For her Valentine’s Day gift, I signed T up for a floral design workshop at Bows & Arrows. As I mentioned earlier, it is a small shop on lower Greenville displaying art, handmade items and flowers. It’s just a nice breath of fresh air. Anyway, the class was Thursday and she had a great time. It was just her, two other people and Alicia and Adam. She definitely recommends it. Alicia will be teaching a few more classes starting this summer after their new baby is born and I will update you when I learn of them.

As you can see, T did a fantastic job. She tried to focus on bright warm colors – reds, oranges and yellows and used many different species. There are a few in there I’ve never seen before.

She also made two boutonnieres. One for a summer event, the other for a winter formal. I like them both.

If you haven’t heard of the acronym, MLIA, which stands for My Life Is Average, you should definitely check out their site. It’s updated constantly and is just enough to always put a smile on my face. Here’s a small dosage for today:

Today I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. When i came back I found my dog laying on my bed under the covers and his head on my pillow. He looked at me just streched to leave me no room on the bed. I had to sleep on the couch. MLIA

Today while in piano class at school I found that my piano has an applause key. Guess who spent the next 45 minutes feeling fantastic? MLIA

Today, I noticed the words “caps lock” on my keyboard are in lower case. I feel oddly betrayed by my computer. MLIA

Today, my mom told me that when I was little, I used to pretend that traffic lights were monsters. When they were awake (red light) you stopped and waited for them to fall asleep (green light) so you could sneak past them. MLIA

And I totally do this one:
Today when I was leaving my house I tried to lock the door with my car remote. MLIA

More laughs at mylifeisaverage

Yesterday T & I made a fantastic discovery of a little art+floral shop on lower Greenville – just what we’ve been looking for. It’s called ‘bows & arrows’ and is right across from Lula B’s Antiques. You should definitely check it out if you’re in town. The owners and newly relocated couple, Alicia and Adam Rico come from Brooklyn and have really done a great job setting up shop.

The space is long and narrow, with simple gray walls and wood floors making way for the creative displays all about. It has a very modern, home-made, edgy feel to it. In addition to the etsy-style items and flower arrangements on sale, the wall space is utilized for work of a local artist.

Here’s a link to their website and blog.

As for the photos, please excuse the quality. I gave them a boost in photoshop but there’s only so much the iPhone’s camera can handle.

Check out what I got today! My very own, driftingcreatives t-shirt. After graduating college with little prospects in this recession, Gavin Braman and Martin Hooper have been traveling across the country meeting and interviewing with designers, seeing the sights of new cities and doing design work to sustain their minimal budget. It is a pretty awesome adventure, indeed. And it is all coming out of a Honda Element.

They have done a great job of keeping a video blog of their travels. You can read more about them and find out where they will be next (maybe you can let them couchsurf) here: http://driftingcreatives.com

via Makr by Northern Lights. As seen on FormFiftyFive.

Here’s a very interesting video about the Kluge Letterpress. It’s 550 year-old printing technology, set out by Gutenberg. It reminded me of some of Dick Van Dyke’s character’s inventions from the film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I have recently purchased silk screen printing equipment/supplies as I have been wanting to experiment with this hands-on world of printing. There is just something about the process that makes you appreciate the digital methods we are so used to. I decided that for my first test subject, I would create customized “thank you” cards from all the graduation gifts I have received. I am using the left over envelopes from my graduation announcements and purchased cream-colored cardstock. Needless to say, the trial has been an epic fail / major learning experience. From the images below you can sort of see my process, as tedious (read: unnecessary) as it is, and the suspects for the errors.

I am using all Speedball® products as they seem to be the industry standard/best. This specific process involves using a screen (I bought the 10×14) and your design. In my first attempt, I simple-mindedly cut the design out of cardstock and used the Screen Drawing Fluid to paint onto the screen with the stencil. Well, the Drawing Fluid bled everywhere on the screen under the stencil, so that was a no go. I then carefully painted the Drawing Fluid on the design after tracing in on the stencil with a pencil. This took forever and even longer to let dry and ensure it was solid. After it dried, I used the Screen Filler and (as the instructions said) made one pass with the squeegee to coat the entire screen. This dried and I sprayed out the Drawing Fluid with cold water. I was pretty stoked as it looked like this would work well. Little did I know what went wrong. I set it all up, purchased the printing paper, cut it all to size to fit the envelopes, prepared my work space, complete with screen blocks (to ensure I placed the screen and paper in the same place each time), and mixed some water-based ink to a desired color. I placed the screen over the paper, spooned out some ink on the screen, squeegeed, and removed the screen. FAIL. The paper was mostly covered with ink. Turns out the Screen Filler needed a heavier coating to fully cover and mask out the excess. ug.

I have since then looked up alternative screen printing methods. I think I will try this former method again, but with a simplier design. As for now, I was considering contracting out the job of putting an emulsion on my screen to a local printing company but we have nothing like that close by. I cannot wait to move to Dallas. So until then, and for this project, I am going to use the newbie method of cutting the design out of wax paper, place the stencil directly under the screen and over the paper, and ink it then and there. The ink with make the stencil stick to the screen and I should hopefully be able to get 20-30 prints out of it. Here goes and wish me luck…

I spent Friday evening and a large portion of Saturday in a fairly intense software tutorial for Rhinoceros, or Rhino for short. It is one of the most advanced NURBS modeling program on the market, has an interface somewhere between 3dsMax and Sketchup (a very good thing), and is just really tight.

Our instructor was excellent. He teaches high school students Rhino in Ohio, where apparently it has been quite cold lately (-15ºF?) and did a great job introducing us to the program. We would have a simple objective, like to model a piece of stemware, but would teach 10-12 different techniques and commands along the way – a great way to learn. Gabriel Esquivel is the one who’s jumped hurdles to get Rhino on our lab computer’s here and I thank him greatly for it. I feel like we, as students and designers have been given a powerful tool and opportunity to incorporate into our projects. If only I had learned this three years ago… or even in high school.