Serious Craft Blog

Last week I got bored with not being able to sew, because I'd been packing and my room was a mess.

Now my sewing machine and fabrics are all packed up too. *sniff* I didn't have enough time to work on my new pattern. It will have to wait until next month. Sorry ladies (and guys)!

Anyway, I exerted my stored up energies toward polymer clay. This stuff is really so fun and affordable.

I just made a little takoyaki (they are like octopus hush puppies) charm thing.

I shaped the clay, baked them, and painted over them with cheapo acrylic. Then I glazed them with Sculpey gloss.

The finish is pretty nice. It's not tacky like Mod Podge, but it's pretty stiff.

My room is starting to get pretty empty! I've been busy packing and packing (and occasionally playing).

Whew, so much work! When you're a techie and a crafter, you just have soooo much gadgets and supplies and materials and BOOKS.

I am sore everywhere from moving boxes around. Not to mention when I went iceskating this weekend, I fell once and landed flat on my butt. Oh! The pain. I was doing pretty good practicing basic tricks and stuff until some little girl fell in front of me, which caused me to stop next to her and somehow I lost my balance too. I thought my tailbone was going to break.

I don't want the weekend to end! It's not long enough! Mooooar time!

Well, I only have two short weeks before the end of my job of five years. It's been quite some time! It will be a breath of fresh air when I am done.

My handmade purse lonely hanging there. It used to have more friends.
 

Oooh...it's so coool...

I don't know if I just got lucky or what, but I was able to find two packs of Polaroid 600 Film at CVS tonight. I'm kind of impulsive, so I didn't want to order them online and wait for the shipping. Hooray! So I grabbed both and sped back home.

There's a bunch of tutorials on how to modify the sx-70 to use 600 film. Most involve removing the filter from the camera eye, and adding a filter to the lens.

Since my first test was with an indoor light box, I only removed the filter from the eye, and also cut off the "nubs" from the film cartridge so it would slide into the camera. Initially, I used one light to bounce off the top of the box in the darkest exposure setting. But the standard bulb turned out way too yellow in the pictures. So I switched to a daylight fluorescent bulb, and then it became too blue. So ultimately, I used both bulbs and bounced them off from opposite sides. It took a few shots to get the white balance somewhat right. The exposure was left at darkest.

Here's the last and best picture I've got.

I guess choosing Baby for my first run wasn't so smart. Between trying to manual focus on him and keeping him from shredding my pillow apart, the compositions, or lack thereof, were poor. As you can see here.

I liked that final shot though. Hmmm...now what do I do with it?

This weekend was full of fun and goodies!

I don't know what planet I had been in, for this weekend was the first time I went to the LA Fashion District! I can't believe I had been missing out on sooo much. Especially Michael Levine. Can I please have the whole store? Pretty please with a cherry on top?

This weekend was also my first time at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. This place r0x0rz. There are some very nice and rare vintage stuff there. I got some sweet dealz, check em out.

My very own (well, shared w/my baby) Polaroid SX-70!!! I am so excited to get my hands on some films and play with it! Maybe, just maybe, someday, I'll be as good as ms e.soule.

Yay giant Pyrex bowls! Not Fire-King, but nonetheless beautiful. Orangey, vintagey, and big. I think the two smaller orange ones will serve as perfect ramen bowls. Mmm... 3 for $15, what a steal.

MOAR orange. Actually, these were from Pottery Barn, not the flea market. The soap dish was a buck. The vase was was two bucks. Another jackpot! Seems like I'm stocking up on lots of bright, happy wares. I wish for my next home to be bright and cheery.

The Etsy Mini is a cute little widget that you can add to your website to display your shop's or your favorite Etsy products. It can run on Javascript or Flash. You check mine out on the sidebar here.

It's a neat tool, but you can't change the background color very easily. For whatever reason, both the javascript and flash versions are locked down to a white background, which is annoying for those who have sites with a color background--like mine.

So I wrote a little tool / tutorial that you can use to do just that--change the background color. You can even change your username font color. But that's all it does. It doesn't hack the Mini in any way, but it just overrides the color codes that their code set. You can make a simple edit to the Mini code (if flash), or load the script on your own site or host it on mine (if javascript). The instructions are all there on this page.

Just convo me on Etsy or leave a comment here if you need help setting this up. Enjoy!