Grey Card Mysteries Revealed

We are in the throes of getting everything ready to launch our online store (which will hopefully be open any day now!) and we are learning sooooo much. It wouldn't be like us if we didn't try to do every last thing ourselves, so right now we are acting as webmasters, photographers, writers, designers- you name it!

While we were shooting our products, we had to experiment with lots of different lighting set ups and try to get our little point and shoot camera to do all kinds of crazy things that it didn't want to do. Enter the grey card, an 18% grey piece of tag board that is a handy tool for balancing colors. When I read this tutorial it finally started to make sense! I won't go into the details here, but if you're interested in product photography, you should definitely check out the link. It also explains how to use the levels feature in Photoshop, which helps a ton with color correction. How could I have overlooked this handy tool before? As I said before, there is something new to learn everyday!

This is the last of it, I swear!

I know, I know... enough with the posts about knitted and crocheted food! (and plants and animals!) But I can't stop noticing them and when I see something cute I just have to share it. Here are the knitted donuts in the window of Noe Knit that I mentioned earlier. Aren't they perfect?

Check It!

It's so nice to have a magazine so perfectly tailored to your particular interests and tastes, whatever those may be... We've found that in ReadyMade, our crafty friends across the bay. Check out this month's nifty issue for a fun and easy project by yours truly (pg. 34).

The Knitted Garden

Another example of knitting gone wild! (I love that my friends forward me stories about all things knitted and crocheted- thanks Matt!) A woman in England had the idea to create an entire knitted garden, so she and 300 contributors got to work creating all kinds of knitted garden sculptures, from a pond to a picnic to these cute little critters. I've done some crocheted sculptures, but nothing knitted yet- and this makes me want to give it a try! Our local yarn store has a great window display right now of knitted donuts and other sweets, complete with colored sprinkles done in beads. I'll try to snap a picture of it sometime in the next couple days.

Girard show coming to SF MOMA!

We are super excited about the Alexander Girard show that is coming to SF MOMA next month, called "Alexander Girard, Vibrant Modern". He's our favorite! (Thanks Mom for the tip!)

Aprons Galore

This is the perfect project for someone like me, who is (still!) learning to sew. Aprons can be as simple or as ornate as you want, and since they're small and basically one-size-fits-all, they're pretty hard to screw up.

Tie One On is a website/blog that is entirely dedicated to aprons. They come up with a monthly theme, and people make aprons and send in their pictures to be posted on a flickr gallery. Brilliant! I don't think I can motivate to make one before the October 1st deadline, (the theme is pinafores) but hopefully I'll be able to participate in the next one. Check out the pic- someone's submission from June's theme, which was "the musical". Can you guess which musical this one represents?

Red Sweaters Deployed!!!

Thanks so much to everyone who came out last Friday to the opening reception of The Red Sweaters Deployment Project! It was a fantastic evening full of great art, friends (old and new), and family (mostly old-HAHA!). We had a huge turnout and everyone seemed genuinely excited and moved by the installation. It was such a pleasure to put together, and we encourage everyone to come see it over and over and over (2400+ sweaters, and no 2 are alike). It will be up until October 28th, so please come visit. We also had a great bunch of knitters and crocheters who added around 10 new sweaters to the project. We're still a couple of hundred behind, so keep those sweaters coming! For updates on the project keep checking in with redsweaters.org, as well as the Hardware Store's website.

Crafty Cacti

Thanks to Lara for sending us these photos of amazing crocheted cacti! What will really sprain your brain about these forms is that they are actually visual representations of hyperbolic space. Huh? Read more at the Institute for Figuring website.

They also reminded me of this photo I saw on craftster awhile back- you know how much I love a handcrafted pincushion!

Foraging for Fruit

The jam making workshop left me wishing I had a garden or a fruit tree of my very own to harvest fruit from. Some friends of ours in Berkeley have noticed a couple fig trees in their neighborhood that are ripe for the picking, and we have been picking Strawberry Fruits off the trees in here in San Francisco ever since we found out that they are indeed safe to eat! Foraging for fruit in the city is an interesting concept, and of course there is a website (fallenfruit.org) dedicated to it, complete with a manifesto and a map of the public fruit trees in Los Angeles. They have even started concentrating their efforts on the creation of public parks that are filled with fruit trees. So great! I am now on the lookout for a Bay Area map- in the meantime, keep your eyes peeled and let me know if you find any public fruit trees in your neighborhood!

Check out The Purl Bee

Oh, to be able to work in a beautiful yarn store and be able to write about knitting and quilting, all day long! New York City's Purl is my all time favorite yarn store, and Purl Patchwork, its sister store for all things quilt related, is equally amazing!

Check out their cute blog for good project inspiration- Fall is around the corner and it's time to start working on some new craft projects!

Reason I Love Libraries No. 1875

I'm no Bob Villa, but I am the proud owner of a couple of screw drivers, wrenches, a drill and a hammer. And for the most part, that's just fine. But sometimes, as when I'm getting ready to install a show at the gallery, I need a little something more. And being a garage-less urban guy, I haven't the luxury of collecting tools, nor the pleasure of borrowing from a friendly neighbor's stash. Which brings us to The San Francisco Tool Lending Center. Any SF resident, 18 years or older can go borrow (for free!) any tool they'd like from the Center's extensive holdings. They also offer workshops on proper tool use, as well as a reference library with books, magazines, and videotapes on all sorts of DIY and home improvement projects. Our friend Kate took advantage of a similarly brilliant institution The Berkeley Tool Lending Library, and her weeds have never been so finely whacked!

Jammin'

Here are some pics from the Curiosity Guild jam making workshop on Sunday. Thanks to Carolina from cmbsweets for showing us how to make yummy jams and jellies!

Carolina explains Jam 101 to a group of Guild members, and a sampling of her lovely jams.

Guild members hulling many pounds of strawberries.

Strawberry & peach jams simmering on the stove, and grape jelly jars waiting to be sterilized.

The fruits of our labor!

Best Idea Ever?!

Came across this sweet gem of a spot whilst riding around town to promote the art show. Much, much, much more pleasant than this stinky place.

Busy bees

Phew! We have been running around all day, dropping off postcards for an upcoming art show that we are installing at the Hardware Store Gallery, the new temporary home for the Red Sweaters Project. The miniature sweaters (over 2500 of them–one for every soldier lost in the war in Iraq) were originally installed in a tree here in San Francisco by Nina Rosenberg, until the city made her take them down in July. Now we are trying to find more venues to house the project for a few months at a time, after our show comes down at the end of October. Please let us know if you can think of anyone (stores, galleries, etc.) who might be interested!

There is more information about the project at redsweaters.org, including patterns for knitting or crocheting your own sweaters to submit. Unfortunately, the number of American casualties in the war has increased by over 1000 since Nina began the project in December of 2005, and we are still in need of more sweaters.

Beautiful Blooms

Some amazing blooms from our recent field trip to a dahlia farm in Sonoma.

More pictures from YarisWorks

Our lovely friend Jennifer was kind enough to send us a few pictures she snapped at the YarisWorks event a few weeks back. For more pictures about more events happening around town, check out her blog on Fecal Face. And start preparing yourself for a Curiosity Guild glass etching class in October...

Tracie (who helped organize the event) shows off her creations. A table full of soap making madness.

An enthusiastic etcher prepares to get busy. Lauren explains the finer points of soap making.

Me proving that I'm sometimes willing to put safety before style. Lauren getting ready to pop some glycerine in the microwave, yum!

Just can't get enough....

When we moved to San Francisco, we let a few of our many many magazine subscriptions go, (although I think we still subscribe to a dozen or so) in an effort to distance ourselves from our media saturated NY lifestyles. But it's a hard habit to kick! We always manage to spend way too much time in the magazine section of every bookstore we step foot in, and we've recently discovered a handful of arty magazines that we are obsessing over:

We picked up issue #6 of Esposus Magazine yesterday, and it's totally amazing. The theme of the issue is "Process", and inside are a number of reproductions of peoples' notebooks and sketchbooks, all illustrating the artistic process. It's completely captivating, and I'm super impressed with the printing, the fold out posters, the different paper stocks, the die cut tear outs- the issue is a little work of art in itself and I'm going to try to track down some back issues to see what they've done in the past.

Another magazine we have discovered is Swindle, which we bought because of the Jim Houser art on the cover (the inside covers themselves are soooo beautiful!) Turns out the creative director is Shepard Fairey. There are lots of interviews with really interesting artists, and the design is quite nice.

Finally, we are taking the time to look over our back issues of ANP Quarterly (as well as pick up new ones) and it is fantastic as well. It's interesting to me that so many artists are working on magazine projects right now, (Ed Templeton is one of the editors of ANP Quarterly) and that they are able to survive with money from private donations or through corporate backing. Only one of these magazines has any ads in it!

These are the kinds of magazines that go onto the bookshelf instead of the recycle bin after we have perused them. They are also unfortunately the kinds of magazines that tend to fold after a couple years, so please grab some issues now so we can see more of them in the future!

We (Heart) Heath!

This weekend Lauren and I took a trip across the Golden Gate to take the Heath Ceramics factory tour in lovely Sausalito. If you've never been, we HIGHLY recommend making the pilgrimage. In fact, we may have to organize a Curiosity Guild outing in the not-so-distant future so we can partake is some of the workshops they'll be offering in the coming months. In addition to being chock-full of the most beautiful ceramics we've ever seen, the factory and adjoining store are so casually modern and cozy (which isn't easy!) we didn't want to leave. EVER! (There were coffee and muffins laid out for us when we got there for cryin' out loud!) It's such a great example of a time when simplicity, craftsmanship, and quality truly meant something. It's so encouraging to see places like that still exist.

Click here to check out a little slideshow of some of the pictures we took during the factory tour.

Mon Bloc Rhodia, c'est super!

These little orange notepads first caught my eye when I was living in Lyon, France, where they are made. I picked one up at a paper store this weekend that is perfect for my obsessive list making- it is skinny and long, and the graph paper is sooo French- I love it! Reminds me of when I was studying art history there, observing the students take copious notes on graph paper using different colored pens, rulers and those strange erasable inks. (I spent a lot of my time in class watching the French kids go crazy taking notes, and trying to figure out which of them might be willing to share with an American student who could only understand bits and pieces of what the teacher was saying...)

Maybe someday, the cult of Rhodia will overtake the current Moleskine mania that is sweeping the nation!

How to skip stones

I have a checklist a mile long of things I want to learn how to do, and skipping stones is one of those things. My dad was always able to skip stones really well (seems like one of those things that dads just inherently know how to do) but mine always seem to sink without a single bounce.

This article explains that the secret is to toss your stone at the "magic angle" of 20 degrees. Aha! An excellent tip that I will try to remember the next time I'm chillin' by a lake with some perfectly round and flat stones in my pocket. (Not sure when that will be...) I know it will take much practice, but I'm determined to learn how to do this!