Little sister's birthday gift

My little sister has birthday today. She is 10 now! She got her first digital camera from parents, so i decided to knit a softcase for her camera.

She's also into knitting, sewing and all kinds of DIY, so in addition to the softcase i gave her a book with 35 sewing projects for kids. I really liked the projects in the book, you can sew dolls and other soft toys as well as pillows, totes and other easy stuff. My sister got really excited about the book, she told she wants to try sewing everything from there.

The most time consuming poster

This is the most time consuming poster i've ever done. It took me ages to first draw all the letters on patterned paper (keeping the patterns vary as much as possible), then cut out all the letters, then arrange them on an A4 and finally glue each one to the A4. I got so tired cutting the artist names, that i decided to just write all the other info with a marker.

The poster was for yesterday's show. The show was great, all the artists were awesome and we had our first Banana Pill collaboration with a great artist Olli Aarni.

I can't wait to post the artworks for the new tapes! I tried some new things, and they look good! But we are releasing them in a batch of four, and only three are almost ready, so it will still take a while.

Crochet round frame

My plan for this summer was to find as many good DIY tutorials as possible and try them out. This way i would learn new techniques as well as get some inspiration for designing my own things.

I didn't get too far with my plan. I've tried one more knitted toy from my book and gave it to my sister (i didn't take a photo unfortunately). But i did find a lot of tutorials and patterns mostly through Pinterest and blogs. I even made a folder for them:

One nice tutorial i've also tried was the tutorial on making little crochet flower frames. I found it through Pinterest and it seemed nice and easy. I happened to have some old metal bracelets that i don't use anymore.

The tutorial was really easy to follow (remember, i'm still a beginner crocheter) so i got a nice flower.

I printed a vintage bicycle image i found on *The Graphics Fairy* blog. I glued the image to a piece of carton and then secured the frame on the carton in several places using needle and simple thread.

Now it's hanging on my fridge among all the fun stuff.

Hopefully august won't be as busy as two previous summer months and i will manage to try more tutorials. I will definitely show you what i got.

Summer gifts

Again i took a long break from blogging and there are two reasons for that: we had guests and four new releases are coming out very soon on Jozik records and they all need artworks.

My mom was one of our guests. And she is the kind of guest that never comes without gifts. Apart from lots of marmalade, this time she brought me new watercolor paints!

It is really embarrassing, but before these i used the ones that are for kids. They are much cheaper and whenever i wanted to buy real ones i could not afford them.

I couldn't wait to try them out. And i am really happy, the colors are so much brighter and it feels much nicer to paint with real paints.

One of the next releases will have a watercolor painting done with these new paints!

Mom also brought a funny sticky craft material that is actually made for kids, but she thought i might want to play with it too :)

I've actually started decorating something with it, but the process is not so easy. The material is made for kids, so it never dries in case kids accidentally swallow it. So i am trying to figure out a way to decorate with it. I'll show you the result when i have it.

High school art

When i was in high school i was taking some visual art classes. I was hoping i would learn to draw and paint well. Actually, i never learnt to draw or paint, but i've learnt lots of other techniques and my imagination improved a lot after those classes.

After i graduated i never went back to get my art works. Some of them were quite boring, but there were couple of special ones that took a lot of my time and passion. Unfortunately, i didn't even save any photographs of those works. So from time to time i remember how i made them and i regret that i didn't get them back from school.

Today i accidentally found a photograph of one of my works on my computer. It is one of the works i was really happy with, so it was a nice surprise to find it. I have no idea how i still have this picture, but this is the only proof of me taking those art classes (well apart from a grade in my high school certificate).

This was really conceptual for me at that time. I've been thinking of signs, and how people recognize certain objects even though they look different from what they resemble. For example, toy bunnies don't look at all like real bunnies, but somehow we recognize them as bunnies. Those ideas led me to making this road sign. Big bunny on the sign is a collage of all kinds of bunny images, that come from comics, cartoons, photographs of toys as well as real bunnies.

It looks a bit silly now, but it's a very nice memory for me. I wasn't interested in visual things much before high school, so those classes helped me a lot in doing what i do nowadays.