smart and popular (though I was never convinced of that) and that someone would have hurt feelings if they were left out.
I hated doing it at the time and felt silly giving cards to people who didn’t give me one, but I’m glad my mom made me do it. Better to take a chance and do something nice, even if it’s not reciprocated. There were probably at least 1 or 2 kids who really appreciated it.
In that spirit, here are some valentines for you to make and share!
A few years ago I doodled some cute little Valentine’s Day cards and put them up on the blog as a PDF file. I’m still smitten with them this year and I hope you will be too!
You just have to download the file and then print it off at home onto some heavy paper or cardstock. Cut them out and voila! Totally free Valentines for you to give to your special someones. Yay!
Download the PDF here
If you’ve never downloaded a PDF before, you may need to install a program to open it. The most common (& free) one is Adobe Acrobat.
printed on card stock & cut out
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Picked up my new business cards from the printer today and am thrilled with the way they turned out. I’m always a little nervous when ordering things like this since I order such large quantities. It’s a much better value to order 5000 business cards, but not such a good deal if the new design looks awful in person or if I made a typo! Huge sigh of relief mixed with a happy squeal when I tore open the box. 
Happy weekend to you!
Can you feel it? The sun is starting to shine a little brighter, the cold doesn’t have quite as much bite as it did a few weeks ago and the odd green thing is starting to sprout. I know February is far too early to declare spring has sprung, but I feel like we’re rounding the last corner on winter and that is cause for celebration. Or relaxation, which is what I did this weekend.
My lovely parents live on a little island off the coast of Vancouver Island. I don’t get over to visit as often as I’d like. The cost to ferry our car over is $200 round trip. Depending on how the 2 ferry schedules line up, the trip can take as long as 5 hours, even though the distance is very short. There’s a lot of waiting around.
Fortunately the cafe aboard the ferry makes excellent clam chowder. Dolphins can sometimes be seen swimming alongside the ship. I play a lot of Sporcle quizzes on my phone (even better on your computer, FYI). And when I finally get there? I get this:
Totally worth it.
Well hello there, 2012! The last few days have been very mellow ’round the beehive as I reflected on 2011 and started making plans for the upcoming year. I have a little tradition of listing all of my favorite moments from the year before and without a doubt, the highlight of 2011 was bringing Princess Sparkle home. It was a tough year for just about everyone I know (myself included) and her wagging tail and constant desire to cuddle made the dark spots a little easier to bear.
After I saw her listing on Pet Finder, I knew we had to meet her in person. She looks so much like my old dog, Sparkle could be one of her puppies! The rescue group I adopted her from, Rescued Paws, was wonderful to work with. Shelly, the foster mom who gave Sparkle a loving home while waiting to be adopted, was so patient with me as we emailed back & forth, answering my many, many questions & concerns. It didn’t take more than a day or two before she’d settled right in, always choosing to squeeze in beside the pug rather than lay in her own bed.
As I started writing out my goals for 2012, an overriding theme was pretty clear – slow down! I don’t know if this is a getting older thing, but my goals seem to be shifting toward getting organized, simplifying my life and creating a home I love. I want to have more time to paint, to write blog posts and to truly *enjoy* time with friends rather than be frantically working and trying to keep up with the insane schedule I kept last year. I worked my tail off in 2011! I love my job, so it’s not like this is some kind of hardship, but I definitely need to create more balance in my life and my home.
To start with, I’m finally allowing myself to take up a real hobby – one that doesn’t involve creating something for sale! It’s funny…when you make things for a living, it seems like you should always be doing something “productive”. Between craft shows, my Etsy shop and the retail stores that carry my work, I have to stick to a pretty strict schedule of making lockets and brooches and things. It’s also important for me to keep coming out with new designs, which means new paintings. Of course, not all of my paintings work well as reproductions either. Maybe this isn’t the case for artists who, say, don’t have credit card debt that they failed to pay off the year before, but I feel like I’m always supposed to be working, being productive, making money. This is definitely a recipe for burnout, my friends.
And so, after MANY hours of research and reading reviews and drooling over online fabric swatches, I ordered a book that’s going to teach me how to sew clothing for the first time in my life! *squeeeeee*
The Colette Sewing Handbook has received fabulous reviews and I couldn’t be more excited to get started! Here’s why:
I hate shopping.
I hate trying clothes on and being disappointed that the hips are too snug and the waist is too baggy.
I hate that it’s so difficult to find cute, vintage-style clothing locally. (sidenote: I love Anthro. I hate the prices.)
I hate gambling on ordering clothes online that are often poorly made and ill-fitting once you see them in person. (sidenote #2: I think ModCloth does shoppers a great service by allowing such thorough reviews by other customers, including their sizes and measurements. That being said, I’ve never spent more than $50 on something I couldn’t try on first.)
Solution? Sew my own clothes, obviously! I’ll let you know how it goes. 
