My Art and Life

Welcome to my journal! Here I show off my artwork, rant about life, and many other things that amuse me. Feel free to go ahead and add me, though I love it when I get comments first. For more information, see my user info, and don't forget to visit my Etsy shop!

It has been insanely hot here lately. Temperatures upwards of 100 degrees have made me very glad that I have the freedom to stay at home with my baby during the day, instead of having to get out (strangely, that has not historically been considered a freedom, but it is in my own particular case and I'm thankful for it). My air conditioner has been running non-stop to keep up with the heat (I dread looking at my electric bill, but I've had to live without air conditioning in the past, so I'm not complaining), but at least it's been cool inside. Texas is nice, but should not be experienced without central heat and air.

My little one is asleep right now, and my big one is away working on his car, so I've decided to take some much-needed Mommy time for myself right now, scrapbooking and surfing the web. I will re-open up shop eventually, but I don't feel comfortable doing that when I can't really even manage to update my blog regularly. First things first!

Octavio is looking older and older each morning, although he's only 12 days old today. We're not quite on a schedule just yet, but I am able to predict his nighttime feedings pretty accurately at this point. I'm sleeping late, but I get enough of it. He's also gaining weight very quickly--at his last doctor's appointment he was a week ahead in terms of his weight gain. I'd worry if he were on formula, but since I'm nursing him I don't think there's much to worry about. I'm just glad he's healthy.

Turns out my my favorite stamp store, Viva Las Vegas Stamps is having a birthday sale, which means I managed to get one of their grab-bags for half the price they normally go for! Do I need the stamps? No, probably not, but I knew if I didn't order it now I'd never forgive myself. I warned my fiancee that it would be coming in the mail, and he teased me relentlessly for buying more rubber stamps. Wait until he finds out there may be anywhere from 50-75 of them! Heh...why are rubber stamps so habit-forming?!?!

Oh, and I haven't done a meme in ages, but I thought this was cute:

Get Your Cyborg Name

FEAR ME!!!

Sorry for the unexplained hiatus. My beautiful baby boy, Octavio, was born on June 27th, at 2:14 in the morning. He weighed 7 lbs. 13 oz. and was 21 inches long. I say was because he's already growing at a phenomenal rate, which is good, and makes me happy! Needless to say, for the past week the Internet has not been on the top of my priority list. He's an easy baby, and I've had a very quick recovery, but I just felt it would be best if I took a bit of a break from the world for a while. I'll be waiting just a bit longer before I re-open up my shop; I want to re-do a lot of the things I have in there.

This took me a buttload of carving, but it was well worth it. I don't really have anything in particular to use it for; I just like moths. I was also hoping that I could get the lines inside its wings a bit smaller, but my carving tool is a bit clumsy, so I decided to leave it like this. The thicker lines make it look more handmade, anyway.

Even though I'm not really an overly modest person, I think these are really cool:

www.modest-swimwear.net

Besides offering a nice workable alternative to people who are of a more conservative nature, which I always think is neat (I can admire them for going against the grain, and I too hate being stuck to the norm), they'd be wonderful for long trips. Any trip during which you plan to go swimming is always so much more of a pain for women because we have to either wear swimsuits under our clothing (cumbersome and hot), or change there (who wants to carry a swimsuit + a change of clothes, especially if you've got kids and diaper bags?!?!). This way, the swimsuit could double as my outfit for the day, so all I'd have to worry about would be my hair. And with the amount of hair I have (a lot), that's really all I WANT to worry about when I'm planning an outing.

I'm tempted to buy a pattern, but I don't think I'd get around to making it anytime soon. Anyway I can't properly measure myself until after I've had the baby. I'll be bookmarking it for the future, though.

Maaaan, I had a really nice nap this afternoon. I'm fairly sure that it means I've thrown off my internal clock completely, and I'll end up over-sleeping tomorrow, but it was well worth it. I was dragging my feet the minute I got into the apartment.

Anyway I thought I'd show off some of the stuff I've been working on for the shop. Mostly it's scrapbook papers, but they're fun to assemble. I always told myself that I wouldn't do the Kawaii thing, but I've caved in a bit. It's rather fun, and perfect for practicing my skills with Inkscape. Don't worry, though. I'm sure I'll be back to my usual textures after a while. I'd like to incorporate these into digital scrapbooking sets.

So for right now I'm mostly just playing the waiting game. I'm due in two days, but that doesn't really mean much. It would be lovely if I didn't have to wait much longer after that. I did have a friend tell me, though, that the old saying is, "The first baby's either two weeks early or two weeks late." Yikes!

In the meantime we've been getting everything in order here. The apartment's mostly organized except for a few things here and there--but all in all it's livable. The dishwasher wasn't working for a few weeks (gah!!) but they've finally come and fixed it. Yay! I've been spending some of my spare time reading about investing, a subject which I think appeals to me because of my background in math (I told myself I was taking a break; apparently I was wrong). How to Think Like Benjamin Graham and Invest Like Warren Buffett is a book I picked up at the library, mostly because our library doesn't have Graham's The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition), believe it or not (most of the investing books up there are of the "get rich quick with our strategy" type, which doesn't appeal easily to someone who has studied statistics). I've enjoyed it a lot, though. It's probably not for someone only casually interested in the subject, because it contains a lot of mathematical concepts (albeit rather simple ones) that would drive others away. Being more comfortable with them myself, I sort of wish it were written more as a math textbook, with example financial statements and so on, and not so conceptually-oriented, but it's really just meant to be a primer, so this would probably be unnecessary.

I'd also like to draw some attention to Print & Pattern, which is just about the coolest blog I've come across in a while. It's incredibly prolific, so you can spend hours reading through it, which is good when you need inspiration. It's full of patterns and pattern artists that come from all over the world, and I've discovered several new artists though it. It's definitely worth a look, even if you're not an artist.

ETA: When did scans_daily get deleted?!?! How did I miss this?

Every time I manage to drop something on the floor, which is often, I feel like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmpIzSgdlAw

I do love that movie.

I was talking to Adrian about my few stretch marks the other day before getting into the shower. I had been pointing to a few I have on my hips that look especially strange, and said, "Do you really think these are stretch marks, though? I mean, they look really weird and dark red. They don't really look like my others." And he replied, "Well I think they are, because they look just like the ones you have right here," and pointed to the underside of my belly.

...0_o?

I didn't even know I HAD stretch marks down there. In fact, I had to get out my hand mirror to see them, because my belly's gotten so large that I can't see them just by looking in the mirror on the wall (and definitely not by looking down).

Poo. And here I was thinking I had made it through 9 months without stretch marks anywhere besides my hips. Very disappointing.

Usually I hate vector graphics programs (Illustrator, Freehand, etc), because I've been working with Photoshop for so long that they tend to really kick my ass. My inadequacy with vectors, though, has really been getting in the way recently and limiting what I can do with my artwork, and hey, I need to jump on the bandwagon, so I downloaded Inkscape yesterday to play around with. Lo and behold, it's rather fun! It's simple and easy enough to use so that I don't get too frustrated with it (I have come to tears over Freehand several times), but powerful enough to be useful. I've been creating a bunch of kawaii-style weather icons that I'd like to put on the weather config on my desktop. Here's a screenshot of part of it:



I'll probably also make a nice scrapbooking package out of them to go in my shop. I do love themed sets!

Two of my very favorite YouTube videos EVER:

Three Views of a Secret with Toots Thielemans
Liberty City

I wish I could play these songs to my own satisfaction, but I can really only achieve a pitiful facsimile of their main themes. Listening to them makes me crazy--I don't know what it is exactly; something about all those chords, and then I invariably get them both stuck in my head for DAYS.

Awesome songs, though.

I'm sitting in the living room of my new apartment right now, exceedingly happy that we've finally gotten everything moved over. Well, really it only took us a day to do it, but it was a lot of hard work, and I felt like I had been waiting forever to get started on it. It's nice to have everything squared away just before I have the baby, even if it's a bit cluttered. I should be unpacking right now, but I think I'll take a break for today and play a little bit.

My back and feet have taken a turn for the worst. They're both hurting constantly, and I don't think it's going to let up until I have this baby. Something tells me it'll be within the next two weeks, even though I'm not due until the 17th, but I've never actually had a baby before, so I might be a bit off. We'll see :)

Oh, and I told myself that I was going to stop making livejournal icons, but dammit, it's a hard habit to break. They're rather addictive. I realized a while ago that there is a serious lack of icons having to do with long-haired women (and men, for that matter, but I didn't make any about that). So here are a few I put together. I might do more, but I'm lazy and occupied with other things for now.

( On to the icons )

So I'm not really in the mood for moving right now. I've packed a bit, but when you're 8 months pregnant you can't really do everything at once, so it's do a bit here, and then a bit more there, then rest for a while, etc. Doing everything at once isn't really an option for me.

I suppose it lets me play a bit on my laptop, though. I've been having a lot of fun with vector graphics lately, and came up with these little things, which I just love so much that I stuck them in my banner, but nobody else seems to care for much. Ah well; good things come to those who wait. I am a very patient person, sometimes to a fault.

I finally got all of the zines I ordered from Etsy in the mail the other day. They make me happy! I love little OOAK publications that don't see large circulation--their uniqueness somehow makes them special. Plus, I also like how they're completely under the control of their creators--no editing, no advertisements, no worries about pleasing the readership. Just art.

( Cut for large, lovely images )

I just finished this one yesterday.

( Cut for image size )

I've been getting into tedious doodle pages lately. I think it's very meditative, with some amount of creativity thrown in. Next, I think I'll do a doodle page of circle things, or square things, or possibly I'll do both.

I finally got a Crop-a-dile! Well, to be more accurate, I got a Crop-a-dile set, for considerably more than the price listed there, because I picked it up at Wal-Fart. Generally I don't make expensive impulse buys, but this one was only five bucks more than I generally see the Crop-a-dile itself for, so I figured it was a pretty good deal. I'm still pretty happy with it--I've been wanting one for a while. Now I can finally start to use eyelets!

Well Google Analytics is proving to be fairly useless. The number of visits to my Etsy shop seems to be on track, but I can't get any amount of useful information out of the Referring Sites info. That's typically the one I use the most, as I use it to find out where and how people are linking to me, which means I can take measures to make it easier for them to do so. Instead, however, Google gives me links directing to sites that have no connection with my shop whatsoever. Typically they all link to someone else's Etsy shop, so I can only assume that what's happening is that people are visiting other people's shops, and then somehow finding mine afterward, probably through a search. That's the only thing that makes sense to me.

It's very annoying, though. I usually really enjoy using site tracking; I gathered a lot of information from it back when I was running my old site.

So apparently Livejournal has teamed up with Blurb, which makes books out of your journal for a fee. It seems pretty neat, except that you can actually do it for free here. LJBook exports it to a .pdf, which you can then take to the printer of your choice. Probably you can find a better bargain than the one Blurb is offering.

Just thought I'd point it out.

So I got up to go pee, and I haven't been able to go back to sleep yet. I do hate it when this happens. I am antsy, though, possibly because my stomach is feeling strange, or possibly because of everything else, and I am anxious to get moving. I'm feeling cramped in my little space, but there's not much I can do until we sign our new lease. We've already done all the paperwork we need to on our side, and now it's just come down to waiting on our landlords to do theirs. Hopefully we'll get the go-ahead soon, and we'll be able to start packing up and heading out.

What I was really hoping for was a place that would give me my own crafting space--ideally a studio--but it looks like I'll have to wait a bit longer for that. Really, since everything I have now is shoved and stored every which way, and I really have no room for crafting, anything would be an improvement, but a girl kinda needs her own room, you know? Ah well. This is really just temporary anyway, and it's much better than rushing into another apartment that we know nothing about. And aside from being one of the easiest places to move into, it's probably also the best bargain we're going to find right about now.

Holy crap, I already hate this site. Worst. Navigation. Ever. Maybe I'm just being a n00b, though?

Anyway I wouldn't be working with the stupid thing if I weren't so intent on using it to promote my Etsy shop. I've set up a fan page for it and I'm struggling with how to get it working properly. It doesn't really help that I have no way of knowing how it'll look to anyone besides me, and Facebook doesn't seem to have a "dashboard" page where I can look at everything I've done.

Grrrrrrrrrr.