I may have mentioned this before but I'm tall - six feet tall. I dread buying pants, not because I don't love shopping but, because of the lacking selection of long length pants.

I have a way around it... a secret(ish) thing I will share!

1) Buy cuffed regular length pants and pick out the stitching in cuff
2) Use that extra fabric to hem them at a better length

Today, I bought these pants at Target. I unpicked the cuff and hem and then re-sewed it. I consulted Mary Jo over at trust your style before finishing up, but now I have a fashionably long pair of pants that I only paid 25 bucks for! yeah!

According to Mary Jo - the hem should fall between the middle and top of your high heels. :)

It took 24 hours from door step to door step, but I made it to Austin yesterday afternoon.

I've had my fill of gingerbread pancakes at 2 different cafes - Kerby Lane Cafe and Omlettery.





Bike racks at the convention center:


Surface demo a the Microsoft booth:

I'm on my way to South by South West in Austin . I started the journey yeterday, leaving the Boy and the Dog around 1 PM. My flight was delayed for several hours - just long enough to miss a connection in Denver.

I spent the night at the Double Tree Hotel - their squichy beds and cookies are awesome. If it were not for several calls from the Boy, a timer on my phone, a wake up call from the hotel, and an alarm clock, I would probably still be asleep.

Here's the view from my room. It's a crappy phone cam shot but still - it gives you an idea of day.


One good thing though - I got to see the sun start to rise over the airport as I was coming in. so pretty....

Hopefully, I will be able to sleep on the plane.

Time to go catch up on work stuff.

So I'm not one of the finalists, but I had a request from Alice at Future Girl to see the full repeat of my leaf design so I thought I would go ahead and share.

I swear that I will be adding something other than spoonflower contest entries at some point but literally very little has been done creatively outside of making tiles for these contests.

Spoonflower teamed up with a company that makes baby carriers called Boba . There were tons of entries (260 total - eep:) ) so they are asking to narrow down to 16 finalists!

right now you can vote on which designs will make the cut!

Here's my entry:


vote for all the ones you like on the spoonflower site .

well - I have been spending time making patterns... and I entered another contest on Spoonflower!!

Check it out:



I like it alot!!

You can vote for all the entries on the spoonflower site.

Lee finally posted the best photo!

My apologies for being away so long the puppy and work are taking far more time than I ever thought possible.

Here is the little guy at Runyon Canyon this morning - all tuckered out before we headed home.

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!