Archive for September, 2009

on and on and on

Published
by
robayre
on September 23, 2009
in Cool Links, General Update, goals, life and Projects
. 1 Comment

spiral, originally uploaded by robayre.
This is what your brain feels like after playing bejeweled blitz for too long. Fun times. And I’m still not even any good at it.

 

Last weekend I crocheted another cowl scarf. 3 skeins in 3 days. Someone is anxious for chilly weather. And, hey, what’s up with the cool summer and then warm september? The trees don’t know what to do, turn red, and lose all their leaves off the top, but stay green everywhere else.

Last weekend I was supposed to cross off no. 17 on this year’s list (ride in a hot air balloon).  But it rained, so we rescheduled. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the weather behaves for my next date. The night before my first scheduled launch I was able to capture an Etsy treasury and it was of course Hot Air Balloon themed. You can see what it looked like above.


At the fair, a few weeks ago, they had one of those booths where you can take “old timey” pictures. I’ve been thinking that I want to add it to my list of things to do in 2010. It was hard not to do it right then, but I started thinking about these pictures I had seen recently from one of my flickr contacts. Anna Allen is involved in living history and re-enactment activities and had her portrait taken at one recently. Yes, that picture above is a modern picture of her, not a scan of an old picture. I’ve been obsessed with these pictures she had taken and want to find a photographer who works in wet plate method and get my own photos taken. How cool is that? Check out Anna’s flickr to see more pictures.

Been Busy!

Published
by
robayre
on September 16, 2009
in etsy, fiber, General Update, life, My Artwork and shop update
. 3 Comments

I’m on a roll, checking things off my lists.

Dinner is on, changed the cat’s litterbox, changed the burned out lights in the garage, photographed and listed new items in my etsy shop. Now it’s time to knock out this one last item for tonight. Blog.

I can’t believe it is already Wednesday. I wanted to post about my whirlwind weekend and it’s seems the week is slipping by just as quickly.

Thursday evening my best friend and I went to the Sandwich Fair. It’s actually the county fair and pretty small-town. Imagine tractor pulls and lots of 4H kids running around. I got to visit the rabbit house, the chicken house and ate corn on the cob, onion blossom, ribs and fried cheese, what more can you ask for? Erica and I took a picture together in a BIG chair, which goes along with our eternal search for BIG things, like here and here.

   

Friday, is my errands day and I went to get reproductions made of 3 original pieces of mine. I’m very excited to offer these as I’ve been wanting to do it for so long, they are such great quality and they are extremely affordable. They are listed in the shop right now :D

Saturday was my cousin’s wedding at the Drake in Chicago. We dressed up and a great time. Really, I couldn’t have been more happy after I found out that they had a photo booth at their reception. That definitely made my night. Congratulations to David and Sarah, they seemed to be on a new plane of happiness that day, and congratulations to my Aunt, who reads here regularly :D

These are the pictures from the photo booth. It’s my sister, matt and I. 1st picture is just smiles, second picture is the paparazzi shot, 3rd picture is sad face, fourth picture is roller coaster.  Funny enough, afterward my brother and sister in law were showing their pictures to us and they did something similar, ending in a picture called “tyrannosaurus!”

Sunday my sister and I went to the Renegade craft fair in chicago. I didn’t buy one thing  and that wasn’t for lack of desire. I found many things I liked but it would be way too expensive, they didn’t have my size, or the variety was gone and I wasn’t crazy about the remaining color selections. Lesson learned, it’s better to go on Saturday before all the good stuff is gone.

And then Sunday evening on the ride home I finally finished my cowl, and of course, it’s been in the 80s all week long. I’m excited to make more of these. In fact, now that I’ve completed posting and crossing off the final item on today’s to-do list I think I will begin a new one.

Thanks for stopping by and reading :D

A pumpkin, a squirrel and a cat

Published
by
robayre
on September 10, 2009
in Fun and General Update
. 7 Comments

Once upon a time there was a pint sized pumpkin. It only grew to be pint sized, but it’s owner treasured it. That was until the fateful day when a squirrel decided to treasure it more.

Enter Evil Squirrel. He treasured the pumpkin all right, treasured it all over the front porch.

Then Cat spied the Evil Squirrel.

“It’s okay, I’d rather have squirrel pie, than pumpkin!”

sup

Published
by
robayre
on September 9, 2009
in Artists, Cool Links, etsy, life, My Artwork and Projects
. 2 Comments

This is what I’ve been up to lately. I’m crocheting a very wide cowl, in a mustard yellow. It will basically be like a long scarf, but instead of having two ends, it’s all connected in a long loop. This way I can wear it long like a scarf, doubled up around my neck, or hooded over my head in place of a hat and scarf. I’m just using a basic crochet and I’m almost ready to head into the third skein. It’s a Lions Brand, vanna white yarn. I just had the urge to start it and had one skein of it in my stash from a year ago. Fortunately, because it’s a commercial brand, picking up more skeins at michael’s matched perfectly.

here                                here                               here

Yesterday I took a leap towards the biggest challenge on my 2009 list. I finally called up and scheduled a hot air balloon ride. I was hoping that I could wait until fall to cross this item off, this way the trees would be changing color. I was not thinking about how quickly schedules can book up, or that weather can be very unreliable. Fortunately the company I spoke with still had plenty of open dates. I’m crossing my fingers that everything goes to plan, but I understand it might take a few scheduled dates before a successful flight. In my excitement, I’m sharing a few hot air balloon Etsy items above.

  

I’ve participated a couple more times in the flickr pool What I Wore Today (drawings only). Oh, and thanks to a friend‘s heads up, now there is a blog that features WIWT drawings.

What I Wore Today

Published
by
robayre
on September 4, 2009
in Fun, General Update, My Artwork and Projects
. 2 Comments

I really wanted to play too, so today I contributed to the What I Wore Today (drawings only) group pool on flickr.

It’s no marvelous work of art, and I’m no fashionista.  I’m actually the girl who was just in Macy’s recently, running around saying “wow, they have really nice clothes here” in a truly surprised fashion. My actual outfit was pulled together entirely from Old Navy (the skirt and the tank top) and Target (the cardigan and the purse). I really wouldn’t have bothered to draw the purse if I hadn’t just changed it out for another bag I’ve been carrying all summer. Once I slung it over my shoulder I was surprised to see that the exact same color of my cardigan was matched in the pattern of the bag. I’m not the type to try and attempt or even care about such things normally, but I was drawing a self portrait of myself today.

Check out the flickr group and if you contribute, send me a link!

Shuffle? I think not.

Published
by
robayre
on September 3, 2009
in General Update
. 5 Comments

Today I am going to talk briefly about one of the great mysteries of the modern world.

Let’s speak of itunes shuffle.

The other day I received a fwd. email*. It contained funny observations about modern life. It said hilarious things that made me lol… only for real, not just type the letters lol. Anyway, one of the observations was “I like all of the music in my itunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen song in my itunes.”

Have you ever wondered if just maybe your ipod/itunes programming is sentient? How else does your ipod know to play Time Bomb by Old 97s exactly when you need that little push to get you through the end of the work day? Conversely, when you have guests over and you’re trying to impress them and play all cool, how does your itunes knows exactly then to drop that one spice girls song you have in your library, and make you want to crawl under a rock?

Back me up here, is it not true? Sometimes you have shuffle on and it plays THE BEST SONGS EVER back to back to back, so you check to make sure you aren’t playing a playlist of AWESOMOSITY! Nope, just shuffle. Other times it’s pulling out songs that make you want to gag and all you can do is hit fwd, fwd, fwd, until you finally just go back and tell it to start shuffle all over again. Hopefully this intelligent machine will rethink about it’s train of thought and play a song you like once in a while.

Do you guys know They Might Be Giants and their song Fingertips? Well, it’s a song on their album Apollo 18 that consists of about 20 small 5-15 second songs. Songs with lyrics like “What’s that blue thing doing here?!?” When the album went to CD they made each song it’s very own track. Now, you won’t hear any of these songs for a year and then whammo, in one short day 5 of them will pop up “randomly” between songs.

Shuffle? Or just the beginnings of Apple’s super top secret plan to take over humanity?

Okay, now that I have that off my chest, just a few things I would like to share:

My second article is up over at Hello Craft, so please click on over and check it out!

Today I just discovered this awesome flickr pool, after several of my flickr contacts contributed to it. It’s called What I Wore Today (drawings only!) and it is exactly what it sounds like; drawings of people and what they wore. Imagine Wardrobe Remix but for the illustrators. I think I will need to participate in this soon :)


My sister sent me this video (watch the boy in the red shirt) and I know I posted it on my facebook so many of you have already seen it, but really, it’s worth another watch isn’t it. My sister loved the slap, I loved the eye contact move and Matt just said “it’s not so funny if you imagine he’s actually a 30 year old man” lol.

*I don’t really ever fwd. emails, but this one was really a classic. Not only did I fwd to everyone, I also printed out a couple copies to hand to the non-emailers. If you would like a copy of this email, just leave me a comment and I’ll be glad to pass it on.

The day after

Published
by
robayre
on September 1, 2009
in etsy, General Update, life and Projects
. 2 Comments

The remaining pieces available are listed in my etsy shop with their new, still affordable, prices here. Earlier today I caught myself thinking if only I could go to Micheal’s after work, but no, I need to get home to finish my daily piece, But NO, I’m done, I have my evening all to myself and anything my heart can dream of. If I want to, I can sit on my front porch and read all evening. I will predict this coming month will have a lot of cooking. Matt’s been mentioning the homemade pizza I made and a few weeks ago I took a crack at making my own spaghetti noodles after reading about it in this book. Now I want to make some french toast with homemade bread after reading this post. Also, I predict more spinning. Yes, with cooler air coming in, I think it’s time to break out my spinning wheel again.

Garden update: A couple weeks ago when I had the flu I got so sick I couldn’t go outside. Unfortunately this meant that I let my garden go unwatered for a few days. That was all it took for my (probably) root bound container garden to shrivel up and die. I continued watering for a couple weeks hoping that they might come back, but the damage had already been done. My small pumpkins started turning orange, so finally last week I cut them off their shriveled, brown vine. Here you can see the size they reached before the fateful flu of 2009. I left them out on our patio table and this weekend I looked out and one of the pumpkins was in the yard. I scrambled out to find that a squirrel (evil, evil) had started devour one and had attempted to carry off the other.

I got a customer appreciation picture from Tiffany. I LOVE when customers send me pictures of what they are doing with the things they’ve bought from robayre.etsy.com.

I also got a message that my “you’re my favorite” grass painting was featured on another blog. Hard to believe that piece hasn’t sold with how many views and how many miles it has received on the internet. It made quite the rounds at one point on Tumblr, and has been featured on a bunch of websites.