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!

Liquid pencils, lace and other things

Been a while between posts, a lot has happened in the meantime.

"Liquid Pencil" tests: Fun times testing out a new typographic piece as an inked up poster before the sewing phase. I had bought a bottle of "Liquid Pencil" (Derivan) on impulse a while ago but haven't had a project to test it out on 'til now. It's less liquid than ink and more the consistency of globby paint but it glides off the brush smoothly and has a nice thick look to it with a graphite finish. I used it in combination with masking fluid which was a bit hit and miss. The bottle of masking fluid is quite old and probably past its prime but seemed to be working alright, although some areas dried too thin and ended up not masking at all. Overall I'm pretty happy with the results, I know I probably could have composited it digitally in photoshop with all the masking etc but its nice trying to do it the old fashioned way. The roughness of the edges where the fluid pooled at the corners and brushed edges of the mask add that extra bit of charm you can't emulate digitally. Or...I suppose you could but it wouldn't be half as fun.

Kevin Tran exhibition: We checked out Kevin Tran's exhibition at Mils gallery after seeing his work posted up online, the works up close are so vivid and detailed. Thanks to Catherine and Matt for the heads up on the show. (On a side note we went down to chinatown after the show for our favourite cheap eat at the Chinese Noodle House. Nothing beats special braised eggplant and combination hand made noodles!)

Lace Study Centre: We had a great time chatting to the extremely helpful ladies from the Powerhouse Museum's Lace Study Centre. They were nice enough to share their love of lace and give us a quick demonstration and pull out some amazing examples from the museum's collection. We went straight out and bought a book so we can start learning how to lace. So many possibilities.. so many things to make. First step, modify some chopsticks into bobbins.

Gaffa Gallery: Went to the exhibition openings at Gaffa gallery which were jam packed with a lot of great works. Anna Fraser's photographs and Linelle Stepto's flora/fauna studies are some of the works on display right now. After this show we also had a food odyssey, this time it was a reunion of sorts at KFC. We used to live on popcorn chicken while at uni. It's greasy and usually leaves me feeling a little ill afterwards but the smell always beckons me back!