I thought I would show the process by which I made the repeat below. I had a lot of help from Julia Rothman's tutorial on Design Sponge.

First step was to draw something:



I then cut it into 4 quarters and re-taped them back together so that the middle was open to draw in (you essentially put the origianal out side edges together in the middle):



I added some doodles between the original parts of the drawing:



Then - the image was scanned into Illustrator, producing this:



I then tweaked the edges of the repeat in Illustrator and recolored to match the palette for the Spoon Flower contest

AND VOILA!


Please vote for me!

I need some moral support :)

As you may or may not remember, I've been dabbling with surface pattern design for a few years now and this past week I entered my first fabric design contest on SpoonFlower.com. I'm SUPER nervous! I'm not sure I even have a chance, but would you please vote for me?

Blog post with all the entries is here:
http://blog.spoonflower.com/2010/01/81- ... brics.html

I'm #51 and here is a link to my design:
http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric_items ... _id=137164



The poll shuffles the entries every time you go to vote so I can't tell you which page (of 4) I'm on :(

thanks a lot for your help!

I finally got around to setting up a shop!!

Woo Hoo!!

I put the chick pendant up for sale as well as a few of my cuffs and stickers. Check it out, please :)

My friend, Miss Mowie, introduced me to odosketch via face book.

sketch out an image and save it!

This is one of my sketches:




when you click on the sketch is draws in the same way drew it so you can see the artist's process - which is my favorite part!

I love the Blah Blah Blahg! Miss B has such a great site and is now offering some digital downloads. Here's just a peek:



Go check out the rest of the digital downloads here.

And don't forget the brightside project - daily give-a-ways and the latest one is AMY BUTLER!!!

hmmm - so far I have managed to:

- throw myself over the handle bars of my bike trying to learn how to properly jump a curb
- spend 3 hours at a hospital - only for them to tell me nothing is broken (good news - but the wait, OI!)
- cut out more stickers for my post below
- enter a bunch of blog give aways (go check out sew mama sew)
- as soon as hubby gets up, we're off to Bicycle Kitchen again - gotta see if they have a spoke cutter and to donate left over bike parts.
- head over to Little Tokyo to pick up our subscriptions from kinokuniya book store.

OH YES - THANK YOU FOR SIGNING UP FOR THE FEED!!

She's about 2" wide and about 3" tall.

My office closed early today for the Memorial Day Holiday on Monday so I have a tiny bit of time left to spare today and thought I would post.

This week's adventure in the civic center of LA wasn't a total loss. I got drawing out of it.



and here's what the scene looked like in real life - see the trees off to the left? Those are the ones in the drawing (just in case you can't tell...)



Comments?

Yesterday was a such a lovely day! Husband I decided to roam about the neighborhood on our bikes. We ended up biking 12 miles.

We went to check out the Bicycle Kitchen an some of the other businesses near it and ended up at an art show.

In case you aren't familiar with them, the Bicycle Kitchen is a non-profit organization the encourages people to ride bikes and maintain them. Their little shop, is just that, a bicycle repair shop. They have all the tools and bike stands with people there to help you make repairs or build a bike from scratch.

Across the street is orange 20 bikes. It's a nice shop with a varied selection of bikes and various accoutrements to outfit yourself for a ride.

While poking around, I noticed they had a fancy wheel painted by a local artist I love, Cache. He paints large scale images of chickens on bikes that most people consider graffiti. His chickens make me super happy - I smile every time I see them.

My cooing over the wheel, prompted the sales girl to plunk down a flyer for his latest show at Monkey House Toys.





Husband and I plotted a course on the trusty G1's and made it just before the start of the opening reception. Arriving we got a sneak peek at the artist creating a mural for the shop.



Now, I have for many, many years kicked myself for NOT buying some chicken paintings that were hanging at the Omlettry in Austin.

So of course - I had to get a painting. The prices of all the art were super reasonable. Seriously, a new pair of shoes would have cost more than the piece I bought. So instead of just checking it out and leaving, I bought one.

This little guy will be hanging in my kitchen at the end of the show in June.



It's actually a collaboration between cache and his lady, Erin.

If you are in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, I highly recommend you go check it out

more messing around in fireworks produced the images below. What do you think of the colors?





oops - I forgot a few spots....