Meanjin - process

The Meanjin cover we embroidered last year was easily one of our most enjoyable commissions to date. We were able to explore our growing plant nerd-dom plus reimagine the traditional embroidery motif of florals. When Zora the editor of Meanjin first contacted us about working on this issue, the brief was both simple and complex. This issue was unofficially a women’s issue with content provided by female writers. Our brief was to use our embroidery to play on the idea of “women’s work” but other than that the Zora was happy for us to propose anything that fit within that broad scope. The challenge was to avoid clichés and not be superficial in our message.

We presented a few ideas, one of which was to subvert traditional motifs and in place of pretty daisies and roses, embroider fleshy, gruesome plants (or Frankenflowers as we grew to call them while sewing).

We've posted some of our process below. Firstly some rough initial sketches we presented with our first round concept. We didn't sketch a layout for this stage but provided a written treatment outlining our idea along with some support imagery showing how the plants could look. We proposed toothy flowers as well as scrotum buds, and amazingly got the go ahead on everything.

After the concept got the go ahead we started collecting some reference material for the Frankenflwoers. As you can imagine we had a lot of fun researching weird, unusual and gross looking plants. The last preview we sent to the client was a coloured tight sketch which you can compare to the finished piece. Since embroidery is so time consuming changes after the final coloured sketch is approved is rare and usually requires some extra time for the delivery schedule. The coloured tight sketch we present to clients shows them exactly how the embroidery will look so that they'll be comfortable giving a final go ahead. It shows composition and colour but not texture which is something we can build organically as we embroider. For instance we introduced a lot more dimensional stitching techniques in this project to give extra movement and depth to the flowers. We padded out the stitching to create a fat stem for the lower hero flower and added hairlike red fringes on the conophytum inspired globular flowers. We also loosened some of stitching and instead of completely filling in shapes showed some of the black background fabric to imitate shading.

We’re often asked how our embroidery sits within contemporary illustration and we usually struggle to eloquently answer this. I’m really happy we were able to create this piece because it represents what we try to do with our work. Embroidery is an age old medium but like any other technique or mark making medium - like painting or drawing - it can evolve. We try to add a different perspective to the craft with our work and see how much of its tactility we can exploit.

As Prescribed - Fine Lines

As Prescribed is an artist driven t-shirt label that aims to be a platform for exposing artists and designers to the universe. Founded by Melbourne based illustrator Eveline Tarunadjaja and designer Nick Parker, As Prescribed takes on the form of an art gallery, in an online retail environment.  The awesome folks behind new T-shirt label As Prescribed invited MaricorMaricar to take part in their first artist series "Fine Lines". The series of shirts also feature designs by Eveline Tarunadjaja, Sean Morris and Kubota Fumikazu.

The label launched last week with a pop up shop and exhibition at No Vacancy gallery in Melbourne. Head down and say hello to Eveline, she's super nice and until the 20th of May visitors to the gallery get $10 off shirts.

Our piece is titled "The Hungry Slug" and this little monster and some of his gang are currently on display in the exhibition as well as a couple of original hand sewn embroideries and our print "Makers, Dreamers" which is available for sale during the exhibition.

Each artist has a nice little interview up on the As Prescribed site, here's our one, we were pretty nervous on camera and kept pulling faces!

WIRED Magazine 12 11

Hello, we're back! We touched down in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and have since then gorged ourselves on summer fruits and catch ups with friends and family. We're in between studio spaces and rentals but have managed to set up desk spaces at least. It's funny how having even a bit of space to yourself helps you feel settled.

It's been a while since we posted regularly so we have a few projects to share that we'll post about steadily. Firstly we can finally share an embroidery we created for WIRED magazine's December issue which we completed around June. It's for the features introduction page and includes the numbers 12 and 11. For iPad users this embroidery is animated too as a nice little bonus. The piece took about 185 hours to complete. A huge task as the whole surface was covered with needlework and while we were embroidering we were also capturing photographic stills to build the animation.

There were a few changes to the final embroidered piece, colours were changed and tweaked. Once it was completed we realised that the 12 and 11 got a bit too lost in the pattern so we swapped in a few more red tiles into the mix. Normally we would have unpicked the tiles and sewn in the new colour but as we had animated the piece as it progressed this option wasn't feasible. Instead we digitally tweaked the colours frame by frame.

We were lucky our apartment was high up or else neighbours might well have wondered why our windows were boarded up. The makeshift studio we set up at one end of my bedroom needed to be completely blacked out for the photography. A bit of a shame we worked on the piece right in the middle of the London summer, we hardly got a chance to enjoy the sunshine.

The Lovers, the Dreamers and Me - a Jim Henson tribute show at Gallery Nucleus

Here's a peek at a couple new embroidered pieces we've created for a Jim Henson tribute show at Gallery Nucleus titled The Lovers, the Dreamers, and me. The Cookie Monster makes an appearance for the show which opens on the 10th of December and any guesses for which Sesame St characters inspired these special edition Sweater Letters? More details here and on the Gallery blog there's a little write up on our artworks as well as some of the other wonderful artists who are taking part in the show.

Back to Oz

We're counting down until we bid London farewell and head back to sunny Sydney. I'll miss this wonderful city and I hope it won't be too long before I can come back again. An endless summer sounds pretty awesome, 6 months in Sydney and 6 months this side of the globe sounds like an ideal arrangement. If only!

Before we fly out we're holding a special clearance in our BigCartel and Etsy stores. 30% of our handsewn embroideries and a 3 for 1 special on our risograph prints (BigCartel). For the 30% discount on Etsy please use this code BACK2OZ.

Makers, Dreamers: We also have a brand new poster available of our Makers, Dreamers embroidery. "We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams" is a quote taken from Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy via the film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.

The original embroidered artwork was on display at AMV BBDO and now a limited edition of 100 A2 sized giclee printed posters are available. (please note that the posters are smaller than the original A1 sized hand embroidered poster)

A2 posters (including 12mm border) hand numbered and signed. Printed on Hahnemueller Photorag paper using archival inks

Posters will be mailed rolled.

Mr Postman

We've just arrived back to a surprisingly sunny London after a week road-tripping around Scotland. A proper roundup of what we got up to will come soon but in the meantime here is a belated post about a few special deliveries that arrived in the mail recently.

The letterpressed wedding invitations I designed for our big sis and her fiancé arrived all the way from Sydney safe and sound. The tactile and warm touch of letterpress printing fit in beautifully with the vintage theme they've chosen for their wedding. They went with Crane Lettra 300 GSM in Pearl White and Kraft brown envelopes with their own custom envelope liners.

We were also gobsmacked to receive another invitation... for a reception at Buckingham Palace hosted by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh! The reception will be in October to celebrate The Queen's upcoming tour of Australia. We have British Council Australia and Realise Your Dream to thank for this incredible invitation. 

It's pretty random, I didn't think we'd be attending any formal event while we were in London, let alone a reception at Buckingham palace, so I didn't pack anything appropriate in my suitcase. Been busy hunting for formal "Day Dress" wear but we're having trouble finding anything that fits. And ideally we'd love to wear an Australian design in keeping with the theme of the event but that's proving a little difficult. Unfortunately we can't take a camera in with us but we'll try to soak it all in and report back.

Defeat Deflector & Makers, Dreamers

Just a quick post about a couple of works we have out and about in London. We've donated "Defeat Deflector" (a piece from the "Turns of Speech and Figures of Phrase" show that we held in March) to Artarama where it will be auctioned off to raise funds for Age UK and the White Ribbon Alliance. Artarama is organised by Karmarama London and the show/auction is on the 7th of October. There'll be exclusive work by Rankin, Rob Ryan, Al Murphy and many more.

We have also completed a new embroidery called "Makers, Dreamers" which is on display at AMV BBDO as part of a typographic group show. "We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams" is a quote taken from Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy via the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

This is our largest to date, 841 x 594 mm. I'm not sure exactly how much thread that amounts to, but I bet it's something crazy. The original A1 sized artwork is available for sale, please email us if you're interested.  A limited edition of 100 giclee printed posters are also available for £45, A2 in size, hand numbered and signed and printed on Hahnemueller Photorag paper using archival inks (please note that the posters are smaller than the original A1 sized hand embroidered poster). Please email us if you would like more info. The posters will be available from our Big Cartel store soon.

We have another group show that we'll be taking part in later in the year. It's a tribute show for Jim Henson at Gallery Nucleus in the States. Look out for some Sesame St flavoured "Sweater Letters" and a Choc Chip C. Other artists include Cat Rabbit, Isobel Knowles and a fellow Handsome Frank artist Helen Musselwhite. Can't wait to see what these talented ladies create!

And I almost forgot, we have a new Sweater Letter. We're slowly going through the alphabet and filling in the gaps. For "B" I've been influenced by the clashing colours of 80's knitwear. This is also available from our Big Cartel store. We're making our new Sweater Letters available as limited editions of 3, each one will still be hand embroidered so there may be slight differences.

** Update: I've signed and numbered (handstitched) the B Sweater Letter piece **

Summer/Autumn and "Back to the Start"

There's now a chill in the air and the blazing sunsets we've come to expect have faded away to ones
that are grey, white and pale. Brrrr, luckily we're going to skip the northern winter and will be home in time for summer in Sydney. We realised we have less than 3 months though before we head back so we're cramming in all the things we kept putting off: galleries, museums, cafes and curiosities. We jotted them all down and each week we have a lucky dip. Our fist pick was the flower markets at Columbia Road where we enjoyed a leisurely Sunday of people watching and flower hawking and came away with a chili plant and some thyme. But not as successful, was our trip to the Natural History Museum. We got diverted by heavy rain and a sea of children to the bedlam that is Harrods on a wet weekend in London. Some things I learnt that day – avoid museums during the summer holidays especially on a weekend, Harrods is crazy and somewhere I need not visit again and I'm very picky about my almond croissants. Since then we've had trips to St Bride's Printing Library, Victoria Park, Brick Lane Sunday Markets, Rough Trade and No Brow which have all been a lot more exciting.

Below are some of the goodies we picked up from the No Brow store. Everything We Miss by Luke Pearson, Flesh and Bones: A Colouring Concertina by John Sibbick and Rise & Fall by Micah Lidberg. A place you must visit if you're in London, No Brow are independent publishers that work with graphic artists and illustrators to produce exquisitely tactile printed works. They have a show coming up in September that looks like it will be pretty awesome. Masks is an exhibition of works from Ben Newman and it opens on the 15th of September.

And lastly here are some stop motion animations that have blown our minds lately. Johnny Kelly from Nexus Productions beautifully crafted stop motion animation "Back to the Start" has just gone live. There's a behind the scenes here and some production stills from the shoot.

And a classic animation that we were introduced to at LIAF, "Hedgehog in the Fog". Stunning, mesmerising and so technically brilliant.

Gusto Gusto!

There are a handful of words to describe rice in the Filipino language. There's a word for unmilled rice, milled rice, cooked rice, rice porridge, burnt rice, leftover rice, fried rice, and rice muffin...but today's post isn't really about rice. It's about a play on words. Well actually just the one word. Gusto.

Our new embroidery is Gusto Gusto! (pronounced goo'sto gus'to!) and it's a play on the Filipino word gusto (want) and the English word gusto (enthusiasm, zest, energy).

"I want energy" sounds a little lame, but Gusto Gusto! has the right motivational tone don't you think? This was a little phrase I had written down in my notebook a while ago and is another motivational typographic piece along the lines of "You Gotta Keep Cheering". Sometimes you need a little helpful reminder to keep going, don't give up, be persistent. One day Ca and I will create a series of these type pieces and we're going to call it "Say SO'S".

Anyway I've rambled a bit, here is the finished piece which is available from our Big Cartel store. And below are some pictures of the tools we've used. Most of the process we share on this blog has focused on the creative side of things but I thought we'd share a little insight into the equipment we use to create our sewn illustrations. People have asked if our embroideries are hand sewn or machine done (every piece is entirely hand sewn) so we thought it might be interesting to share with you the tools we use.

We began sewing using an embroidery hoop, crewel needles and cotton embroidery floss and calico. And this really hasn't changed much, save for a couple of modifications to the hoop. We've also just bought an embroidery stand and a larger scroll bar frame which we've used for a recent project but most of the time a simple embroidery hoop has been adequate. In the process photo below you can see the hoop clamped onto the frame which is an Elbesee Posilock standing frame.

One helpful tip with the hoops is to bind them, we found the tip through Mary Corbet's site Needle 'n Thread. This is a great site for anyone learning embroidery and as self taught embroiderers we've definitely found it useful. Binding helps protect the fabric and prevent it shifting as you work. We still use the first plastic hoops we learnt on and while they're cheap and great for beginners, they have a tendency to mark the fabric which doesn't come out after washing. Perhaps we pull the fabric too tight and damage the threads in the weave, but sometimes a ghost of a circle is left on the fabric even though we have made sure to take the fabric out of the hoop after each sewing session. So to avoid this marking, wind ribbon or scrap material over the plastic and it's good to go. No marks and the fabric fits more snugly in the frame without having to pull on it too tightly. A bit of a geek confession but we feel a bit bad-ass wrapping our hoops like we're preparing for a boxing match :)

Ephemera Society London Fair

One of the perks of being in London is that we are able to indulge in our love of markets, vintage and paper in one combined geek out. Our trip to the Ephemera Society's Fair was as exciting as our childhood trips to the Lollipop Shop (remember the one that used to live in the basement of the Queen Victoria Building at the top of the small escalators?). Tables upon tables of lovely printed labels, their ink still vibrant despite some of them being more than a century old, theatre bill posters advertising curiously titled shows in a jumble of typefaces.. a lot of printed matter to make a designer swoon.

Mr. Jimmy and the Riomaggiore skyline

"I made a huge mistake" One of my favourite lines from one of the funniest shows that should never have been axed, Arrested Development. I'm hoping all the rumours surrounding a movie release will actually turn out to be true. Sorry for going off on a tangent. This is a post about our latest embroidery, a private commission based on a Rolling Stone lyric and the reason why the images may look a bit blurry.

"Mr Jimmy" as I like to call it was the first piece we completed and sent back from London, it's also quite large. Too large to actually fit into a regular mailing envelope since we were sending it pre-stretched so I made a makeshift package for it. Paranoid that it might get damaged in transit I reinforced my handiwork and packed it pretty darn snug in layers of bubble wrap and card board and sent it off via Royal Mail. But because I was so pre-occupied about the packaging I posted it without taking any proper scans or photos. Dang!! As soon as I got home I realised my huge mistake but it was too late.

Luckily I had been sending progress snaps to the client and had taken a few pics of the finished piece for approval. Sadly most of the shots I took were out of focus happy snaps using my point and shoot Pentax and the lighting was pretty shoddy. So nothing good enough for print but scaled down the blurriness is hardly visible on the web. This is the finished piece it's roughly 40x40 cm

The palette was inspired by the colourful architecture of Cinque Terre (photo by Robert Crum, seen here on the Plenty of Colour site which is an awesome resource of inspirational projects all celebrating colour). I travelled through Europe after graduating from University and fell in love with Riomaggiore, one of the five towns. Everything about the town was magical, from the first glimpse of the clear blue sea as soon as the train clears the tunnel to the patchwork of colours of the town's architecture. It's definitely a must see if you're planning a European holiday and I'm hoping Ca and I get to revisit while we're based in London.

I knew I didn't want to use just cherry red for this artwork (a nod to another line in the lyric) and restrict the design to hues of reds and pinks. So when I came across this image on Plenty Of Colour I thought it was perfect for this embroidery. The cherry red would be mixed up and contrasted with shots of turquoise, green and yellow to create a vivid splash of colour.

I followed our usual process of sketching then inking the lettering in watercolours. Initially the design was against white but I discussed with the client the option of sewing onto black fabric to highlight the colours and give a bit of a twist to the design and I think it turned out really well.

Here is a dodgy snap of me hunched over the magnifying lamp. Besides a couple of pencil cases full of brushes, pens and tiny tubes of watercolours and Ca's sewing bag stuffed full of threads we weren't able to bring a lot of our tools and equipment over over from Sydney. So over the last couple of months we've been slowly re-stocking our "studio" with a lot of boring things like cutting matts and metal rulers and more exciting things like a loom and a standing frame (ok, only exciting for me but I get to stab sew two handed!) One of the first things we hunted down in London was a magnifying lamp to help our poor eyes. This one is a daylight lamp which is handy for night time sewing, showing truer colours.

We have more commissions that are just wrapping up so hopefully will be able to share these with you soon.

London. Perfect summer one day, rainy winter the next..

Hello, sorry it's been a while between posts. We had some alarming news last week concerning the flat we just rented that had us distracted and anxious for the whole of last week, but I think (and i'm trying not to relax too much in case I jinx us) that everything is going to be ok now. It was a fairly black week and I'm so glad we had some friends to talk to here and back home otherwise I don't know how we would have coped. When the dust settles we'll be able to shed more on this as I think it will be very helpful information for anyone planning to move to London and are looking to rent a place here.

Ok so with that yuck news aside, Maricor and I are very happy to be able to share some of the new work that has kept us busy since landing here. We were commissioned by ESPN Magazine to create an embroidered piece of typography. Each issue they commission an illustrator or designer to a unique GoPlay graphic. For ours we extended our family of Sweater Letters, in the next few days i'll be able to post up some of the process work behind this project. And hopefully soon we can share more information about the other commissions we've been working on. There's another music lyric that's currently en-route to the framers back in Sydney as well as another set of Sweater Letters that are almost complete.

We're also been heaps excited to be featured in a few magazines lately, Freehugs Magazine from Russia and Nice Magazine an online magazine created by Nicework studio in South Africa.

In this issue of Freehugs Magazine we were asked along with Bratislav Milencović, Alex Trochut and Teagan White to discuss hand crafted typography and its relevance today. Although each of our styles and approach to design is quite different, it was interesting to see that our motivations seemed quite similar. We all like to develop details in our work that draw the viewer in, desiring to create type that communicates something more than letters and words.

The third issue of Nice Magazine features our work alongside a bunch of amazing creatives including Coralie Bickford-Smith and Serial Cut. You can download all three issues here for free.

Bottom image: Freehugs Magazine spread, image on right hand page by Bratislav Milencović.

Sea Sew

We've finally unpacked our suitcases and have settled into a new home here in London, which explains why it's been a tad quiet on the blog lately. Although we didn't have much to move besides a couple of suitcases we've been busy criss-crossing town picking up stuff for the home, all the major things have been taken care of (kettle, tea and toast!) and its slowly starting to look like our place.

We've been on the look out for some brightly patterned textiles to make the place look cosy and we scored a great knitted throw from the Bethnal Green Vintage Fair on the weekend. If anyone can recommend any great second hand stores in East London we're keen to collect a few more bits and bobs for the house - crockery, cushions etc.

Besides moving we've also been busy sewing - we've got a few exciting projects we can share with you now. A limited edition pop-up book is being produced by Katana and created by the very talented Benja Harney for Kylie's Aphrodite Les Folies Tour in Australia and we've been asked to contribute some sewn illustrations for the book too. Below are some process pics and here you can read all about the making of the book. Look out for the wonderful illustrations by Jon Zhu!

A couple of weeks ago the etcc exhibition rolled into Sydney as part of the Semi Permanent design conferences. We posted a little about the exhibition earlier and here are some pics of the show. Below is our work and the creative commons licensed image that was the inspiration.  Images courtesy of aMBUSH Gallery.

We've also got an interview up on The Creative Haven where we give a bit of an insight into our work process, how we got into doing what we do and the people who inspired us in the first place. Thanks Carly for featuring our work!