Crafty Update

Top: Peace, Bottom: Negotiation

I had a little break from work this week so I thought I'd get a head start on doing my holiday cards. Can you believe it? I actually worked on my holiday cards BEFORE Thanksgiving this year! I'm kind of stunned myself.

It was a little rough going at first (the fox and the bunny had some trust issues) but I finally got predator and prey to sit down together and work out their problems. As I suspected, it mostly had to do with hunger on the fox's part, and not-wanting-to-be-eaten on the bunny's part. The problem was solved with marshmallows. Ladies and gentlemen, Fox and Bunny wish you "Peace & Joy All Year Round."

I used the Gocco machine to screenprint them with red and silver ink. I'll be sending the cards out to friends and family, but the few leftovers will likely make it into my Etsy shop, so keep an eye out for them if you want one!

In other crafting and Etsy shop related news.... Several months ago I pledged my May through September shop proceeds to help elderly Ethiopians who have been affected by HIV and AIDS. The result is a nice $400 check, earmarked to help elders, for the Missions to the World AIDS Care and Treatment Project. Thanks so much for your help!

The year isn't over yet, so I'm committing my October through December proceeds to help Aid to Artisans. They're an awesome organization that supports handmade traditions by connecting artisans in the developing world to markets in the developed world. If you need to do some holiday shopping and want to help a good cause in the process, come by the shop... I'll be updating it over the next month with new items... Here are some of the crafty things I've stitched/printed up so far.


Cloudy Coin Purses: Make it rain money! The coin purses are stitched with silver thread for extra optimism, and each comes with two handmade felt pins, one for sunny weather and one for thunder-n-lightnin' weather.


Alejandro el Legarto the Pencil Case: Alejandro is 3/4 friendly green lizard, 1/4 vicious alligator, and 100% hungry pencil case. He and purple Sally Salamander have a penchant for cookies. They each come with a hand-stitched felt cookie pin. Nom nom nom....


Ornaments: I'm almost done using up my previously ginormous craft supply stash, but I still have a fat bag of felt scraps. I think most of it will go towards making holiday ornaments. Not sure what the result will be (it mostly has to do with the color and size of the scraps) but for starters I have some summery oranges and leaves to hang on the Christmas tree....


Holiday cards: Now's as good a time as any to put some holiday cards in the shop... I dug through my storage and came up with some cards from as far back as 2005. Holiday Safety Tips and Everything You Want, both shown above, are greeting card / booklets, and there is only one set each. Also up for sale are some Gocco screen printed cards: Peace on Earth and Joy. They are in limited supply, so if you want a set, snatch it up!

DEAR SANTA:
Oooh, I want the L Letterpress Kit!
There's a giveaway over on i-DIY -- enter a comment to win!

LINK DUMP:
Connectivity
Satellites in South Korea :: why Lee Si-kap owns more satellite dishes than any other South Korean
Blackboards in Africa :: analog blogging in Liberia
Internet Usage Around the World :: global map of who's using the internet and how much
Open your ears!
Music from a Tree :: tree as instrument, by Diego Stocco
Soundtransit :: book a ticket and travel with your ears
Smithsonian Folkways :: listening is an act of love
Sound Recordings by Tony Schwartz :: listen in on the past, through the recordings of an old pro
Imagination & Stories
Marco Polo Sightseeing :: paintings of Marco Polo as a modern-day traveler by Nora Sturges (full gallery here)
Significant Objects :: a project to test the value of a well-told story... using Ebay

New Year's Resolution

Happy New Year!

Most years, I don't even bother with resolutions. I just figured I'd break them anyway. My reasoning was that the decision to designate years with numbers, to break them down into months, to have the yearly number change on a certain date -- it's all rather arbitrary. And I admit a slight superstition that I might jinx my general trend of good luck by paying too much attention to this arbitrary date.

This year a resolution popped into my head when I was least expecting it. I was cleaning my closet and finding things at the back that I had forgotten about. The resolution seemed like a good one, so I decided to go with it.


There just so happens to be a TON of crafting supplies in the closet now. Mostly they consist of fabric and notions that seemed like a great idea at the time but which I couldn't find a use for later. This is the year that I'm going to get rid of them! So, my new year's resolution is to NOT BUY ANOTHER CRAFTING ITEM until this vast stash 'o stuff is depleted. I will make one exception for replacement sewing machine needles since I seem to... break them... often.

The year is nearly gone. I'm excited to get started. I kind of panicked a bit while we were in Bangkok, and bought an entirely unnecessary stash of fabric and zippers, but I'm fine now. When my Etsy shop re-opens in January, I will start filling it with the creations that are produced from the various odds and ends in my closet. Over time, I think some interesting things may happen. For example, after I run out of zippers, I'll have to figure out how to sew button holes. And after I run out of buttons I may have to use found objects for button closures. Then there's the part when I get to the bottom of the bin, the ugly fabric. Hmm...


There's a second part to my new year's resolution. All the proceeds from my Etsy shop this year (excluding shipping and handling costs) will go to charity. I haven't decided yet on the roster of charities to give to yet, but I'm starting out by giving the earnings from the first 2 months sales to one that's close to my heart, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the largest charitable group funding the search for a cure for Type 1 diabetes. I hope it will happen in our lifetime.

We came back from Bangkok on Monday, after 4 days of walking, exploring, snacking and shopping. Some posts about all that are coming soon. Tonight we're back on a plane for another long weekend trip, to the Northern Marianas islands of Saipan and Tinian. Yay!

'Tis the Season

1. Cloudy coin purse, 2. Silver lining
It's the rainy season on the Korean peninsula. Last weekend, the weather gods taunted us with a solid wall of non-stop showers. I'm not one of those people who likes walks in the rain (nor piña coladas), so we've been staying indoors, watching DVDs, reading and peering out at our rain-soaked courtyard as precipitation pelts away at our tiled roof. I've been getting a lot of crafting done.

I'd been itching to make something other than iPod cozies for a while. But even after a ton of sketches in my notebook, I didn't have any designs I was particularly excited about. Finally, all this rain yielded some inspiration. Cloudy coin purses with raindrop zipper pulls were the result. Now it can rain money! And, for an extra dose of optimism, every cloud is stitched with silver thread... Each purse comes with two pins: a sunny badge and a thunderin-n-lightnin' badge. You can switch 'em up depending on your mood or the weather. Or use both if you're feelin' kinda crazy. Go check out the clouds in my Etsy shop...


1. 5kg of tomatoes, 2. Cross section
Well all this rain is good for something. Our little cherry tomato plant is sprouting mini-tomatoes nonstop. We can't eat them fast enough. But sometimes mini tomatoes just don't cut it and you yearn for something meatier, jucier...

A few weeks ago, a friend who I hadn't seen in a while e-mailed out of the blue. She lives about two hours southwest of Seoul on her family's farm in Jecheon (제천), and she wanted to know if she could send us some of their organic tomatoes. Sixteen gorgeous, fat, vine-ripened tomatoes arrived by messenger the next day, and thus began 7 days of tomato-cooking and tomato-eating.


Gazpacho recipe
First, I made gazpacho. It made for a refreshing and light appetizer for my friend's potluck lunch.
Then I made some tomatoes with scrambled eggs, a yummy Chineses homestyle dish whenever my stomach is homesick. For brunch, the tomatoes went into an omelet with cheese. And after I picked up a baguette at Paris Croissant I made some garlicky bruschetta as well. Yummy.

And finally, two quarts of tomato sauce. One quart was my typical chunky "kitchen sink" sauce where I throw in ground pork, bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, chili peppers, you name it. The other quart I went with this enticing summer recipe from 101 Cookbooks. I hadn't realized that such a light recipe could be so good! The only ingredients in there were the tomatoes, some tomato paste, extra virgin olive oil and some red pepper flakes for a good kick, but despite the simplicity (or maybe because of it) it was addicting.

Growing up in New York, I was pretty much spoiled when it came to having any kind of food, any time of year. It seems silly, but for 30... someodd... years it never really occurred to me that there were seasons for foods. If I wanted oranges, there were oranges in the supermarket. If I wanted bananas or strawberries, bananas and strawberries were in season somewhere in the world, so there they were in the produce section. Everything could be flown or trucked in from anywhere. I had no idea what time of year was the season for tomatoes.

But then again, I hadn't experienced the joy of locally grown, organic, in-season, vine-ripened tomatoes like these, so I didn't know what I was missing. Mmmm.

When I met my friend for coffee last week, we talked about her family farm. They have four greenhouses that are right now -- late June through July -- full of tomatoes and green chili peppers. A little later, during September and October -- red chili peppers will show up on the scene. And later still, in the fall, lettuce. Actually, there are two harvests for lettuce, one in spring and one in the fall. These days, their one cow has been eating a lot of tomatoes, as has been the rest of the family.


1. Vacation, 2. Sea urchins
The rainy summer is not the season for seafood, however. When we showed up at Noryangjin seafood market last weekend, the place was eerily quiet. Our favorite fishmonger was nowhere to be seen, and a Styrofoam board with a "gone for vacation" message scrawled on it was placed on top of his stall's empty tanks. Then we looked around and realized that nearly 80% of the stalls at Noryangjin were closed for vacation until August 3.

We were at Noryangin because Gavin and I had seen a TV program featuring the women abalone divers of Jejudo. They were saying it was sea urchin season, which got the both of us salivating for uni or, in Korean, 성게 (song-gei). True enough, the spiky little fellows were there. We ordered up some, and they arrived at our table, somewhat haphazardly cracked open with their guts spilling forth, moments later. Yup, Korean-style raw fish, or 회 (hui) isn't as prettily-arranged as sashimi, but it gets the job done.

Actually, in case you were interested, it's not sea urchin roe that you're eating when you're savoring uni. It's the mashed up gonads. But don't let that deter you; they're really very tasty, a kind of savory-with-a-hint-of-sweet combination that's kind of addicting. However. Our sea urchins lacked a certain something. They weren't bad, but they didn't seem "ready." Disappointingly, there weren't that many mashed-up gonads inside. And whoever cracked the little suckers open didn't do a good job; there were loose spikes all over the plate and -- ick -- inside the sea urchins as well. It made for a prickly meal.

So, when is the sea urchin season? I did some studious Googling and discovered that, in Korea (specifically on Jeju Island), July is the spawning season for sea urchins. So we were on time, after all. But the spawning season is also when the urchin innards are least tasty. Oh.

These days, I've been hearing a lot about the 100-mile diet, reducing one's carbon footprint by making sure your meal didn't travel the typical 1,500 miles from farm-to-plate that most North American foods do. But South Korea isn't so big, so even if we sit in Noryangjin market in Seoul and eat a sea urchin from Jeju Island, we're still eating a kind of 280-mile diet. Hunting down information about what's-tastiest-at-what-time-of-year-and-where can sure be exhausting, though...

On a completely unrelated note, here are some robot links... Apparently, the future of robotics is.... cute!
I wanna see Wall-E!
Forget the 3G iPhone, I want THIS mp3 player! Cuter video here.
I can afford my very own robot bug.
Huggable robot.
MarsPhoenix tweets! And says "w00t"! And wants someone to send it a 3G iPhone!
Too bad I can't see Robot Chicken in Korea. Here are clips from their StarWars episodes on YouTube.

Moving & Making

1. New house day, 2. New house night

May and June turned out to be kind of hectic months for us. The owners of the house we were renting suddenly sold it, and the new owners wanted to move in, giving us 3 weeks to scramble for a new place to stay. Add to that the fact that we were leaving for vacation in a week when we heard the news, and you can understand why we were kind of in a panic.

Luckily, in Korea, everything that can be done, can be done quickly. It's the "bali bali" (Korean for "speedy, speedy") curse, but it's also a blessing. We knew that we wanted to continue living in a traditional Korean house, so within a week a real estate agent showed us a flurry of "hanok," we fell in love with one of them, Gavin's firm handled the details and we signed the lease.

The week we were to move coincided with the largest protest that Seoul has seen in two decades, and since we were moving to a neighborhood near the President's Blue House, roads were blocked every night and traffic was mayhem. The owners of our new home only just managed to move out before the police blockaded their area, but they didn't have time to clean. We spent the night before moving day cleaning the new house from top to bottom.

In Korea, moving companies offer a packing and cleaning service as well. What a godsend! On moving day, two men and an ajumma (a middle-aged Korean woman) arrived at our old house with boxes and crates. The ajumma immediately set to work in the kitchen, taking all the contents out of the cupboards, packing them into crates, wrapping plates and breakables, wiping the kitchen down. The men packed our wardrobe and drawer contents into plastic boxes. In our new house, everything went back into the kitchen cupboards and drawers in the same order. They started at 8:30 am at the old house, and finished by 1 pm at the new house. It was amazing! I wish moving companies did this in the States. Here are some photos of the new house. I'll post more as soon as I get it looking homier...



1. Elephantasy Journal, 2. Elephantasy Card
3. Sir Hamilton, 4. Goggles

Amazingly, I was able to get some crafty stuff done during this mayhem.
Elephantasy is an illustration that I sketched out ages ago that I Gocco screenprined onto some journals and greeting cards. The journals are made out of handmade mulberry paper that I bought in Luang Prabang, sewn with hand-spun and dyed silk thread that I also picked up in Laos. I've posted them on my Etsy shop, so go take a look.

Sir Hamilton is a flying pig with high hopes to become your favorite iPhone / iTouch cozy ever. And Goggles is... well Goggles is a mutant-3-eyed-frog iPhone / iTouch cozy. It's happened; increased pollutants in the air and water (and an exhausted slightly delirious Annamatic) have given Goggles one more eye than his fellow frog cousins. He's a bit self-conscious about it, so try not to stare. Goggles and Sir Hamilton will be making more appearances in my Etsy shop soon, so keep checking back.

Linky stuff that I've bookmarked over the past month (sorry, but I've forgotten where I've gotten most of these links... it's been awhile...):

some never-ending web interfaces that i'm loving:
>> helloworld from softbank
>> good things should never end from the orange network

music in unexpected places:
>> the super mario theme played on bottles by a remote control car
>> david byrne turns an abandoned building into a musical instrument

unwanted home improvements?
>> repairing broken spiderwebs
>> snail shell painting

too cute to eat
>> marzipan characters
>> sushi art

Coziness

1. Diablo, 2. Gregory, 3. Nibbles, 4. Boris

Last week I had a little bit of free time again and started stitching up some more iPhone and iPod Touch cozies... I'm going to try to keep them in stock over in my Etsy shop, but if you don't see the one you want there, just send me a message and I'll do a custom order...

Part of the fun of sewing up different styles of iPod cozies is giving the characters names and personalities. If you know me at all, you probably realize that I anthropomorphize EVERYTHING. So... Everybody, meet Diablo, Gregory, Nibbles and Boris!

Diablo comes from an notorious family of iPod and gadget accessories including Mr. Devil and Mrs. Devil, who dedicated their lives to taking care of Nano and Video iPods, the Quintuplets, who left home to seek their fortunes as cell phone and holiday ornaments, and 99.44% pure evil Lucky, who brings mischief and misfortune to those with iPod Shuffles.

Nibbles is... Well, to tell you the truth, nobody knows what Nibbles is. Rumor has it that she's a hamster, but since she can't talk, it hasn't been confirmed. Let's just call her a critter, shall we? Nibbles the critter has a pouch on her back to tote earbuds in. Cuz, frankly, I'm always getting my earphones tangled up in a big mess and a pouch to tuck them in seemed like a good idea.

Boris also has some illustrious family members. You might remember Benjamin, his little Nano-lovin' brother, and Big Ben, his cousin of Video cozying fame. Boris' feisty friend Bounce, prefers iPod shuffles. Who doesn't love bunnies?

And finally, Gregory the frog. Most frogs like flies, but Gregory loves earbuds. Just tuck the earbuds into his mouth and he'll gladly carry them around all day for you. Although it really doesn't matter what kind of music you listen to on your iPod, Gregory wants you to know he prefers hip hop. You know.... because he's a frog... and he likes to hop.... Ok, so I'm corny. Whatever.

About frogs
I've been partial to frogs ever since we moved into our home two years ago and found that our courtyard was inhabited by two adorable amphibians. We called them Mr. & Mrs. Chombagi (Chombagi means "spotted" in Korean) and followed their antics all spring and summer. Sadly, after they went into hibernation at the end of that summer, they didn't return. I'd been thinking of them again at the start of this spring, and casually drew up a pattern for Gregory before going off to Coffeest to meet Younghui.

Sometimes we meet to do our respective design work or sewing or knitting or whatever in some local cafe. On this particular day last week, Younghui was working on a logo next to me while I was stitching up Diablo. Gregory was still a half-sewn pile of felt when the owner of the cafe, who'd been sitting across the table from us, leaned over and asked (in Korean), "What are you making?" Younghui (Thanks!) became my interpreter and explained that I was making iPhone cozies.

Hereupon, the cafe-owner became very excited. Firstly, she loved the cozies, and would declare to anyone in the cafe who would listen, "Hey, look at these pouches for iPhones! Aren't they BEAUTIFUL?! Aren't they cute?! Do you need one?!" Finally, after a flurry of questions and inspections of my products, her companion plopped 25,000 Won (about $25) down in front of me and declared, "I want the frog." And so, Gregory got stitched up and sold right then and there. After attaching the snap buttons to his feet that evening, I returned to Coffeest the next day to drop him off with his new owner.

About gadget-love
Anyway the aforementioned exchange kind of prompted a weird Apple gadget geek orgy. The platform of choice in Korea is Microsoft, and the favored gadgets are made by local kings Samsung and LG, so to see such a convergence of Apple love was a little funny.
Roughly translated from Korean,
"Oh my god, you have the iPod Touch?! Can I see it?" exclaimed the cafe-owner.
"Sure," said I handing over the Touch.
"Hey look at this," the cafe-owner said to her companion, demonstrating the multi-touch features.
"Mmhmm," he says looking it over with interest before glancing up and exclaiming to Younghui,
"Oh, wow, you have a MacBook Air! I've never seen one before! Can I see?"
"Oh, sure, take a look," says Younghui.
"Oh, hey! That guy over there also has the iPod Touch!" the cafe-owner says, pointing across the room.
"Where? Oh, no I think that's an iPhone, it's a bit thicker...."
"No, not THAT guy, the one at the next table!"
"Oh, hey, right, that's funny, there are a lot of Apple products in one room here..."
"Yeah, the girl over THERE has a MacBook..."

Then it was my turn for gadget-envy, because I noticed that the man sitting at the table right behind me was holding the brand new Sigma DP1, the camera I'm drooling over at the moment.

That's one thing that's great about Seoul: It's a city of early-adopters who aren't shy about geeking out over gadgets. People love their gadgets in New York, but you can't be too public about it or you'll be asking to get mugged.

Some linkage:
Using Google Maps to navigate... text.
Read magazines here.
Read a short story here.

Crafts & Arts

While my some of my work projects are lounging in "waiting for client feedback" purgatory, I decided to not let the creative momentum slip away and made some more stuff.


This Valentine's Day card came about because I did a bunch of sketches for my friend's wedding invitation. I had forgotten that she really hates birds. Needless to say, she didn't choose this design, but I liked it, even though I kind of think the whole bird trend thing is over. If you want to send a handwritten message to your lovebird, you can buy it on Etsy now. If you have more than one sweetie, you can buy the set of 4, I won't judge you.



I made the travel journal and the passport holder fresh after our trip to Bangkok, feeling inspired by the whole romantic notion of travel. The travel journal is available in my shop. I'm considering re-making the passport holder in vinyl or industrial grade felt (or leather, but leather's expensive and a b*tch to sew by hand) to make it more durable...

I haven't gone to any exhibitions lately, but it's so cold out that it's been much comfier to browse art online while sipping hot chocolate... Some artsy things I bookmarked this week:

art made out of crayons
via it's nice that

art made out of chalk dust
via notcot

sculpture made out of a book
via ffffound

camera (and photograph) made out of a room
via... a vague memory i had of an article in the nytimes years ago + google

Inside and Outside

This is Babbette. She's a result of various converging events :
1) my favorite Muji sweater getting shrunk in the dryer. Bummer.
2) getting a brand new sewing machine that I wanted to try out.
3) it's freezing cold outside and I do NOT want to go outdoors until April. Or May.
I'm trying to decide what to do with Babbette. Should I put her on sale in my Etsy shop? Should I give her away? Should I keep her and add her to my growing stable of stuffed rabbits with personality disorders? I'll dwell on it for a few days and decide.

There's just a ton of scrap felt lying around that I can't bring myself to throw in the trash. So while I was testing out all the sewing functions on the new machine, they somehow morphed into... holiday ornaments! Anyway, here they are. Since I've no idea what to do with them now (we don't have a tree), I put them on sale at Etsy. They're super cheap at $15 for the set, plus they come with a free silkscreened holiday card / envelope set.


Some pictures to prove that I have indeed been outdoors this week:

It's the official electioneering season -- the Korean Presidential election is on December 19 (yay, Gavin gets a day off even though we can't vote!) -- and all these posters are up in the neighborhood. Portraits of 12 beaming Korean men promising to be the best choice to lead the ROK. Do they inspire confidence?


Japa, a bar in Sincheon with marbles in their bar. Actually I'm not too crazy about the atmosphere at this place. But our friend Hyungjin had a bottle of whiskey reserved in his name here so we went.

Still here...

Nothing much to report... Been a little busy working on the odd freelance project here and there. I'm taking a break from it now because my application crashed after 5 hours of work which I didn't save. Yeah, I didn't hit Command-S ONCE for 5 hours. Real smart, eh? Being a diehard Mac user, what does this mean? Of course--it means I need to upgrade to a MacBook Pro!

I've been making iPod cozies. Well, it kinda started out that I wanted something to put my Nano in. And then they just kept on reproducing... So, I set up a little shop at Etsy. There's only 2 things there, but I was thinking of putting the extra Christmas cards I made up there, and anything interesting that happens to come off my knitting needles...

Sunny (The Breathing)
Originally uploaded by annamatic3000.

On Tuesday, I went to see a friend's band perform in Apgujeong. There are a few more photos here. They'll be performing again (along with other bands on Modern Life Entertainment's label) on February 3, so if you're in Seoul, definitely go! It's free! Listen to some of their music here.