Cool tool

There's a part of me that really enjoys walking through paper and fabric stores and being able to fully appreciate the texture and tactility of the materials. The problem is there aren't very many 'cool' or 'modern' fabrics or paper available to us locally, so much of what we see around us is rather traditionally or even boring.

Both paper and fabric designs are an interesting study of repetition and pattern and while I've never dabbled in the design of either, it does intrigue me. I recently came across Symmetry Works from Artlandia that could make designer repeats a lot easier. Symmetry Works is an Adobe Illustrator plug-in that will take any vector artwork that you've made and apply the necessary transformations to make a repeated pattern.



The download for the plug-in costs $229 US, so it's a bit pricey as something to play around with, but it does intrigue me...

Fun with avatars

There's a fun little avatar making toy as part of the Simpsons movie interweb marketing.

With a little help from Photoshop, here's our nuclear family (HA!) as Simpsons characters:


To make your own avatar, just go to the top left-most link on the Simpsons movie page.

In an attempt to blog again

As you can see, the blogging on our site has been sporadic at best. And even then, the word 'sporadic' is probably too generous and should be replaced with 'rare' or 'once in a blue moon'.

It had been so long since the last posting, I'd forgotten the password to the blogger account. In fact, I'd not only forgotten the password, but I'd forgotten the actual username. Though, in part, that would be Google's fault :P since they took over blogger and I have two gmail accounts and that involved a mess of even finding the blog.

So that's a good way to make a short story long. What's been going on in the mean time? Well, I could say that we've been busy dreaming up new designs (we have, but they're a ways from being in production). I could also say that we've been busy filling orders (we were for a while after we re-stocked), but things are finally calming down a bit.

The reality is probably closer to being tired (comes with feeling like an often clueless first-time mom) and lazy (the perpetual to-do list is hard to tackle) and the idea of updating the blog falls somewhere after the idea of maybe vacuuming under the desk now and then. That, and Facebook and reading cupcake blogs seemed to be a better way to use waste time most days.

So in the lull of finally feeling like we know what we're doing as parents, we've been slinging Jack around quite happily in the summer weather. Rather than exhaust all of what I might have to say for the next little while, I'll leave you all with a picture of Eric slinging Jack, and hopefully over the next bit, the blog posts will be rolling out once again :)



P.S. The sling is from Lucky Baby. Both Eric and I each have one (since they aren't adjustable) and Jack is quite content to be 'slung' around with his hippy parents since it lets him see the world from a higher perspective than from his stroller and we're quite happy with them as well :)