Menace Creations Blog Feature

The shop has been very successful this past week - averaging just over a sale a day.  Today I got featured on another blog!
http://upcycle-recycle-reuse.blogspot.com/2011/12/origami-earrings-great-gifts-for-her.html

New stuff in store

I've been neglecting my Etsy shop for a few months, but I decided to try to spruce it up in time for the late Christmas rush.  I just reached 50 items for the second time EVER, and I'm hoping to hit 75 in the next couple of days!  Lots of new and exciting stuff, but what I'm most excited about is my Pride and Prejudice earrings:

These guys sold like wildfire at the Cabbagetown festival, so I'm hoping they'll be popular on Etsy as well :)  So far they've been getting a lot of views in not a lot of time, so I'm pretty hopeful.

Kitty!

Jordan and I have a new furbaby.  His name is Neuron (as in grey matter) and he's a toilet-paper shredding brat, but we love him anyway. It may have to do with him being SO CUTE.

Pride Weekend

The past couple weeks I neglected my shop a little in favour of making one-of-a-kind recycled buttons for the Green Party booth at Pride.  Here are some samples.

Drawing

I used to draw semi-constantly.  I always had several projects on the go, and even finished drawings with some frequency.  When I went into engineering, I stopped drawing.  I didn't mean to, but sometime last year I realised that I hadn't drawn anything at all in over a year.  Over the past several months, I have slowly started drawing again.

First, I started going to life drawing classes, then doodling in a sketchbook.  I listed a few of my newer sketches as cards in the Menace Creations shop, but the originals stayed safely bound in my sketchbook:

 I'm proud to say that today I listed my first full-sized original drawing on Menace Creations - an 11" x 14"  pen and ink dragonfly.

One thing I've noticed, and which I commented on in my interview on the TESTy blog, is that my drawings have gotten a lot looser.  I'm not sure if it's the engineering influence, or just me getting older and more mature (haha, right) but I'm getting a lot better at capturing the essentials of a drawing without overworking all of the details.  I think it gives my drawings more life, although perhaps I am just being overly optimistic.

I've even been keeping a semi-regular sketchbook.  I'm still nowhere near as prolific as Misha, but I have a few sketchbooks gradually getting filled up with rough, unfinished sketches.  I was never able to sketch in the past.  Very exciting stuff.

Hey look, I got featured on the Toronto Etsy Street Team Blog !

I was interviewed by Toronto Etsy knitter Pusha, and the lovely little elves at the TESTy blog made it into a great feature with LOTS OF PICTURES.

See the whole post here

Ramen Noodles

I'm eating a package of delicious, greasy salty spicy flavour Nong-shim ramyun with corn and fried egg.

Haven't had ramen since last year in Brazil, which nearly turned me off ramen forever.  They make cheese flavoured ramen and ketchup flavoured ramen.  Both are just as gross as they sound, but I have this bad habit of seeing strange, gross looking things at the grocery store and restaurants and buying them because they look gross.  Surprisingly frequently, they end up being delicious, but just as frequently, they end up being just as gross or grosser than they look.  I should have figured that cheap brazilian ketchup-flavoured ramen would taste like instant noodles with salty fake ketchup powder on it.

Anyway, I'd forgotten how delicious these little MSG-bombs could be.