Paper Gnome Chains

The other day at work I was admiring the cut paper designs on angry chicken’s blog and fell in love with this paper Christmas tree on the small object’s blog. I had been seeing a lot of paper cutting recently and decided that I needed to try it. I was in the office however with no exacto knife and not quite ready for such intricate things anyway. I started out slow with paper show flakes. These then progressed to paper doll chains, a somewhat failed attempt at a paper camel chain and my favorite, paper gnome chains. These are now covering our one tiny office window, that actually looks out into a hallway and not outside.



I liked the paper gnome chains so much I made more at home. Here is a garland strung over the mirror in the living room.



I think these are the last Christmas decorations I will be putting up. Christmas is in less than a week and we are leaving on Sunday to go back to Portland so it would be pretty silly to make anything else.

Speaking of paper cutting, I went to Giant Robot 2 on Sawtelle yesterday and saw the Jill Bliss and Saelle Oh collaboration, Hidden Habitats. I have always loved Jill Bliss’s work. She is one of the people in this new craft movement that I think has combined art and craft as well as business really really well. I had seen Saelee Oh’s work online before but in person the paper cutting stuff is just incredible. Anyway, it is a really cool exhibit that and it is running until January 9th. So if you live in LA you should definitely check it out.

Still Life

The whole crafts on the internet thing still kind of amazes me. The idea that people from all over the world, that you would never have come into contact with without the Internet, can see your work and buy it just never stops being cool to me.

So recently I have actually had two different people contact me on etsy wanting to sell my stuff in their actual brick and mortar stores. The first was a girl who has a shop on Kauai who was interested in napkins and dishtowels. Sadly both of those are things I had been finding the raw materials for at big lots or similar stores and now can't find the kind of napkins or dish towels that I like anywhere. I need to get off my ass and find an Internet supplier or something but I've just been lazy.

The second was Kelly Malone. She is one of the founders of Mission Indie Mart which is a monthly craft fair featuring cheep beer, food and music held at 12 Galaxies in San Fransisco's Mission District. She just opened her own shop called Still Life which features hand selected vintage, local designers and the best of etsy. It is located at 835 Divisadero in San Francisco. Here are a couple links to info about the shop:
http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision/2007/11/still_life_for_your_hotness_li.html
http://www.thrillist.com/archives/2007/11/still_life_sf_san_francisco_gear_western_addition.html

I am consigning stuff there so hopefully it sells. I just sent her a few t-shirts and an apron to test it out. Depending on how those things do I might send more later. Here is the pile of stuff I sent her. Soon you will be able to see these things hanging in an actual store!



Oh, and I decided that if my stuff was going to be sold at a store I needed some kind of tag to identify it as mine. I would love to get some kind of fabric tags made up at some point but this is what I came up with as a last minute solution. I cut my business cards in half so they were just the kraken logo and attached them to the shirts with a ribbon and safety pin. I wrote the size and name of the shirt on the back. They actually turned out fairly professional looking. I may have to start doing that with all my things I sell on etsy.



Lastly I wanted to show the cute little deer I got at the Hermosa Beach Antique Mall. For some reason I got it into my head that I needed little ceramic forest creatures to go under the mini Christmas tree. I was picturing these ceramic deer that I swear I have seen many times at that antique mall when it isn't December. Someone must have come in and bought them all up because there were no ceramic deer to be found. Actually there were some really cute ceramic deer salt and pepper shakers but they cost $49!!! I settled on these much more affordable plastic ones. I also made another mushroom pincushion. My little Christmas area on the counter is getting a little cheerier.

Succulent Wreath (update on holiday crafts)

I finally finished my succulent wreath. It took way more cuttings than I imagined. I really like the way it turned out though. I had it hung up on the door but some pieces were falling out if the door slammed too hard so I took it down to give it a little more time to root.



Here is the finished version. Hopefully the cuttings will take ok so it will keep looking this good or better in the future.



Here it is in progress. I filled it in as much as I could with cuttings from my own yard. Then I wandered the neighborhood discretely picking pieces off my neighbors plants. Don't worry, most of them were from communal areas or plants that were huge and overgrown. I did find some really nice plants along the Strand in front of a brand new giant multi-million dollar house that they had just put in the landscaping for. I'm sure the owners will never notice a few missing pieces of their plants.

I also figured out where I saw the tutorial for making wool felt puffballs. It was from bitter betty blogs. They are super quick and easy to make and I had a ton of wool felt sitting around that I hadn't done anything with for a long time.

I made this garland with the giant pile of puffballs that I had accumulated. Some how the colors of felt that I already had sitting around go really well together. It looks Christmassy but not too Christmassy and really brightens up my front window.