Monday, August 30, 2010

I want to go to there

I went and lined up for macarons at Adriano Zumbo's cafe on the weekend. Thankfully the line wasn't as crazy as I heard it could be, we waited only 15min or so. Being my first visit, I was curious but open-minded and I'm pleased to say they were pretty good! My favourite was the passionfruit chocolate version. I'm looking forward to the cherry and coconut one I saved for today's afternoon tea.

We tried to go to rozelle markets afterwards but the stalls were packing up by the time we walked down. I miss poking around markets and garage sales and finding random knick knacks. The little miniature of Paris was one of my finds on a particular good garage sale saturday. I managed to go to two and found bargains at both.

I love the little details in the street scene. At the moment it's hanging up on my inspiration board. It's good motivation to keep working! The glass jars holding our new embroidery thread are from the second garage sale. We went to Morris and Son's in the city and went nuts buying thread. They were from a discontinued line so we though we better stock up in case we can't find them elsewhere.

/ca



Monday, August 23, 2010

Epic Battle

We've gone a bit thread mad lately and are both working on some more sewn artworks. My table is pretty messy at the moment. I dream about finding one of those really nice old wooden drawers to keep all my little bits and pieces.

We went rummaging through our materials last week and came across some old projects we started for the Poketo project. In the end we went for something else (I think we were worried that the stitching wouldn't look right on the wallets) but we want to finish these and hang them up somewhere. Get some colour in our house other than the lemony yellow that is EVERYWHERE.

We're going to call the gnome and dragon piece 'Epic Battle' :)

/ca



Monday, August 16, 2010

Designer Disco

Over the weekend Ca and I were part of the Designer Disco lane way exhibition for Sydney Design Festival. We forgot to bring a camera on the night to take pics of the light-boxes, dang, but here is the poster sans the light. Its called "Something Close To Nothing (but different to the day before)". The theme for the exhibition was music, so we took that line and played around with the idea of making nothing out of something....the solid space of the poster is made up of thousands of lines built up to create a flat texture...at least that was the idea. We hope the lyric isn't too obscure, can you guess which song its from? I hope we didn't give the impression we think music means nothing!

Thanks to Australian INfront and Future Classic for hosting the Designer Disco event.

Monday, August 09, 2010

Hungry Colours

Just finished our latest typographic experiment this time using needle and thread. A few weeks ago I posted this design as a watercolour and ta-da now it's sewn :) It's based on The Unicorns' song 'Ready to Die'. But I've only just realised that I've been singing the song wrong all this time! He's saying cougars not colours but I think I prefer it this way. You can see full design up on our site.

/ca

Neil Gaiman at Graphic

Over the weekend the Graphic festival took over the Sydney Opera House, we were pretty excited to see Neil Gaiman in the flesh and hear him read his short story "The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains". Although I was disappointed not to be able to get Neil to sign my copies of Sandman we came within inches of the man himself at the opening night drinks. We were a bit awestruck at how many of our creative heroes were at the event! Next time we're gonna have to pluck up the courage to introduce ourselves. It was a great festival with some informative workshops and hopefully Graphic 2011 will be just as awesome.

Monday, August 02, 2010

Gotta Keep Cheering

True to our word, here's another Monday post....
Second stab at "You Gotta Keep Cheering, this time I've approached it with a scalpel blade and dusted off an old set square for some "precision" cut out triangles. I'm happier with this design, a lot more brighter than the first attempt and it was good to break away from drawing for a bit. I've got a callous on my finger, I suspect the A2 page worth of lines for "Something Close To Nothing" had something to do with it. Maybe I could whip up a thimble especially for drawing (or perhaps just cutting up an old glove might do the trick) for next time. Or, I guess I could learn to hold a pen the right way...



In the meantime we're exorcising our obsession with minute lines and patterns and have created some geometric based illustrations for posters, perhaps a t-shirt and for fun. Here's a process snap of the one of the designs.




Away from the desk we've had some fun at Jingle Jangle a "monthly night of Rock N Roll, Exotica, Soul, Rhythm N Blues, Beat, Rockabilly and 50s and 60s Pop" at the newly re-opened Good God Small Club. We checked it out for the first time and we'll definitely try to make it a regular thing. The music was great and the dancing was fun.