Gift giving

I like to go a little crazy when I wrap gifts. I love doing it so much that one year one of my coworkers paid me to wrap all of her Christmas gifts on my lunch break. I had a lot of fun doing it, and she kept bringing me presents to say thank you.
My favorite presents to wrap are books, because you end up with a flat, thin-ish surface to work with. Making the wrapping a part of the gift just feels better, like I'm creating less waste. I also try to only use what I have around the house because buying pretty paper that's only going to be thrown away seems strange to me.
This one is a book about Bob Marley that I bought for my sister during the last Chronicle Books sale. First I wrapped it with a piece of drawing paper that had been sliced with an exacto knife on accident. It looked so tempting as a blank canvas that I had to rewrap it with a nice piece so I could draw on it.

I was listening to great music while I drew which gave me the coolest idea for the circle journal swap at Glitter, but more about that later.

I used a picture in an old embroidery book as inspiration- I think it came out pretty nicely.

This one was a copy of The Prophet for my friend Laura. I had to add all sorts of pretty stitches because I cut the ribbon to short and didn't have enough left over to fit around it either. The butterfly sticker is covering where I sewed the ribbon together. Then I decided that I couldn't just write her name on the wrapping, like I usually do, so I made the little butterfly tag out of origami paper.

Someday these will all be swapped

I made these pendants out of porcelain and fired them using various techniques- some are regular gazes fired to cone 10 and the shiny ones are raku fired. The plan is to use them for jewelry for swaps, but some of them I like to much to send away.

Birthday No. 27

I adore birthdays, both my own and other people's. I've never been one of those people who thinks of it as "just another day".
This year I had a very quiet birthday, which started with the perfect morning for sleeping in. Cloudy and cool- we don't get days like this in August very often.

For breakfast I made myself Special Gunpowder green tea in my favorite mug (my momma made it for me) and oatmeal with fruit. I ate it at my desk downstairs while listening to the best college radio station ever. After I ate I changed the sheets and enjoyed the quiet beauty and bliss of a freshly made bed. Someday when I'm rich (but not famous, because I don't want to be on TV or in People magazine like, ever) I'll have fresh sheets everyday.

Then I hit the thrift store and the magazine stand for some birthday goodies. The cards crack me up!


Later, while I was buying myself a flikr pro account with my b-day money from my parents, I heard something smacking against the window in my studio room. It was the biggest toad I've ever seen trapped down there. I don't know how they get down there, but in every window well we have a colony of toads and salamanders, and sometimes snakes. The toads jump up to catch bugs and thump the windows. They're cute, but it sounds so gross.

When the hubster got home, we got ready to go out to dinner at Hapa in Boulder. On the way we saw a rainbow and these clouds that looked a lot like a mushroom cloud. We couldn't decide if that was a good omen or a bad one.

Dinner was wonderful! I don't have any pictures of the sushi because it disappeared to quickly, and I don't have any pictures of us because I drank sake and cocktails and got really ah, well you know.

Then I spent the rest of the week in blissful laziness. I gave myself the gift of being forever 22 years old on the inside. So, while on the outside I'm now in my "late" twenties (oh eww) with a "real" job and plans to buy my very own house and finish grad school, on the inside I'm still the giant slacker who loves playing video games all day, drinking at all hours, and just doesn't care about silly things like bills and other people's opinions. Twenty seven is going to be a great year!

Cruel, cruel Summer

Beautiful morning
sun, I wish you wouldn't use
your power to melt

Oh, it's a sad morning here at the Copy Shop .

For work I have to cart my own supplies between 5 different schools. To keep the disaster in my car to a minimum I toss everything in a plastic crate in the back seat. When school ended last Spring I left the crate sitting under the window in my studio room until I needed it again. I have to make a lot of my own games and supplies and was planning on doing that this summer, but being a slacker I found "better" things to do with my time. I climbed trees, played hours of video games, went camping, slept in, watched the Tyra show and Starting Over (Shut up. It is real life. It's not just another stupid, whiney reality show. It's not!), and mostly ignored the fact that I'd have to go back to work in just 2 short months.Sadly, reality is setting in. Last night I realized that I'd better get my act together this weekend. So this morning I pulled out my crate of supplies to get ready for next week. And there, on top of the pile, was my plastic bag of crayons that the kids use. All melty and sad. No one will use these now! Look at them. The horror is almost unbearable.
I'm not a crafty sub-hero for nothing though! I'm gonna melt these babies down all the way and make some mini crayons to give as prizes for the little ones! I felt bad last year that I only used praise as a reward, so it will be nice to have some incentives. If only I could find a way to get the teens excited about high school.

But dang it, now I have to buy new crayons. Poop.

Professor Chaos!

Sometimes I think I need to put in for a crafty sub-hero name change. You can do that while you're still a sub-hero, you know. It's when you get the promotion to full time Hero that the paperwork is too overwhelming to deal with.

This is the current state of my sewing table, from craft project view. It's a HUGE mess, but I think I work the best when I'm surrounded by crafty bits and bobs. Current projects in the hopper: Hedwig and the Angry Inch Apron (I was going to make it for Tie One On, but uh, I didn't), Needle book, T shirt quilt, necklaces, sleep mask, and a way over the top planetary mobile. I think that last one will take years, as it's still in the planning stages and, like I said, way over the top.

Hopefully I'll finish something off this list so my WIP post tomorrow won't be so huge!
Of course, I might just go play Fable for the rest of the day. I am NOT watching any more news though. No water bottles on airplanes? Wow. I don't... just wow.

Woo woo swap

Shrine, originally uploaded by Pearliepie.

I finally finished it! I have been working on this shrine for a swap on glitter for a year. I am so excited that it will soon be in it's new home. Click the photo to go to my flickr photos, the shrine pictures are in the art projects set.

Now I have so many crafty ideas for myself that I don't know what to work on next! I still have a huge project to do list, so I'll just pick something off of it. I'm trying to finish up all of my UFOs laying around, because it's really bad Fung Shui to not finish things. So I'll put the new ideas in the sketchbook and finish something else up.