1. Baroque Corkboard, 2. Jellyfish!, 3. Cupcakes & Gocco arrival,
4. Whale shark feeding, 5. New Shirt I customized, 6. Looking in the Mausoleum,
7. Otter Toy!!, 8. First Gocco Printing, 9. New Fabric! Yay!
Super fun craft explosions week I will refer to this as. Eee! Last weekend I had tested out some resin (Testing resin photo) on a heart necklace I gutted out the old imagery from, and it had finally dried. (Success!!) It turned out pretty good, I filled it with pictures from an article on Les Shadoks - it has the Gibis on it and it says, "C'est tout pour aujourd'hui" which supposedly means, "That is it for Today." I put on the back a picture of another Gibi and it says the phrase in english, and I poured resin on that tonight so in a few days it should be ready. I'm excited about the possibilities of making jewlery and sealing things in resin, so I hope to expand on this after testing it on different kinds of paper!
I also bought some cork board and cut out a shape in it to make my own baroque themed corkboard based of the idea from design*sponge. I was on the fence at first if I liked it or not, but its slowly growing on me. I think once my room is painted and there is a lovely color behind it, I'll enjoy it more. The calendar I have pinned up on it is from Magnolia Moonlight, I had my eye on it for a while and it went on sale recently! I definitely recommend it, it is really bright and fun.
Aside from Calendars (and cute fabric!) arriving in the mail, I also got another very exciting package this week - I recieved my Gocco printer from Japan!! When I came home Friday from work it was waiting for me along with super delicious confetti cupcakes my boyfriend made. :) I didn't dive into a printing frenzy until Saturday though because shortly after coming home we went to go see Charlie Wilson's War. (Which was very good.)
My gocco printing went about kinda goofy the first time. I drew out a little cat, scanned it in to clean up the black, printed it out, loaded up my Gocco to do its business - flashed the lightbulbs, lifted up the lid with excitement to see my new screen and...NOTHING! Turns out, you cant use print outs from home photo printers. If I had read the directions more carefully, I would have seen that... Oops! I redrew my little picture with the recommended Riso pen, and that time it worked fantastically. I printed my design on so much stuff, I kinda went over board with excitement. I made some Valentines to send out, and then 10 to put in my etsy store when I set it up, 3 blue felt patches and one pink one. I also decorated a CD envelope I'm sending to my friend Krysti. If you are curious about how the Gocco works, here is a tutorial that was very helpful. Most of the kit has english through out so it was pretty easy to work with, but its still a odd little mysterious machine which can be a tiny bit intimidating. I'm so excited about it though and cant wait to buy more bulbs for it so I can make more screens!!
I also had finished up working on a little shirt I made waaaay back at the Indie Craft Experience this past November. I had printed their little bird logo with craft paint on a shirt there for $5, and then saved it hoping I could figure out more to do with it when I got home. I ended up painting little little pink hearts onto it, and stamping the letters "create" and then hand stitching floss around the print. I like it a whole lot now, Its one of my new favorite shirts and I wore it to Yoga with Jenny this past Saturday as its first out of the house experience! Zooom - I hope to maybe print and hand stitch more shirts now with my Gocco printer.
To wrap up this weekend up, this morning Chris and I went to the Atlanta Aquarium. It was Chris' first time going, and he took some really good pictures, much cleaner and easier to view than the ones I posted on my flickr because his camera can capture things 10x better. We saw an awesome leopard printed ray (I had never seen that there before!) and we also got to see a trainer playing with otters and teaching it how to sit and when to let her pet it. After, we went over to Six Feet Under to eat Lunch, and then went across the street to explore the Oakfield Cemetary. There were so many pretty tombstones and mausoleums, we both took lots of pictures. I then proceeded to take a super long nap, and now I'm going to package up my new little cards, eat macaroni and cheese and prepare to make an etsy store!
One last note - I recently got two new albums which I definitely recommend and want to share the word on: Janelle Monáe's Meteropolis and Stereo Total's Paris <> Berlin. Stereo Total has been around for a while, but Janelle is a new artist who I think is fantastic and want to introduce more people to. So check those out!
