My handmade Valentine's Day card: LOVE

1) Laser cut Robert Indiana's LOVE onto reclaimed wood.

2) Hand stitched it to paper of rice straw, made by Prokritee, a fair trade group in Bangladesh.

3) Enclose in handmade envelope, sewing from polka dot print wax paper.

Available at my online shop: Tinted Mint

Here's a guide on how to make your own whisk lamp from Sweet Paul.

Also noticed a cluster of these lamps above the stairway at Anthropologie in San Francisco.

Sweet Paul now has a gorgeous online magazine featuring amazing photography, recipes, craft ideas, and more. Love it!

Here's a mini portfolio I made recently. I will be using it to send out to select companies as self promo.

I believe presentation is super important. It has to be something that will stand out on someone's desk and interesting enough so one wants to open and explore its contents. As I love working with textiles, my design involves a simple sleeve of organic cotton canvas.

Outside is screen printed in fluorescent pink with houndstooth pattern, my website and short text describing my style. The interior is lined with mid weight, bright lime cotton. The sides are left raw for a natural, frayed look. As I have plenty of snap buttons, I used these as my enclosure.

Inside each sleeve is a series of 4"x6" photo prints of my projects, short self intro and business card.

I've tried laser cutting the exterior artwork, but it does not compare to the visual impact of bright pink ink. The entire process took much longer than expected. I had a hard time screening on the canvas, usually needing 2 passes of ink instead of just 1, which usually results in too much ink and less refined lines. The sewing took an entire day to make 24.

I already have a new idea for a different design that will be much more time efficient to make. Looking forward to that once this batch is used up.

Learned screen printing last month and have made so many things!

Here's some process pics of how I make my 2011 Birds Laser Cut Calendar, a mix of screen print and laser cut methods. I have so much good quality card stock that's originally part of packaging for these lovely wax papers I sell on Tinted Mint. I keep them and reuse them for all sorts of stuff. They come in large sheets so I first cut these to size, bit bigger than what I need so I can later trim to finished size. So with stack of cut card stock in hand, I screen print part of the art work first.

I then trim off the left side of each screen printed sheet, using the registration marks as a guide so when I put this into the laser cutting machine, my cut outs will be "straight" against the screened artwork. Here's a video I took with my iPhone that shows the laser cutting/etching part. It took 2-3 trials to get the alignment just right.

Here are pics of the final product.

There's always something new to learn about Photoshop and Illustrator. Thank goodness for the internet and fabulous free resources!

I downloaded a bunch of Photoshop brush settings from Colorburned, including ones to create coffee stains and tapes. At left is an example of the tape brush I used to create my Tinted Mint ad for Scout Magazine (look for my ad in the November and December issue). This tape brush is perfect for my Tinted Mint shop so I will definitely use it more often.

Also handy in creating this ad is the background image I downloaded from Shutterstock. While this was not free, I subscribed to their 1 month plan with up to 25 images/day and took full advantage, minus a few. I Photoshopped in the washi tapes and little flags on the cupcakes. Et voilà, my beautiful ad!

I was looking online to see if there is an easy way to create scalloped edges in Illustrator. Wavy zigzag just isn't the look I wanted. So I came upon tutorials about creating pattern swatches. Wish I learned about this sooner when creating print repeats. Before, I would manually tile repeats across a 1 meter length for textile prints, creating huge files for the manufacturer. Now I can just create one single repeat, save it as a pattern swatch, which will automatically tile across any size space needed. 

Here's an example of a traditional Japanese print based on my Yagasuri washi tape, created in Illustrator (seems so easy, but it took me a while to figure out repeat alignment):