New Orleans Days 3 & 4

Though Monday didn't go quite according to plan, it was still very enjoyable... but lesson learned: for the most part, the Big Easy takes Mondays off.  Brooke and I planned to spend the day in the Garden District and Uptown and later City Park.  We soon learned, however, that most of shops on Magazine Street were closed.  After deciding to save it for Tuesday we hopped on the Canal St. streetcar to City Park to look at art at the museum and take a break from the sun.  Our plans were again spoiled when the museum was locked up.  Nevertheless, we took a lovely stroll through its sculpture garden...

New Orleans Days 1 & 2

Nick and I are celebrating our anniversary in New Orleans, and we are having a great time! Here's a little recap of what we've done so far:
Day 1 was travel day - we rode for our first time a real passenger train from the humble Amtrak stop in Birmingham to New Orleans!

Day 2 we hopped on the St. Charles street car right outside our hotel and went down to explore the French Quarter. Before we even knew it we were walking down Bourbon Street, and I have one word for it - funk, as in the smell. But we quickly found our way over to Jackson Square which was packed with tourists and local artists. We walked around the Quarter and Warehouse District all day checking out the fun galleries and shops. We also stumbled across Cafe Beignet which was a delight...

...It was so quaint and quiet as compared to Cafe du Monde that had a line down the street to even get in. For dinner we ate at a cafe in Jackson Square and sampled gumbo, red beans and rice, and jambalaya!

FiN Submissions

These were my submissions for the Future is Now.  This first one is a proposal for an "incremental" urban park the City has been talking about.  Replacing a parking lot with a public park is a great idea, but the images the Development Department had put out were uninspiring and unresponsive to the human needs for which the park should provide -- like shade and seating.  Click the image below to see the actual proposal with diagrams and explanations.

The next is an idea of how to reuse some of the unsightly parking decks around downtown.  The concept is basically 1) to infill the bottom with leasable space that would activate the sidewalk with pedestrian life while still providing parking above 2) clad the parking floors to make the building feel more like part of the urban fabric.



Finally is a proposal I did with a Mike Shows for the riverfront entry.  We heard the City was wanting to improve the entry and give it prominence (with very little money) so we showed some simple changes to make the underground entry noticeable and more inviting.  I think of it as a temporary solution... maybe soon we can design a more inspiring and permanent intervention.

Five Years

Today marks our fifth anniversary! It has been an amazing five years. Today, I am thanking God for giving him to me to be my other half in this life and for blessing us with two beautiful children. I could not ask for more. We are heading to New Orleans tomorrow to celebrate!

FiN exhibition

(This post is a little overdue.)  A couple Friday's ago, I had the pleasure of being involved with "the Future is Now," an exhibition put on by Helicity of Montgomery.  Though I had recklessly procrastinated, my submissions for the show came along more efficiently than I had expected.  After sending them to the printers - and paying way too much for it - I somehow still had a night to work up some last minute programs for the show.  They were nothing too fancy; my main intent was clarity... but I did do some geometric play with Helvetica.

Having nearly finished the programs, I thought I could finally take a break the night before the show, until my friend Mike wanted me to stop by and give my thoughts on set up for the exhibition... which ended meaning staying up until 3 in the morning to help him make an impromptu installation out of rope and old sheets of plywood - go figure.

Though exhausting, we probably had too much fun figuring out different ways for the rope to interface with the timber columns.  Our favorite was one in which the rope basically folded around one corner of the column before shooting up to the ceiling and back down to another:

To terminate the rope, we unravelled the ends and poked them through a floor vent at the foot of the last column as if these parasitic fibers, having found there way into the space, had stretched themselves across its structure... it seemed so witty at 2 in the morning.  After all of this, I did not feel too selfish taking some of this new prime real estate for two of my own boards:

The show was a lot of fun... great people, good music, tons of ideas.  I'll post my actual submissions in the next couple of days, but until then HERE was one of my favorites from the show.

FiN invitations

I had the pleasure of designing the invitations for The Future is Now exhibition put on by Helicity.  Don't worry if you did not receive one -- it is open to the public, so please come!  It should be tons of fun.  I still have to finish up a couple submissions for it.

I especially had fun illustrating the Brew Pub and the water tower.

Easter Sunday

I know this is way late, but here is the only semi-decent picture of Noah and Olive on Easter.  I like that isn't posed; Noah must have seen a plane in the sky.

Who, Me?

We are extremely honored and flattered and flabbergasted to be included in babble's 50 Best Etsy Baby Shops! We are at #9 with Best Bedding! Wow! I never dreamed that our business would come this far! Can I just take a moment to tell you all how our little business began? Back in the spring of '07 when I was pregnant with Noah we were searching for baby bedding for his crib. We came across some we liked, but they had a hefty price tag. So Nick had the idea that we could make it- as in, sew it. We didn't own a sewing machine and the only experience I had was from 7th grade home economics. Initially I thought there was no way we could do this, but Nick convinced me to buy a sewing machine, we found some fabric we liked (which, by the way, was from a quilted blanket and a bed sheet), and we gave it a go. Now, 4 years later we have a successful etsy shop that has made it to over 700 sales! God is truly gracious to us. This business has been such a blessing. It is what helped us get Nick through school and now serves as a little extra income. We have shipped our items all over the world! I get chills thinking that there are people in Australia, China, New Zealand, Canada, England, and many other countries that are using things that we made with our very own hands. Kinda cool, I think.

Animals, Art, and Amazing Music

The fantastic spring-like weather was a sign that we should take a break from our usual drudgery to spend some quality family time at the zoo.  We spent the morning admiring the diversity of creation.  After eating our sack lunches by the chimpanzees, we played on the playground and finally enjoyed a relaxing train ride.  Luckily, all of this expended enough of the kid's energy that we could work on Etsy orders back home while they napped.

Bookending the day was an art party in a grand antebellum home out in Coosada, AL -- who would have thought? (Thanks again Henson's for bringing us along!)

On display was work from local artists surrounded by a crowd of interesting people.  Luckily, there was also land and other children for Noah to play with while we hung out... he even got a hold of a light saber.  Then there was the music, which was well worth the wait.  Spirits of the Red City, composed of bass, cello, banjo, guitar, accordion, percussion, and fantastic vocal harmonies, were phenomenal.  It was a treat to watch them live.  Their slightly creepy marionette show was just icing on the cake:

A Temporary Move

Today we are moving from our loft apartment to a little rental house in a nearby historic neighborhood.  We hate to leave downtown, but we will be back... soon, I hope.  In fact, this move is the repercussion of our trying to buy a space downtown to turn into a live/work -- Unit A.

It boasted 14' ceilings, fantastic brick walls, and a ton of well-detailed windows to the sidewalk. So sure it would work out, we decided to go ahead and put in our sixty day notice to end our apartment's lease.  I even did some architectural photography of our apartment for the owner to aid them in finding a buyer. Our plans for Unit A were thwarted, however, when the owner decided to increase their asking price by fifty grand.  It was a fun design project, nevertheless, and eventually it could work out.  Here are some drawings of how we would have turned Unit A into a tight 2 bedroom condo with a small retail space to the street (the kids would even have a lofted play space):

After Unit A fell through, we had to find another place to live while we await the right opportunity to arise downtown.  Brooke quickly found a small, cute square house in Cloverdale, still biking distance from work and walking distance from some restaurants and shops.  Better yet, it has lower rent, no lease requirement, and no deposit.  I'm hoping this is part of God's plan for us to find our place in downtown, but I am trying to be patient.  In the meantime, I am really going to miss our casual family walks to 2Cities church, the Riverfront, the Biscuits baseball stadium, and all of the fountains around downtown.

Recent Work: Part 4... cupcakes

I had the pleasure of making baby shower invites for our friend Ashley, who happens to be our go-to gal for fabulous cupcakes.  So referencing pictures from some she made for Olive's birthday party, I illustrated them in the style you would find in children's books from the 60's; that is, line drawings in ink imperfectly filled with harvest gold, rosey pink, minty green, and the like.

Also, I decided this time to take advantage of the back of the card with a busier pattern, also drawn and colored in the same manner.



The Square House

It's official. We're moving to a little house not too far away. The feelings about the move are bittersweet. We have loved living here. It has been a fantastic experience- one that we hope to come back to as soon as possible. We're just waiting for the right building to open up! In the mean time we found a cute house to rent. It has a lot of great things about it, but one of our favorites is what will be Noah's room:

It has these awesome built in bookshelves and the walls are the original wood slats painted white. So dreamy.

Recent Work: Part 3

I've completed a prototype for a new mobile.  I am pretty satisfied with it but still unsure if I want to offer it on the shop or not.  The main issue is the metal wire.  The mobile I currently offer is light enough that floral wire does the trick, but for this one I had to resort to piano wire... which is pretty difficult to bend into a smooth curve.  I finally made a jig out of a washer and random metal fastener I found in my toolbox to keep the loops consistent.

The main objective with this little experiment was to balance objects of equal size in a dynamic and seemingly precarious composition in space.  It would definitely be more successful with more pieces, consequently with more chances for long cantilevers.  Maybe sometime I'll get around to expanding on it.

Olive's First Birthday

Our baby girl turned one a couple of weeks ago! We had a fun, quaint little party for her here at our place. We are so thankful for her sweet little life.

Nick made the invites and party hats, I sewed the bib, and my grandmother knitted Olive's top. The awesome mini strawberry cupcakes were made by a very sweet and talented friend, Ashley.

Recent Work: Part 2

A while back, Brooke put together a wedding shower at our place for a couple friends of ours... so I had fun with the invites. Pretty simple; I mainly played with mixing typically formal typefaces in a playful way that would match this fun yet tasteful couple... and then, of course, I threw in some ring-bling for Mallory.

At one point during their wedding reception, Brooke came to me panicking because she couldn't find Noah. We found him in a room, workin' it in front of the camera with the bride and groom... typical:

Recent Work: Part 1

I have been meaning to post some little projects I've done these last few months. I'm so far behind on that that I now have enough to post it as a short series; so here's part one.

The program: book storage (high-parent's, low-children's), object display, and workspace for Noah. Atop of that was my desire to play around more with metal rods that I had begun working with in my Interior Architecture thesis project.  So I got some off-the-shelf brackets that I painted to match the wall, two depths of poplar and a block of aspen that I finished with linseed oil, and metal rods I bent into two different types of bookends.

Noah has definitely made good use of his desk. It is so sweet to see him sitting at his chair concentrating on his own art.