Photographer of the Week.

I'm Photographer of the Week over on the Volume blog :)

I gave them free range of my flickr to choose which photographs they wanted to use, and these are the ones they selected:

I think they chose an interesting selection - film, digital, disposable and edited photos. It's a shame there's no info about me in the feature or a link to my flickr or website but it's good exposure all the same :) Plus I have a pretty unique name, which if you google you can find all my sites anyway!

Wishlist.

I've been building my wishlist for the last few days (see it in the toolbar on the right)
It has much of the same stuff (cameras) as the wishlist we've made on the 27 Kodak Moments blog, but the books are different.

It's also ridiculously long! Going to take me a long, long time to buy everything on it, especially in my unemployed-no-money current state, but how good a collection of books and cameras would it be if I did get them all?!


There are a few that I already have, ones I got to help with my final major project, which was based around handmade design.
The first is 'Fingerprint; The Art of Using Handmade Elements in Graphic Design' by Chen Design Associates.
This is a lovely, lovely book. It has sort of a fabric cover, with what looks like a design made using ink on the front. It has some really great examples of handmade graphic design inside. Head on over to Amazon (links below) to look inside the book. I've added a few examples here.

     

I've Lost Track...

Of how many jobs I've applied for now. They just go on and on.

I applied for one today that sounds really good. My friend let me know about it, her mum used to work at this school so is friendly with all the staff there. She found out that they're looking for a media studies technician, so I've applied for that :)

I also have a trial day working for my dad's company tomorrow. They use a freelancer who works from home to do a lot of their graphic design work, but apparently they're not too happy with the work he's been doing, so they're going to see how I do and if I impress them I might get taken on for some freelance work :) That would be great experience.

What I've learnt is that it really, really is about who you know and not what you know. It's a shame these are like my only links to the industry!



On a non related note, I'm taking Finlay to puppy training classes on wednesday. Apparently he's my responsibility now! No offense to my parents or anything, but our other 2 dogs are really badly trained, so this is my opportunity to see if I can do any better (doubtful, very doubtful!)

Dreamcatchers.

More items added to my Folksy shop :)

These rather lovely dreamcatchers are all my sister's creation. She won't let me just have one either, I have to buy it. From myself :S

CardCub.

Some more designs submitted to CardCub :)

Mostly Christmas ideas:

And a non christmassy one that doesn't really have any message:

Coolpackers.

I entered a photo in a competition on iwannagothere.com.

It's one of those that the public vote for, so I'd really, really appreciate some votes please!!

Click here to go to my photograph.

I really, really, really want the camera that's first prize so I'd be so ridiculously grateful for some votes!! Thank you :)

Wishcatcher Crafts.

My sister and I have set up a shop on Folksy, a great website selling beautiful handmade goods.

We have big plans for it, but have only listed 1 item so far. Doesn't matter though, because we've already sold one! Result!

I also designed and made (on Illustrator I add) the banner for the shop :)

Visit the shop here :)

Fuuvi Juicebox Camera.

I just blogged about this over on 27 Kodak Moments but I'm so excited about this camera arriving that I thought I'd talk about it on here as well :)

It's called the Juicebox camera and made by Japanese company Fuuvi.

It's a regular 35mm film camera, but the outside casing has very cleverly been made to look like a juicebox.

It comes in about 20 different designs, but is not readily available in the UK so I had to buy mine off ebay (still less than a tenner though so a pretty good price!)

You can buy it here (shipping from Japan) and here (shipping from Malaysia) (I don't know about postage costs from these places) and there are some available on ebay but sadly not very many :(

CardCub.

I've just discovered CardCub, where designers, artists and illustrators can upload their designs for greetings cards to sell and get paid royalties when people buy them.

Sounds like a brilliant platform for all sorts of creative people :)

I've just submitted a couple of ideas for christmas cards. It takes a week or so for designs to go up, and there's some brilliant work on there already, so I'm going to see what else I can come up with! 

After all, I have a ridiculous amount of time on my hands seeing as no one seems to want to employ me :(

What's really great is that you get to design all aspects of the card - front, back and inside, and you can do them landscape or portrait.

Also, I used Illustrator to design the cards (it was either that or Photoshop and I already had the illustrations in eps format from when I designed the NET Patient Foundation Christmas Card and the calendar I designed on my internship ) so it's all good practice!

Fun Pet Photography.

The company behind Marks & Spencer's greetings cards and gift wrap, tigerprint, runs frequent online competitions.

The current one is 'Fun Pet Photography', and as I have three adorable little doggies I figured I may as well enter a few photos of them :)

I entered these three photos with the description:
We have three dogs; Hamish (10), Logan (16 months) and new addition Finlay (10 weeks). Hamish is an old grump, Logan chases shadows and Finlay is trying his hardest to be accepted by the 'boy boys'. Boisterous Logan and cheeky little Finlay are all teeth when they play fight, while Hamish does his best to ignore them. However they always cuddle up together to sleep on what has become the "dog sofa", where us mere humans are no longer allowed to sit.
Hamish is a Blue Roan Cocker Spaniel and Logan and Finlay are both Springer Spaniels. The Scottish names for the dogs are a tradition within my family.



You can check out the other entries here.

Some More Crafty Bits....

Day 2 of food and craft for me and my little sister Sophie.

I've posted the food, now for the craft :)

Firstly, my pom making skills have vastly improved :) 

Me and Soph went with mum to a craft shop in the village and mum took pity on my poor unemployed self and bought me some tissue paper! Haha 89p for a packet of 10 sheets and I got 5 different coloured packets. (I clearly didn't take advantage of her willingness to spend money on me, but then again she did buy me petrol last week, which is the most expensive thing ever when you're jobless, so I'm very grateful to her for that!)

Anyway, I digress. So, poms. 

I think this corner of my room looks much better now. All full size poms, this time with ribbon holding them up, so they look more complete. (Although I'm not allowed to use anything other than blu tak on my walls (or in this case pink tak!) so it doesn't look so great at the top, but nothing I can really do about that)
My desk is right below the window so I'm sitting here looking at them, so pretty! I also added another white pom to the other side with the cranes, but I don't have a photo of that.

These blue ones were for Sophie's room, which has a duck egg blue colour scheme.

I absolutely love, love, love bunting.
I made this miniature bunting with some scraps of material I had. So cute!

I've completely run out of anywhere to put more bunting though, so I had to put it round the top of my wardrobe (there's already bunting running across the inside) but I think it's small enough to not be overpowering. In fact I'm considering making another chain so it can reach all the way to the floor.

That shadow on the bottom right is really weird and I have no idea what it's from :S 

I can take no credit for this, this is all my sister's doing. She could really do well as a crafter if she wasn't so set on working with horses (though she's only 13 so there's plenty of time for me to persuade her otherwise!)
She's making all her friend's christmas presents this year, and she's making them either a dreamcatcher or a little garland with their names on. She made me a dreamcatcher a couple of months ago, which is hanging up in my car, but it wasn't a cute little heart like these so I'm trying to convince her to make me one too!

She's definitely talented and creative, making each one personal to each of her friend :)

The downside to all this crafting fun; the absolute mess it leaves in my room!
The floor was my doing, the bed Sophie's.
We also made just as much mess of the kitchen table when we ran out of room to put anything down in there! Oops.

Another thing me and Sophie have been getting into is nail art.
I don't have any fancy tools or anything, so we've been trying to be creative with just what we have. Not bad for a first try right?!

So that was today's fun. I feel like I typed a lot in this post :S

We were also discussing maybe trying to sell some of this stuff, mainly the dreamcatchers, miniature bunting and heart bunting from my earlier post (so stuff we haven't copied from some tutorial somewhere but came up with ourselves) but we're not sure if there would be any interest in any of it. Any thoughts?