Colour crazy

I have gone a bit colour crazy lately - doing three-colour screenprints no less. Fun! Two-colour designs are a bit of an obsession with me, but three? Madness. The whole dynamic might go out of whack if that third colour doesn't quite go with the first two. But in the case of my latest 'T' Towel printing session, I think it kinda works - red, cyan and chocolate go together quite happily. So I put a couple in the shop.

Etsy tea towel love

So happy to see this article on Etsy's Storque blog - a feature on Etsy tea towel sellers! There are so many beautiful towels - craziness - and I'm so glad to be included. And no, that's not me above but the brief we were given was to provide a photo of you and your products - eeek. That part was hard. Thanks to Elizabeth of flyingrhymes for organising it :)

Finally, my new 'T' Towel is available in the shop. For those fellow type-mad folks out there, it's a chance to get your fix while also doing house work - perfect! As mentioned before, it features my hand-drawn rendering of various letter Ts, including Garamond, Hoefler, Kevlar, Mrs Eaves and Caslon. The first run is a charcoal (very dark grey) on crisp, 100% linen. Enjoy :)

Views on a black day

I took these photos of the outside of my studio building in the heat of last Saturday morning, not knowing just how bad the day would get - not only would it be the hottest day on record for Melbourne (hello 46.4 degrees celsius/116 degrees farenheit) but it also saw the worst bushfires on record for Victoria.

It's not hard to imagine how it happened - the horrible northerly winds were so strong they nearly blew my screens away as I was trying to clean them up outside (no, I didn't take our Premier's advice to stay home) and just going outside was like walking into a fan-forced oven - hideous.

And don't forget, there are little ways of helping out - the Red Cross are taking donations, Pip of Meet Me At Mike's has compiled a bunch of helpful options which you can read about here and if you're in the inner north, RRR are collecting toiletries and sanitary items *up until the end of today* which will then be dropped off at base camp, direct to those affected.

Ta-de-da

This is my new little studio :)



And I love it. It's been six months in the making, but it certainly feels worth the wait now that it's all ready to go.

Here's the spiel: Early/mid-last year I decided I needed a proper space - rather than corners of my not-very-big home - to work (ie: do screen printing & sewing and have somewhere to store all my equipment and not worry too much about getting everything messy). And so started the hunt. It was on Lara's blog that I originally heard about a new group of studios being set up in the delightful Kensington, and they sounded perfect.

So after six months of lease negotiations and studio-building, here we are, and me and all my new studio mates are moving in. We each have our own room to work in and there's a great communal area - it's all perfect. And I'm now ready to take on the year and get new things happening. Like, uh, actually get my new tea towel in the shop! Soon, soon...