Things I Like Today

A dose of pretty.

I am working with PDK to decorate our new place, and he got us an awesome couch from Therapy in San Francisco that is a minimalist modernist-inspired couch in grey. But we need something to make it pop! So I ordered throw pillows and covers, and the first just arrived!

TA-DAHHHHHHHHH!

via Modern Marvelous Home on etsy

I can't wait until my other pillows, in yellow-and-white and yellow-and-grey, get here. I hope they all look good together.

Other thing that is awesome:  Look at these cool arty creations by Jennifer Khoshbin. I found her at her Etsy shop Rubyslounge, originally, but her own website features a lot more of her adventurous art than is featured just in her shop. Thank you, Jennifer, for letting me share your work with my readers!

A work of art in the Manipulation sequence

A very fishy fellow.  This sculpture is a Transform-ation!

These guys are killer. via jenkhoshbin.com

General Catch-up

Hello my dear friends,

I know I have been terribly absent. I taught intensive classes this summer, actually got something like a chapter of my dissertation done, and then moved house! I am back in my beloved Bay Area, in Berkeley, a wonderful, wonderful city, and still dissertating away, as well as applying for academic jobs this fall (to begin next fall).

I have reopened my etsy shop, and I made some cool new accessories this summer in a few new designs that I am excited to share soon!

I also was pleased to be asked by a good friend to make her a hair accessory for her wedding earlier this month. I was so flattered that she liked what I sell on etsy! It was my first custom made piece, which was a fun adventure -- we looked at some of my completed designs to find something that worked with her aesthetic and with what I had in stock. I even made her a little muslin "rough draft" so she and her hair-dresser could use that for the trial appointment. In the end, I trolled vintage and thrift stores until I found a great silk scarf with enough white to make a little flower, and then I almost wrecked the scarf by by washing it..... and almost wrecked the first flower I made by applying a stiffener that had worked great on cotton, but left marks on silk. Luckily, I had made a "back up" flower in case something happened to the first one. And my friend liked the second better anyways, thank goodness. She was a total bombshell at the wedding, and I loved how the little silk "flower" looked! Hopefully she'll send me a pic I can post.

If I had been charging her, that little flower would have easily cost her twice as much as I usually charge, considering the time and energy and materials. I can see why bridal items can seem to be so overpriced, but the care and energy that goes into pleasing one customer is a lot extra, it seems to me. I was glad to do it as a gesture of love for my friend, though.

I also was commissioned to do some freelance writing, which was a lot of fun, but also hard work.... I am not used to modifying my style for commercial writing, and I had to tone down my long sentences, tone down the purple prose, and just be much less flowery, generally. Still, it was good money and gave me some confidence that if this academia thing doesn't work out, there may be other ways in which to apply my skills.

This is a text heavy post, but tomorrow will be an image heavy one, so forgive me in the meantime :)

Dia de los Muertos Decorations

I'm excited about Halloween, and I want to put a cool spin on it this year with some awesome Dia de los Muertos skulls!

How do you like your sugar skulls ...

Black and White?

[Edit: My black and white skulls treasury was featured on the Etsy Treasury Hunter today!]

Or Full of Color?

Stitching in Circles featured at Heart Handmade

Mandie of Heart Handmade sweetly featured the upcycled accessories I sell in my etsy shop on her blog!  I am so flattered.

Check out the profile and feature! StitchinginCircles on HeartHandmadeBlog

Etsy News

Just the headlines!

• I am delighted to announce that the giveaway I participated in at Fantabulously Frugal has been won by Terecille of New Jersey -- Congratulations Terecille! Her bobby pins went out in the mail earlier this week.

• new bobby pins are in my shop! 

• I sold three items this week -- what a rush!  One to a friend, and two to a lovely woman I have not met who runs a letterpress company and makes gorgeous things. In fact, she heard about me solely because I left several very enthusiastic comments on the giveaway she is running right now: $50 in letterpress products or in a gift certificate to Apple, MyFonts.com, or Amazon: go check out Dingbat Press's blog! So there has been lots of packaging and careful final finishing of my little fabric creations before I send them out into the wide world. And another friend, Megan, who modelled these bobby pins and this collage pin, is loving the bobby pin set I gave her as a thank you, and is going to buy more!

Today in Dissertation Writing, Politics, and Jewelry

PDK got back from his loooong trip to India yesterday -- woohoo! Brought me some lovely presents of the gold and silver kind, too :)  I love the pretty silver earrings he and his sister picked out -- they make the loveliest chiming sound if I shake my head and I've never seen anything like them. I did find some very similar ones on etsy so you guys can see what they look like (since I am too lazy/busy to take pics). Apparently they are called jhumka in North India and jimiki or jitniki in South India, and they are shaped like bells, or you could see them as inverted lotuses.

image via jhumkas on etsy

Instead of hooks, though, mine have posts like these. So beautiful!

image via jhumkas on etsy

So after his three weeks off, he's back at work today, and I am home, planning on doing PhD work.... I am revising and adding to a chapter (well... the chapter, since it's the only one I have written), and I have a plan of how to do it, finally, after rereading and editing and changing the organization of the forty pages I have already written.  I've been thinking about it all day, but have yet to put pen to paper (well, keystrokes to Microsoft Word).

I am also excited about my plan for the evening, which might sound boring to most people: I am going to a meeting with Santa Barbara's representative in California's Assembly, Das Williams, to hear him talk about California's budget, which is in a constant state of crisis. I long wanted to be a lawyer and follow in my civil-rights-defending father's footsteps... until I came to the realization that I was not sure I could emotionally or mentally handle the weight of deciding others' lives with my actions, since any mistakes I made could mean a loss of freedom or loss of life for my clients. Still, I have remained pretty politically engaged, especially with my pet issues: prisoners' rights, women's rights, the environment, and higher education.

I am looking forward to hearing an update on the budget, not least because it directly affects my employment at the University of California. Grad student, undergrads, and faculty at the UC have been fighting and protesting budget cuts, and Jerry Brown, who I voted for, is still proposing an additional $1 billion in cuts to the UCs on top of what has been cut in the last two years, even with his proposals with increased taxes. A sad day for a public university system.

The constant undermining of public support for higher education is one reason that I am thinking strongly of leaving academia when I (finally) finish my PhD. There is no reason to stick around in a system that is making it impossible for me to actually engage with and directly educate students, not just lecture and evaluate them, and yet is still giving them a degree at the end.

If you are interested in reading more about the way that college students are losing out while paying more for a college education in California, you might want to check out the links below. I am just going to put my blinkers on for the next four hours and focus on poetry, and then return to caring deeply about these problems at the town hall meeting this evening.

Links

• Remaking Higher Education -- a great on-the-ground blog by a UCSB Prof who is involved in the UC administration;
• "A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education," Parts 1 and 2 in the Chronicle of Higher Education;
• This activity is a fun and interactive way to try to fix California's budget problems.

I Love Winning Giveaways!

Don't you? I am so excited that I won some awesome eye-candy recently!  I hope you win a new treat soon yourself -- have you entered my giveaway on Fantabulously Frugal? Win my handmade bobby pins for yourself or a friend just by choosing a favorite item from my shop, Stitching in Circles on Etsy!

I am so grateful to Beth at Stoney Creek Mercantile for sending me one of her adorable vintage berry baskets with a delicate and lovely antique quilt square as a liner. I won it in a giveaway she hosted at her blog, stoneycreekshops.com. It is perfect for storing all the bobby pins I just made!

Isn't it pretty? I love that she has found a great way to repurpose beautiful, very loved quilts.

I also won a beautiful set of silver earrings from Rebecca, who designs jewelry and sells it at www.rebeccaanneallen.com.  She also has a great blog... which is where I found the giveaway! Go check it out for yourself: rebeccaaccessories.blogspot.com/

These are my adorable new Rebecca earrings -- which just arrived! I was so excited to win Rebecca's give away.  I have great long earrings, but all my posts are really boring, so these are going to be a wonderful new addition to my small jewelry collection.

image via rebeccaallen.com

And my most recent win is the biggest! I won $100 gift certificate for some gorgeous, super modern art at www.mod-tots.com. WOW. The cool paintings are supposed to be for kids' rooms.... and I entered the giveaway thinking I would give it to a friend who just had a baby... but I love them! I am kind of tempted to keep it for myself.  I will probably cave and give it to my friend's newborn, though. I love the fox and the raccoon -- their pointy noses are so cute! And I am very interested to see what mystical creatures show up when they develop that section more. I think they could create some really cute modern elves.

Images below via mod-tots.com

I love this foxy fox!

Or should I choose this masked bandit?

I found these mostly through the blog Etsy Giveaways, which is a fantastic aggregate of handmade giveaways. If you are an etsy artisan who is giving away some of your beautiful creations, you should submit the giveaway to them. You might get a lot of people just swinging by for the freebie, but it certainly opens you to a winder audience, some of whom might even spend money later.

Giveaways are Awesome -- Win Mine!

I have discovered giveaways recently and I am actually having one today! I was contacted by Megan from Fantabulously Frugal a while back, and she asked me if if she could do an interview, to which I of course immediately said yes.

My interview and bobbypin giveaway goes live on Fantabulously Frugal TODAY in their Etsy Monday feature! Please visit the site and enter to win: Etsy Monday -- Stitching in Circles Giveaway. I'd love it if one of my followers and friends won these pretty floral bobby pins! The little yoyos are about 1.5 inches wide and are glued and firmly sewn to antiqued brass bobby pins that are about an inch and a half long. Come play in the giveaway -- the winner will be announced on April 11th.

 Exposure like that is great, especially on a site with a wider audience. And I am fantabulously frugal myself, so it is a great match. I hope it will draw lots of views to my shop! I've been busily making lots of bobby pins in anticipation of that. In fact, there is a new set of flowery, bright bobby pins for sale now.

New spring-time bobby pins in my Etsy shop!

I've also been the lucky winner of several giveaways recently, so I know how exciting it is to win them! Good Luck!

National Poetry Month is Underway!

Celebrate it every way you know how! I will be celebrating it by planning the reading for the summer course I am putting together: "Modernist and Avant-Garde Poetries and their Contexts" .... a bit of a mouthful, but it was the only way to get everything in.

I've also been busy making treasuries to feature some of the wonderful broadsheets and books of poetry available from vintage and handmade sellers on Etsy! I love letterpress, and I am so glad there are other people who have access to presses and can make beautiful editions of poems that I can buy. There is a letterpress machine at UCSB, but I think I'd have to sign up to take a Book Arts course, which would be awesome, but it is such a time commitment! In my last semester of college I took a course in letterpress (to fulfil my arts requirement... when it comes down to it, I really double majored in English in college, I took so many book-based courses). It took me the whole semester to create a broadsheet of the last lines of Joyce's Ulysses and tiny book of quotes about my hometown. I already am spending too little time on my diss as it is.

Capturing the Light

As I mentioned last month, in my post about a new pin I had made, I created a new photography set-up. I am finally getting around to telling you guys about it today.

I am a member of the handemadeology team on etsy, which is a business and promotion oriented team open to all. There is a great blog set up by the founders of the team that you can visit at http://handmadeology.com that  is a wonderful resource for and support for etsy sellers. They have advertising tips and photography tips, and they also promote sellers, which is always appreciated!

I decided to build a cheap little light box based on the instructions provided by handmadeology here.  I didn't want to buy foam board as the tutorial recommends because, as we all know by now, I am CHEAP. Rather,  I currently have several large rolls of lovely artist paper that I bought on sale from a local art supply store, and I figured I could use that instead to line the cardboard box. So, I cut off two sides of a small cardboard box, and measured the bottom and sides of the box against the large roll of lightly-textured white paper.

Ta-dahhhh!  This is my wee little lightbox. I didn't do it perfectly, 
obviously, since there is a little area the paper 

doesn't cover in the corner. I need to do something about that.

A Moment of Reflection and Thanks

Everyone who has been following and reading along and commenting -- thank you!  I am so glad my writing and pics are providing some diversion and entertainment to people beyond just my own self.

The Lovely Cait, who blogs at Book Geekery, recently bestowed upon me and several others the title of stylish blogger -- go check her list out, I found some new favorites already!

 I am very flattered and grateful. So when you win this award, it is said that you should: a) Thank the person who awarded you, b) include 7 facts about yourself, c) pass the award on to other bloggers, and d) notify them of winning the award. 


It's a little like chain mail, I guess -- or I could be a wee bit less cynical and see it rather as a generous Pay It Forward that connects bloggers to each other. So, moving forward in all sincerity and earnestness:

Skiing in Tahoe for Spring Break

Found on Flickr --  by Scott Thompson

I am so excited! My friend Kevin, a whip-smart fellow grad student in English, has invited me and some friends to stay with him for a five days at his boyfriend's gorgeous house in Tahoe. Yay Kevin and his retired-at-30-and-bought-a-house-in-Tahoe-because-he-invested-ridiculously-well-in-the-tech-boom boyfriend!

I haven't been skiing since I was like 16, when my mother sweetly took me, my high school boyfriend, and my best friend up to the mountains. My family used to go up to the snow every couple years before that, so I am hoping it's going to be more like riding a bicycle and less like html coding, which I am truly slow and stupid at when I haven't done it for several years. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see if I can stay upright while charging down mountains. I love the thrill of speed on the slopes, and I will just have to not eat much in order to be able to pay for the ski rental and lift tickets for as many days as possible.  Otherwise I'll have to go cross-country skiing, which is cheaper but  no fun at all, as in my opinion it's like walking, but harder, whereas downhill is more like

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

First etsy sale and DIY packaging

This weekend was fun -- two of PDK's friends from college visited -- one I had met before and I am quite fond of -- the other I had never met, but we're going to his wedding in Manhattan in May, so I am glad I got the chance to get to know him, too!

The other reason this weekend was so fun is that I had my first sale! It was through a BNR (buy and replace) treasury, so I bought a couple trinkets in order to get my item featured, which means no profit, but I am excited to have the opportunity to practice shipping my little accessories. I decided to make my own packaging as part of my commitment to upcycling when I can, so I created this little waterproof envelope by hand sewing together rectangles I cut from a clean plastic bag and a brown paper bag. I improvised a bit on the instructions from a great Eco Etsy blog post. I am pleased with how it came out and I hope my buyer likes it and what is inside it!

This is the hairpin my lucky customer will soon receive. It is packaged on an adorable vintage playing card, as you can see in the etsy listing here (in the last picture), and then I made a little brown paper envelope to hold the card and pin.

posted from Bloggeroid

Memories of Ireland, part 1.

With all the mentions of Guinness and Dublin and the wild west coast of Ireland that I've been seeing lately, I am getting more and more nostalgic for my years of living in and travelling around Ireland. Looking back over what I have written, it's gotten very long!  I hope you all don't lose patience with me.

My father's family is mostly Irish, and my grandmother  was entirely Irish (a Holland by birth, her parents both hailing from County Sligo) and fairly fierce about it.  The family never did any of the typically Irish-American stuff though (other than being Catholic), but there was a true connection to Ireland that was a thread running through the family. My grandparents sent clothes to the poor Irish relations for years, and even visited in the 1960s. My father and two of his siblings had also visited our relations in Kilkenny and Sligo in the late 1970s, and Christmas cards were exchanged regularly.  But most importantly, to my young bookworm self, my grandparents had a print of a WB Yeats poem, "The Fiddler of Dooney," illustrated by Jack B Yeats, on their wall, and I knew that poem so well from visiting them and staring at it -- now it hangs in my parents' house, in the room I stay in when I visit. 

"And dance like a wave of the sea."

New Creations, Photography Question, and a Recommendation

A new pin in my etsy shop! 

I built a new photo-taking set-up to help me capture light better and create more neutral backdrops (which I will soon post about in detail), and took some great photos of some of my newest creations. This one is ready to find a new home!

I really like this picture, and I have no idea how I captured the lightness of the layers of the pin. Photography is still kind of magic to me.  Do you all think this is light and bright enough to be attractive to buyers? I lightened the exposure and brightened the colors a little; on my macbook it still looks kind of dim, but I don't want to slam it with everything photoshop offers for fear I might bleach it out entirely or fry it in neon.

The book serving as a prop is a very very awesome issue of McSweeney's Quarterly  that I picked up used on Clement St in San Francisco at Green Apple Books -- aka one of my top ten independent bookstores -- and it has two spines (!) . . . basically, there are two front covers and one back cover, and I love that book design and presentation can be so inventive.

I used to be kind of dismissive of McSweeney's because A) it was started by Dave Eggers, whose memoir title annoyed me, 2) it seemed kind of twee and precious, and iii) because I interned for a different San Francisco publisher and was miffed that Eggers's imprint got what I saw as outsized attention while the publisher I worked for did not (at the time, anyway).  But, McSweeney's Internet Tendency totally changed my attitude, because that shit is funny (especially this one -- warning: a LOT of obscenity deployed hilariously ahead), and mockery such as it dishes out soothed my ruffled feathers. I still am sort of "meh" about Eggers, but his projects have really had staying power and have actually made substantial impacts on his community and on publishing. And McSweeney's Quarterly is a seriously great literary journal, in my opinion.

Fellowship applications are due Friday and my dissertation is begging for attention, so I have had to reduce my time spent on such fun things as blogging and creating. Ah well, so it goes.

An Unconscionable Abuse of the Semicolon

I am a terrible, slow, inaccurate typist, and this passage, composed of only TWO sentences, made me want to die as I was taking notes for my dissertation yesterday.

“To start with some definitions, by ‘avant-garde’ I am referring to historical waves of artists in the twentieth century associated with innovative formal practices and their legacy. Manifestations of avant-garde practice generally are regarded as formal and sociopolitical, and typically involve groups of artists with shared principles who often work in more than one medium or genre; synthesize disparate influences and techniques including ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, deliberately attempt to undermine or contradict formal markers of rigidified artistic structures and ruling ideologies; consider art to be apolitical and aesthetic instrument with direct agency; push art and society forward into new and unfamiliar terrain; employ technical features designed to unsettle and interrogate unitary voices of authority and totalizing narratives; explore formal modes such as open field, performative, and alternative poetics based on extra-semantic properties such as visualization and sound; question the nature and possibility of a nonproblematical speaking subject; animate multiple voices in preference to a centralized stable narrator or persona; transcend boundaries of nationalism, draw on international influences, and maintain dialogue with artist sin other nations and cultures; and frequently use collage, bricolage, fragmentation, and pastiche in order to create palimpsestic or dialogic texts revealing multiple frames of reference and mechanism of interpretation.”

from “Diaspora and the Avant-Garde in Contemporary Black British Poetry” by Lauri Ramey in Noland and Watten's Diasporic Avant-Gardes.

It's not a bad definition of the avant-garde, though. All-encompassing, to say the least.

Better ways to use semicolons:

• 
  Vintage cream/yellow typew...

  lettershop
  $13.50 USD
• 
  Semicolon Black Laser Cut ...

  agirlfrommar...
  $7.00 USD

Semicolon Brooch

nerdgoddess

$8.50 USD

Semicolon Letter Press Nec...

WoodenNickel...

$29.00 USD

SKUNKED.

Pearl, the lovely, gentle, petite husky who rules over this house, had an altercation with a skunk very late last night that left our house absolutely reeking. Her owner, my roommate Ken, had to take an important flight first thing this morning and tried to rinse her off around 2 AM, to absolutely no effect, and then skedaddled with his be-skunked suitcase and all.  So, Ms. E and I combined hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap according to a recipe found online and wrestled the stinky beast into the bathtub for her libations. Half an hour later, she was much improved, but we've had all the windows open all day and all the doors open... except Ken's, because during the night and morning, Pearl had been confined in there to try to lessen her effect on the rest of the house. So his room is still a danger zone, but the rest of the house is becoming more livable.

I even turned shaman and bound up some of Ms E's dried lavender into a smudge, lit it on fire and wafted the smoke convincingly around the house. It helped a lot, and was a bit more pleasant than Febreeze.  Pearl has been quite self-pitying all day, although after her bath she actually seemed very relieved!

A sum up of my day in etsy finds:

The Stinker! Husky looking so innocent
That smells! Part of the solution

The cleanser

Open all the windows!

              

Here's hoping it fades sooooon!

Best Friend-Book-Internet Coincidence Ever

I am so excited!  To begin at the beginning (and thereby build d  r  a m  a) ... My friend Genevieve, who works for Google Books and who was an English major with me back east in college, has a super cool blog that I like to read as often as possible. This girl is one of the funniest people I have ever met (we were in an improv group together in college, and I spent most of our performances trying not to break out laughing at her utter hilarity), and a great writer, and she does cool stuff to link publishers and libraries with Google Books, AND she finds really great things on the internet, which she posts at her blog, piglets and fishes.

This is where the amazing part comes in. Genevieve posted the best video today, which I am embedding below, too. I loved it. I watched the whole thing, all the way to the credits. And THEN I saw that the people who created the video are the super creative, totally talented, artistic-from-head-to-toe couple Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp and Sean Ohlenkamp.

And then I may have made a little shriek of glee, because Lisa and I went to high school together, were in loads of classes together, mock trial together, etc etc, and I consider her one of my oldest, closest friends, and supremely gifted into the bargin. She and Sean moved to Toronto last year, where PDK and I visited them in September (insert long story here involving PDK's cousin's wedding and a Mustang convertible). Now Lisa and her husband, who is an artist and graphic designer himself, get to share a studio and be creative together. Lisa has a blog, Blonderland, where she shares her art and the secrets of yummy vegan cooking, and sells her drawings and crocheted creations on etsy under the name blonderland as well: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Blonderland/. I love the weird wiles of the internet that have allowed one of my favorite people find another of my favorite people, and then I get to bask in the sunshiny happiness of it all, and now so do you!

OK, now for their awesome, bibliophile-pleasing video

Megan Models my Wares

Collage pin 

My friend Megan, another PhD student in the English department and a fan of Irish lit, was a sweetheart and agreed to model for me for some Etsy photos.  Her hair is so gorgeous and she has such a cool and unique style that I knew she would enhance my brooches and bobby pins.  She did such a great job and made it so easy!  We played around in the afternoon light for an hour, and then we each grabbed dinner, and later went to a clothing exchange organized by a friend -- more on that soon.

Modeling these pins

Her hair is so thick!  I think she looks stunning here. I blurred out the background by using a mask in photoshop and then applying lens blur.

A bunch more images after the jump.

We Saunter in and out of Art Shows

My household loves the Elizabeth Gordon Gallery (EGG!) in SB, primarily because we all adore the paintings of one of their mainstay artists, Sherri Bellassen. The more venal reason is because the owner of the gallery is very generous with goodies -- truffles, good cheese, lots of wine.... what else could a grad student ask for? Every time they have an opening, we trot down to it, but the one last weekend was special because it had Belassen presenting her newest work. I know little to nothing about fine art, but what I love about Belassen is how still her figures are, even though she is usually capturing them in motion (swimming, dancing), and how stylized they are. Also, being the daughter of a surfer, I love her paintings of surfers in the long hours of watching and waiting.

At the opening, we got to really spend time up close with the paintings, and I noticed the texture, the way that Belassen layered paint and left these interesting little squares open in the layers that showed other colors beneath, or even the canvas. From a distance, they looked just like little splashes or sparks, but they were so carefully planned in these perfect squares when we looked closely. My favorites were the divers and the surfers, but the hammock loungers also caught my eye.

Pssst... In the photo, I am wearing one of the pins I sell in my etsy shop.