art making and messes in the east bay

do you ever feel like you have friends who don't quite get what you do, in terms of art? sometimes i feel like that about some (not all) of my friends. so it's really refreshing to meet new people who love art journaling and making messy collages and appreciate scraps and all sorts of the same things i love in real life.



i first met sparkleface on flickr and i had been admiring her art journals for awhile and it turned out she lives in the east bay. so she invited me to hang out with her and her friend rachel, who is also does wonderful art journals. thats why i have so much love for flickr, because i've 'met' so many talented artists on the site.



it was a windy day but still beautiful. i loved using their supplies, and they had fun using what i brought with me.

somehow it's so refreshing to use someone else's ephemera and rubberstamps and paints. it makes for a change i guess. and it's just so much fun to share. that's what i love about art, is that it's about sharing and learning and mutual admiration and community and new friends coming together.

goals

there are things in the back of mind that i have to do and sometimes i've been putting them off because i don't have enough confidence or enough time or whatever. sometimes i feel like i don't put myself out there enough.

things i want to do:
1. apply to a juried show that's coming up
2. apply to be a student artist in residence at the SF dump
3. work on more graphic design stuff
4. find time to meet other creative people and have art/crafternoons
5. expand my itty bitty etsy shop

what are your creative goals? or just your goals in general?

bits & pieces

i don't think i've posted this before, but a book by Carolee Gilligan Wheeler and Jennie Hinchcliff called Good Mail Day is newly released! Please check out the book, i loved the sneak peeks of it, the styling, photography and layout looks wonderful and charming. if any of you are in the bay area, they are also having a book release party at the SF Center for the Book

i am thrilled that the cover features a part of a mail art envelope i sent them - it's on the top left corner of the cover, where the forever stamps are.

i made the envelope from bits of chinese ephemera i had lying around the house, tea wrappers and calendars and peruvian ephemera i had collected after my trip to peru - bus tickets and tea bags and museum brochures and all sorts of bits of paper.

on another note, school is starting up again, the last week of august. i've transferred to San Francisco State University and i'm majoring in graphic design. it's too bad with impacted classes i didn't get any required classes for my major. that is so disappointing to me, but i'm going to see if anyone drops and try to sign up for the classes.

On Monday i went to a free screening of Hayao Miyazaki's movie Ponyo! i loved it, it's about a little fish-girl who meets a little human boy and decides she wants to be human forever. check out the trailer here

letterpress class

these past six weeks, on tuesday and thursday evenings i've been going to the letterpress shop at city college. i love seeing fonts you think only exist on the computer, but they exist as metal type. tiny things that you can cradle in your hands. there's something special about it. we have to carefully set the type - so it doesn't fall apart or be spelled wrong or placed upside down.



my messy tray of type, mini shipping tags i printed on to be my business cards...

i love it when printing onto paper - once the ink has dried you can feel the physical impression of each letter.



i realized you need patience, tolerance for ink and soot smudged hands, that each space between each letter matters and there's such beauty in letters and numbers and symbols you forget about because now they mostly exist on a computer.





edit: all photos are by Jack Edwards
Jack was a great guy to go to for help in the letterpress shop. he took many wonderful photos of the work the class produced so this is just a sampling of what i could fit in my usb thumb drive.

new prints in my etsy shop!

just listed these three new prints onto my etsy shop :)

Map of My Life poetry chapbook

Map of My Life is 8 poems & 2 stories, it's about my favorite fruit. a childhood memory. living in san francisco and riding muni. it's about everyday things, it's exploring who i am.

i've been writing poems since i was thirteen, now i'm twenty, so it's long overdue i suppose on publishing my first collection of poems & there are two short stories as well. and i do mean really short stories. i took a short story class during the spring semester and every story i wrote was 500 words or less. but i don't mind that, because it's the words that matter.

sprinkled around the words are some photos i took while walking around the city. the skeleton piano photo is one i took when i toured the san francisco dump.

check it out in my etsy shop :)

vintage paper fair

i look forward to going to the vintage paper fair in san francisco, it comes three times a year now, for 2 days each in january, may and august.

i love digging through the $1 or less table. the typical stuff i find is usually old letters, a mishmash of old booklets, maps, and it's a place where people carefully sift though boxes and boxes of postcards in various themes. i don't collect anything that seems too precious, though i covet tiny french dictionaries and beautiful storybooks like frank baum's oz books and scrapbooks from the 1800s. there's so much eye candy but i go for the cheap stuff - the used vintage envelopes, old photos and letters, cabinet cards and cigar labels.



most of my 'finds' yesterday were old airmail envelopes. i love the handwriting and the dash of postmarks, the assortment of stamps and some of them came with letters. most of them didn't but the decorated envelopes were enough of a treasure.



some of them are so lovely, i'm not sure if i can tear them apart for my art, maybe i will frame a few of my favorites.