New Maricor/Maricar website and blog

Hello!

Just a quick post to let you know we've re-launched our website for 2015. We've cleaned out the site so some of the quirks of the old are fixed and it should be a lot easier to find projects.

There is an Archive section for our older projects. Later this week we'll be launching the dedicated shop for our one-off hand embroideries and textile works that available for sale. Our Etsy shop will still be the place to visit for poster and print purchases.

Part of the website launch is also a blog refresh so this will be the last post on this site. We will be leaving this blog up so the old posts can still be accessed. Thank you for the support over the years, Maricor and I hope you come visit the new blog in the future. We'll be using it for more process and behind the scenes insights into what inspires our work. We're just getting the next post ready which will be about the process behind making two of our most recent private commissions, "Love" and another of our painting with thread abstracts.

Easter

Sorry a bit of a belated Easter post. Easter has come and gone but we still have chocolate eggs in the fridge so it's not too late I reckon.

This year Ava was old enough for her first egg hunt and we wanted to do something special so we decorated some eggs that we'll be able to keep for future egg hunts. Through instagram I discovered some wonderful blank wooden eggs that are also hollow which will be perfect for hiding extra treasures when Ava's a little older. Last time I attempted painting decorations (the Christmas wreath) I got a bit caught up figuring out patterns and designs so this time around I tried to be loose. Also couldn't leave out some animal heads for Ava who loves copying their different noises. I couldn't have all the fun so we also some together. Getting the paints off her after that was really hard!

Speaking of round things, Ava's been in wonderland with house full of giant sized balls and boxes for a project Maricor has been working on with friends of ours. They're for a series of concerts later this year for Justine Clarke's 'I Am A ... Band' Tour. Which Maricor has also done the poster artwork for.  If you follow our instagram you'll see some more of the process pics maybe a few of us going a bit kookoo after some long nights.  PS it looks freakishly convincing but that isn't Ava under that ball just some of her clothes with stuffing.

Recently

Hello we cropped up onto a few press recently and wanted to say a huge thank you to Embroidery Magazine in the UK, French magazine étapes and Habitus magazine for including and sharing our work with their readers.

You can read a short interview on the Habitus blog and some photos of our workspace. We talked to Jo Hall at Embroidery magazine which is published by the Embroiderers' Guild about our process and how we got started in embroidery. You can see some of the spreads below. It was a real pleasure talking with Jo, thank you for such a great feature!

Studio visit - Leonor Barreiro

About a month ago we had a lovely visit from Leonor Barreiro, a fellow embroidered from Argentina. This was actually her second visit to our studio. Leonor was in Australia travelling and visiting family for a few months and stopped by our studio before Christmas for a quick hello and chat over tea and cake. But this second time around we had organised to have a sewing afternoon. It's something we dearly miss, having the banter of many people in the studio. Maricor and I are so used to each other's company after a lifetime that we can go hours without saying anything. Especially if there's a deadline to hit.

Leonor's work is amazing. http://www.yosoyele.com.ar/?section=bordado It's intricate and delicate and it was a real pleasure to see it up close. She was working on a piece that I had earlier seen a progress photo online (the black background piece) but it was really amazing seeing the physical piece. I thought our stitches were tiny but hers are on another level!

Leonor also told us about the sewing circle she works with back home in Argentina, Rita Smirna. The group grew organically from the students she learnt with while doing embroidery workshops. They have a great blog at http://ritasmirna.blogspot.com.au/, which unfortunately doesn't look like it has been updated lately. But their past posts are worth looking at to get a feel of the collaborative works they create.

Leonor describes how the group will often work on one piece together. Each member adding their own embroidery onto what has been stitched before, similar to a exquisite corpse artwork. We were very lucky to take part in our own small sewing circle with Leonor. She explained the 'rules' they usually use to help having a "blank canvas" less daunting. They collectively decide on a colour palette as well as a handful of stitch styles to keep a level of continuity across the embroideries.

The photos below show you what we ended up with. It's interesting to see that while we all worked with the same colours each work is quite distinct and has a totally different tone. It was really enjoyable having this freedom to experiment, to let our needles meander and let something grow without a plan or design. It's very different to how we have to work commercially where there isn't a lot of time to experiment. But it's a catch22. Experimentation keeps us motivated and open to new inspirations and ideas, which we'll often feed back into our commercial work so we need to remember every now and then to free ourselves and start with an empty square of cloth.

PS. Leonor also very kindly gifted us some sewing supplies she sells through her line 'ele'. It has the most lovely vintage thread that i've now become obsessed with sourcing online. They're called cordonnet and if anyone knows where to find these we'd really appreciate your help!

Website updates

Hello! Hope you all had a great holiday break. We've had a sluggish start to the year in the studio trying to get psyched up for 2014. It's just so hard to focus when the house heats up like an oven and the beach beckons!

We're trying to get through the last bits on our 2013 to do lists and can finally cross off 'update our website' which sadly hadn't been shown much attention since this time last year. There are too many projects to fit on the homepage. But if you visit the Tactiles page you'll be able to see all the new projects www.maricormaricar.com.

We enjoyed working on some pretty fun and challenging projects last year and it was particularly exciting for us to try some new techniques such as goldwork, patchworking and paper embroidery. Hopefully you enjoy the new work as well!

We've also had a bit of clear out in the studio. Well mainly just shuffled one pile of clutter to another corner of the table... but we have managed to go through our back catalogue of embroidered work and have a few old and newish ones up for sale on our etsy shop.

I've got some summer photos to post up as well as some process behind our Menajin cover. Will hopefully have those up on the blog next week.

The photos above show the Christmas lettering and graphics we created for Shinsegae department store in South Korea and their holiday campaign. We documented our process which was then edited into a behind the scenes making of video. Photos courtesy of the Shinsegae design team.

MAPS opening

Pheew I'm very pleased to say that our MAPS show is now up at Koskela. True to form there was some last minute up all night nimble needle work to get the last piece finished but it was all worth it. The opening was last weekend but the exhibition runs until August so there's still plenty of time to see it if you're Sydney based. Unfortunately I was in a rush and arrived late to the opening, so was a little frazzled and didn't take any photos on the day. But we did take some photos during the install and will try to get some pics of the show before we take it down. Many thanks to Kate at Koskela and M for all their help measuring out positions, hammering and ladder climbing. Below are the main patchworked wall hangings and the one we've nicknamed the long sock.

There is also a little extra side show in the nook with some of the pieces we created for Pick Me Up earlier in the year. You can see some of the Epic Battles and our Aim to Misbehave piece.

We also had some great write ups on the show on Inside Out magazine's blog, Desktop and Broadsheet Sydney.
PS You can see some more of our workspace ie my lounge room in the Broadsheet Sydney feature.

Happy Merry Christmas

Woah how can it already be the end of the year? I feel like the whole year has whizzed past and I was constantly trying to catch up. It feels like only last week that we were making our way back to Sydney but other moments our time in London feels like a dream. In any case this year has been full of radness, topped with the arrival of my cheeky monkey aka Ava baby aka hungry slug aka the Big Cheese.

It's been a tough but amazing year and there a lot of things to be thankful for, a lot of people that have helped us this year, given us inspiration, a kick up the but and last but not least things to smile about. I hope that this year has been good for you as well.

Thank you for coming and visiting us here on our blog. I hope that next year we're back to posting more regularly, although I know i've been saying that for a while now ;)

Here's to a lot of feasting and merry making good times!
See you next year!

Some exciting news...

Hello! I've finished my latest little project. It's a knitted pompom beanie that i've fit in whilst waiting for feedback from clients or fabric to dry (and when I needed a break from embroidery!). The reason for the beanie is my boyfriend and I are going to have a baby. Wowser! We're actually almost 7 months along and i've wanted to share the news here for a while but things were a bit hectic with the move back from London, my sister's wedding and just general new years and Christmas stuff.

Maricor and I are going to see how things go once the baby arrives. BUT MaricorMaricar is definitely going to get bigger and better this year! We have a few exciting projects under our belt that we can't wait to share and a couple of commissions pencilled in. We're also going to venture into customised short run textiles. Still only in very early planning and dreaming phase but this is the year we're going to make it happen. I'm so excited, this year is going to be crazay :)

1. I based the beanie on this pattern I found online. I made a few adjustments to it to make it a bit larger and added the pompom.

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and New Years!

This year has been a crazy adventure with a lot to be thankful for, luckily the downs were brief and the highs were high! We hope this year has been amazing for you as well and that 2012 is bigger and better! Thanks so much for reading our blog!!

London Fields and Turner skies

Hello I thought i'd write a post about where we live here in London and share some photos. We live in a small flat in a high rise right next to the park (and also right on top of the train line). It has its quirks, one side of the flat is curved with small windows cut into the side so it feels like we're in a floating boat perched high on the 10th floor. Being so high is great, we hardly notice the trains. And also the views are wow. I've never really wanted to live in a high rise before, I used to roll my eyes whenever Michael talked about wanting a place with a view of the city. I much preferred the idea of a garden and being part of the comings and goings of your street.. but I think i've been converted.

We have an almost clear 180 degree view of London because there are no other high rises near us. When the weather is good the sunsets are amazing, fiery and dramatic. And when the weather is bad it's just as amazing. You can see whole storms wash over the city, enveloping the skyline in a shroud of fog that just as suddenly lifts. We had one day when it was crazily alternating between grey cloud and rain to blue sky and sunshine.

I'm going to miss this view. Now if only our balcony faced the west, when I want to look at the sunset I have to jump onto a chair or the kitchen counter :)

1. The view from our balcony facing central London. 

2. Some spools of vintage silk thread we picked up at a Vintage fair in Bethnal Green.
3. This was taken at around 9pm, the summer days are getting long. Sunrise is at about 4am and it doesn't get fully dark until past 10pm. The day sneaks up on you though, I think I have the whole day left to finish off work and then I check the clock and it's already 5 and time to think about dinner.

Show n' tell

I finally got around to scanning and photographing what co and I got up to at our class the other week so we've got a bit of show and tell for this week's post. The second day of letterpress class saw us work with wooden type to create 2 colour overprints. I played around with 'O' & 'As' while co got a bit tricky with her prints and offset her overprint to create a really nice xx pattern.

On our third and last day our project was to create fantasy business cards. I really love the new cards Hungry Workshop created for us so thought of creating a limited edition UK souvenir batch using one of our favourite catch cry mottos printed onto our existing cards.

Last weekend we headed to the Ephemera Fair on the lookout for vintage craft books, embroidered greeting cards and anything typographic and we didn't come home disappointed. I eyed some embroidered cards that I found at the very first table I found myself at. I though really hard about whether I could afford one (or maybe two) but contented myself with just the small booklet of stitches. We went on to discover a friendly retired printer that had an amazing collection of printed ephemera, antique labels that were as vibrant as the day they were printed. We also found another embroidery book and this lovely patterned annual report for the Society of Compositors. I thought the title referred to musical composers until co explained it meant type compositors/printers which explains the awesome printing.

The Hungry Workshop are awesome

For our trip to London we really wanted to get some proper cards done (finally!) and wanted to do something a little special and something fitting to the tactile work we do. Luckily we stumbled across the letterpress work of The Hungry Workshop run by the awesome duo Simon and Jenna. Letterpress is something we've been dying to try as we've been interested in printmaking for a long time (we did a short course in stone lithographic printing at COFA a few years back and we've booked ourselves in for a letterpress course at Central Saint Martins while we're in London which started yesterday - so much amazing stuff to share about the class so we'll make sure to write a proper blog post about it after it wraps up).

Please check out their site, it's chockas with some amazing prints they've collaborated on with other designers as well as custom designs they have created themselves. They were tremendously helpful with getting our business cards done and ready in time for our trip and we couldn't be more happier with the results. Below are the cards, we chose an uncoated, thicker card that suited the handcrafted feel of our work.

Beer Matt Board 390gsm
Pantone Black 5

London Calling

So long Sydney, we're sad to say goodbye but hello London!

We arrived early Tuesday morning at around 5.30 and after 24 hours flying thank goodness we opted for a cab transfer from the airport. I doubt we'd have made it to our friends' place otherwise. The flights themselves were pretty good but any extended period of time suspended in halfway time between your old timezone and your new one is always disorienting and exhausting. On the second leg from Hong Kong to London we somehow managed to score first row seats which meant we had extra leg room. I felt a bit guilty though. Since we're small asian girls we were in the least need, especially as there seemed to be a whole fleet of giant rugby fans/players crammed in nearby.

Our first week has been a mix of work and exploring.. sadly more of the former. We sorta nerded out and made sure we hunted down an art supply store, fabrics and craft store and grocery shops nearby. No denying where our priorities lie :)

On Saturday we checked out a couple of Markets around east London. I scored a rope necklace at the new Designers Markers Market and we ogled the beautiful food (and people) at Broadway Market. We're hoping to find a rental nearby since the markets are so amazing. I miss living in Newtown and it feels somewhat similar, a cross between Newtown and Surry Hills.

This week we have a commission to finish that's been keeping us from exploring more. I shouldn't complain about being busy but it's a bummer we're stuck indoors. Oh well we'll just have to sew like crazy :)

Maricor and I have also put up a massive update on our site. The full series of embroideries from our Turns of Speech & Figures of Phrase exhibition is up as well as the latest Global Village artworks and an illustration we made for Anorak Magazine's Food is Fun series. We are also proud to share our latest animation that we created for British Council Australia. Together with Republic of Everyone we created an animation to help launch Big Green Idea, a great funding initiative by the British Council. We worked on it before we flew out and had to multitask more than usual for this project. Making the props, rigging, lighting, camera ops and post production. It was a bit of a stretch at times! Although it was a busy two week we had a great time working on it, coming up with the cute paper characters and learning new techniques.

Tag teaming

Our first solo exhibition is happening later this week and we're so close to finishing. We're cutting it a little fine again, but we couldn't resist doing one more embroidery. A week out from opening night we decided it would be a great opportunity to work on a larger piece so we're madly sewing to get it finished for bump in.

It's a little different to the rest of the works (we're calling it the bonus track of the playlist) and is a hint to what our future embroidered projects might look like so I'm pretty excited to see how it turns out. Co took some photos of the set up we McGyvered up for it. To handle the size of the design (75x75cm) we improvised a frame/stand by pinning it to the top of an old clothes horse we had lying around and it's done the trick so far. We're literally working around the clock to get it done in time. Tag teaming sewing shifts so one of us sews while the other naps. It feels just like uni days and our final year Major Project!

Also for those in Melbourne, Matt Huynh's latest exhibition of work Aurora sounds like it's going to be amazing. I'm pretty bummed that we we won't be able to see it. There's more info on his blog and site but here's a little excerpt that got me very excited. "This installation is a very large-scale charcoal and pigment drawing on 100% cotton watercolor paper running down the length of the entire gallery." Woah.. i'm usually overwhelmed working any larger than A3! The show opens March 10 at Lamington Drive Gallery.

And another project well worth supporting is the "What Song is That" project by Little Gonzales and Michael Wilton - a book of quirky pictograms. They've set up a pozible (fundbreak) project. Click here for more info on how to support them and help get the book published.

Happy Holidays

Tis a little late but Maricor and I hope that everyone has and is enjoying a great Christmas and holiday break. We'll be a bit quiet for the next few weeks as we're also going to be busy moving house and preparing for our first ever solo show next year. But we'll be back!

Deep Fried Xmas

Co and I had our annual Christmas dinner with our uni friends over the weekend and it was a seafood feast as usual. We swung by the fish markets earlier and managed to buy about a kilo of sashimi but since we had extra guys this time round we figured we'd need the extra food. We also came home with some cooked and raw prawns for the bbq grill, oysters and pippies. Our group is obsessed with chilli XO pippies so it's on the menu every year. We also had spicy meat patties, beef Kofta and cucumber salad, white wine sangria and ice kachang for dessert. Sorry for the details, I get very excited about food.

Co and I were on a budget for gifts :( so we decided to make embroidered cards. I wish we'd thought of making them earlier so we could have made a bunch for our online store (check back in the new year for more details about that!) and I forgot to document them before we sealed them up but I do have one to show. I also made some dark chocolate rocky road with Michael, complete with homemade marshmallows, macadamias, glace cherries and dried cranberries (Michael's idea and a very good extra chewy factor). I used this recipe and made the adjustments..
I was bit heavy handed with the first chocolate step so it set with a real thick layer of chocolate that made it a bit hard to eat.

[Correction: sorry poste dthe wrong link for the recipe, here's the rocky road recipe]

Sunday sunburn

I'm a little sunburnt from the weekend after spending most of Sunday at the combined garage sale we held with our older sister and her friends. We've had a few good garage sales/market stalls before and I was looking forward to a good day yesterday but the combination of a slow Sunday crowd and the heat made it a very exhausting and trying day. We got so hot we'd take opportunities while no one was around to sneak a lie down under the tables. We might have had heat stroke in hindsight. Hopefully the market stall we've booked next month for Kirribilli will be busier since we really need to offload some stuff before our UK trip next year.

It's quietened down for the year in the studio so we've taken the opportunity to work on some small embroidered bits for xmas giveaways. We're trialling stitched patterns onto cardboard and i'm quite pleased with how they've turned out. We've had to adjust our process to work on card and also the artwork is much simpler but I like how it's more linear and geo inspired. And not to mention a lot faster to finish than i'm used to!

Also I finally copied over photos of the recent Art by Design group exhibition co and I were part of. Sorry for the poor photos I didn't manage to get all the angles so I have inadvertently missed some of the artists. Naomi launched her site with more info on all of the artists that were involved. You can check it out here.

PS we had our first swim of the summer!