Tag Archives: creative

Immer Urlaub

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Last friday I joined Iris for the opening of the wonderful Urlaub Illustration and Concept Store. What an inspiring place! Ellen did such a great job putting it all together. There was so much to see (and buy). I really love to see products that were made with such attention and care. And of course there were lovely people to chat to and eat with. A great evening! Of course I couldn’t resist buying something for our future baby girl. I also couldn’t resist leaving Ellen a little message about her shop with a funny little man on a chalkboard.

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Society 6 Love

One of my favourite online shops is society6.
I totally get off on all of the pretty artwork.
In fact, it’s hard to keep from drooling….
I actually keep a little wish list with my favourites.
Today I thought I’d share my current wish list with you!

soc61 soc62 soc631. Haircut 1 – Erin Case  2. Esfera – Victor Vercesi  3. MTNS – Luke Flynt  4. Space Oddity – Pablo Zarate  5. L’infinito – Victor Vercesi  6. Valentina – Dawn Gardner 7. Moonrise Kingdom – Girlviolence  8. Diamond – David Fleck

 

 

 

Away On Holiday: Graffiti

Just one more post about our lovely holiday. Going to Sardinia I expected the towns and villages that we visited to be quaint and picturesque. I thought about derelict buildings and vespa’s. But somehow I never thought about modern day stuff like graffiti. Then when we visited Cagliari (Capital of Sardinia) I was kind of suprised by the amount of graffiti and I ended up photographing them a lot more then all of the old stuff (churches and what not) together! 

I also feel in love with this one artist and had a lot of fun spotting his/her pieces. I loved the crazy fishes, ships and other weird spikey entities I found on the walls of Cagliari. I even played a detective a little bit and did a Google search to find out who was behind those great pieces. And I even found him! He works under the name Crisa and if you also like his stuff, you can found out more about him here and look at more work here.

Excuse the blurriness of the photo, I took it from a moving car, the Sardinian traffic craziness really didn’t allow us to stop!

Ombre Dye DIY

It’s all over the blogosphere and I must say, this is one of those trends I love! (unlike wedge sneakers). Along with neon pink I’ve had a soft spot for ombre garments ever since I was little and pretended to be a fashion designer. Seriously, the amounts of pink and rainbow-coloured ombre dresses I drew are insane.

I thought I might try my hand at my own little ombre DIY project. I decided on ombre bed linens. Mostly because a white duvet cover is the only completely white item I own.

The result isn’t much of a classic ombre. To me it’s some sort of landscape study in pink (woah, this makes the duvet cover sound very arty all of a sudden!).
Then there’s this tie-dye feeling because the paint clearly didn’t reach every bit of the fabric. These shapes look like weird tree-with-moss-nature-things to me. It’s more of an experimental ombre meets tie-dye duvet cover now!
I guess I’ll file this experiment under serendipity. It may not be the result I was aiming for, but I kind of like the result in it’s own weird pink-xtc-trip-way. 

Since this isn’t your typical DIY tutorial, I won’t tell you what to do. But here are a few things I’ve learned while doing this:

  1. If you want to paint a piece of fabric this large, you need a big container to hold both dye and fabric. I used an empty (and clean!) garbage can, but it clearly wasn’t big enough as the dye couldn’t reach every nook and cranny due to the folds in the fabric. I think a bathtub would be your best bet.
  2. Don’t listen too much to the instructions on the package, Technically the amount of dye I used wasn’t enough for the amount of fabric, but it was more then enough really. You only need the indicated amount for dark shades of the color you select.
  3. You have to figure out your own time schedule for painting an ombre, I did the bottom first and left it in the paint for the amount of time indicated on the package. The second part of the fabric I dipped for only half the time of the first round and so on.
  4. Don’t put it in the washing machine! This sounds stupid I know, but here’s what happened to me: originally, I wanted to top of the dovet cover to be white, so I didn’t dip it in the dye. The instructions said to let the fabric dry and then rinse it out manually. So after drying, I rinsed it from top to bottom in the shower as to make sure there wouldn’t be any pink on my white half. Then I let it dry again. According to the instructions, I would now be able to wash the duvet cover in the washing machine. So I did, there obviously was some paint left in the fabric because my top half was pink within minutes! I have no idea how to solve this problem, maybe more rinsing?

So, that’s my two cents regarding DIY ombre projects. Hopefully my pearls of wisdom will come in handy when you try it yourself! Good luck and let me know how it turns out…

Vintage Painting Restyle Again

I found an awesome Bob Ross-esque painting at the thriftstore. Though it needed a little love especially on the awful brownish frame. Initially I wanted to do something like this again. But I changed my mind and I’m pretty happy with the result of my experiment! 

Awesome Typography Art

This week I loved this image:

I found it on Bloesem Blog and I was immediately in bombarded by its awesomeness! I had to find out where it came from and who made it. After some online detective work, this is what I found: it was made by Dominique Falla a.k.a. the Tactile Typographer, an artist from Melbourne, Australia. She loves making different kinds of typography with tactile media. And I must say, I’m a sucker for both! The work I could do Anything… is about the creative process and the fact that it can be a bitch sometimes. An idea can go in so many different directions, it can be quite hard to make decisions sometimes. This work actually comes with something of a Part Two. 

This is the second half of the sentence. First Dominique created I could do anything, then she unwound it and renailed the second half If only I could decide  what it was. If you look closely you can still see the holes from the first half of the work.

Do you like this as much as I do? Well, then definitely head over to Dominique’s site, because there is more where this came from! 

 

Photographical Juices

This year I saw many (and I do mean many) beautiful images on the internet. But something that really got my knickers in a twist were images photographed with an old analogue camera. Iris and Anki for instance, made lovely images with their lomo’s and other camera’s. I loved looking at them but they also got me quite frustrated. My old camera’s were in a box somewhere gathering dust. And I’m sure the camera’s were just as frustrated as I was. Sometimes I even thought I heard them begging me to collect them…. :-)  Today I went on an expedition to locate them and rescue them from a life of boredom and dust. 

I found My Kodak Brownie with a film still in it! And I wasted no time to fill up the film. The Brownie used to belong to my grandparents, which makes it extra special to me. The other small device in the picture is their old exposure meter. I really like looking at it, but I still need to figure out how it works!

This Agfa Isola 1, I found this week on a thrifting spree with Iris. I’ve never shot with a camera like this before. But today I went to the photography store and found a analogue camera-freak behind the counter and I ended up chatting with him about old camera’s for way too long! I did end up with both my camera’s loaded and ready to roll… I can’t wait for the results! Now all I have to do is get some film for my polaroid. But I’ll save that one for later…

Squeeze-me Mittens


I found this lovely image on Pinterest. And after some detective work (yeah, I’m a regular Sherlock Holmes), I figured out where it came from. I love the idea of handholding in the winter without actually having to freeze your hand of. Practical and they look super-cute as well! My favorite combo…  Another great thing: the mittens are even ecofriendly and fair trade! They are made by a self-managed community of indigenous Bolivian women. So order them right away here!

Best Wallpaper Ever

Kirath Ghundoo made wallpaper that just mesmerizes me. It’s a line of mix and match wallpaper with all kinds of patterns and in beautiful colours. Iso, Persia, Geo, Mosaicc, Aztec, Lavish and Stack are each inspired by a culture or style and can be mixed together in any way you want. I’d love this on a wall in my house, although I’m afraid wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything anymore. I’d just be staring at the wall…[images by Kirath Ghundoo]

Jealousy Is A Beautiful Thing

Today I thought I’d share one of my favorite blogs, The jealous Curator. This blog is home to an absolutely beautiful collection of artworks. The common denominator of all the artwork that’s collected here? Well, in the words of the Jealous Curator herself: ‘ A collection of artwork that inspires & depresses me. I know it’s good when I’m left thinking DAMN I WISH I THOUGHT OF THAT‘.

I completely get this feeling, sometimes you see something so beautiful/funny/interesting and you just wish that it could have been you who thought of this amazing piece of work. The Jealous Curator isn’t talking about “jealousy” as a negative emotion. But rather in the way that in turns into a huge compliment to the maker, pure admiration really. And I must say that personally, I wish I had the wits about me to think of this lovely concept! And I’ll admit it; I’m really jealous of The Jealous Curator!

Here’s a small selection of the incredible things that can be found there:

Image by Christophe Dillinger


Image by Samantha French


Image by Michelle Summers


Image by Kyung Woo Han


Image by Erin Hanson


Image Gabriella Barouch


Image by Dear Photograph

[All images via http://www.thejealouscurator.com