Happy Weekend

The sun is coming up today, and I'm off to ship out my orders (I sold 2 of my new product "A Perfect Match", yay.) and do some more design. I wish you can enjoy the sun more than I do.

lovely picture by CathyL

Wow. Matt Shlian

Just found out Matt Shlian's work. A quick share. The design product is very simple, but very complex in achiving the design. I wish I'm this good with paper.

Find it through Craft Zine

A book I bought

My husband stumbled on to this gorgeous and informational book about 3 dimensional clothing construction named "Pattern Magic" by Nakamichi, Tomoko. This is the volume 2, but we couldn't find the volume 1 at the book store.
Even though it's all in Japanese, but there's enough Chinese character and diagram/pattern, we basically understand what it's about.
This book actually is about making clothing for dolls, but it's so beautiful, it can be clothing for human like me. :D
I'm hoping my husband make the top on the cover for me.

Consumption Illustrations

I've been following Kate Bingaman-Burt's blog Obsessive Consumption for a while. She started out photographing the stuff she bought everyday in 2002 and then she changed to drawing them, I find that very endearing for some reason, the idea and the illustrations are very cute. She turned some mundane stuff into a form of art, like a bottle of Tide.

She'll have a book full of all these illustrations out in March 2010.

Pacman love

As much I do not like the era I grew up in...all those embarrassing photo of my big hair day...I love Pacman. Love the photo concept of Lanvin SS08 fashion shoot here, though I look more into the set decoration then the clothes.
I bought a pacman ring for my husband 2 years back and he loved it very much. The 80s, a mix of love and hate feelings.

image via Trendland

Another Origami Post

Just to show how much I love origami. Remeber the previous ASICS ad video. This video is from the same origami artist. Now, all I need is just a piece of paper and a repeat viewing of this video. Make my day.


THE MAKING OF AN ORIGAMI KOI from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo via swissmiss

Things that make me happy

I brought the balloons and borrow an air pump. This makes me very happy, and it doesn't cost me much.

Make something cool everyday

I found Laser Bread's photo set title very intriguing, it's called "Make something cool everyday". I think I should do that too.

Then he started cutting things up and photograph them for last few days which to me is kind of fun. I love cutting things up, especially when I was a child, I chop off the stuff animals my mom bought me which resulted in no stuff animal for me, ever. Ugh, parents, what do they know, it could be art. ;D

Color me Katie

I recently discovered Katie Sokoler, a freelance photographer in Brooklyn. She has this cutest blog with really fun photographs and all sort of silly and fun ideas. The above picture is her recent post, she took the eyes with her, and just take photographer everywhere she went.

There's a post that she camped out in her living room, absolutely hilarious.

I'd like to think I'm as fun as her. I sometimes break into singing and dancing on the street...my mother in law said she's worried about me after watching some video of me. I took that as a compliment. ;P

A quick thank you to my followers

Just a quick thank you to all the old and recent followers, for the past few days, even there's not much activity here, I see a growth in the followers section.

Thank you for reading my blog and leaving comments every now and then. It's great to see faces and real people who come here and read the silly stuff I wrote or made.

Do you guys have facebook or twitter? Feel free to add me. :D

Bringing Color Back - Etsy Treasury Monday

Today's Chinese New Year, the 1st day of the lunar Calendar, yeah, I'm busy meeting with relatives handing out red pockets, but still haven't forget I need to bring you my Etsy Monday Treasury.

CNY means spring time, and spring time means color, so this Monday's theme is Bringing Color Back.

I hope you enjoy this edition of Yellowgoat Treasury. I will back in a few days.

A Perfect Match

I have been working on this for a while, that's why I haven't been posting here as I used to be. My alchemy table was up and running, and lots of cutting, firing, soldering, noise and quite a bit of frustration to get this done, but I'm in love with the result. Honestly, I kind of hestitated a little whether I want to sell it, but a poor goat in strange yellow color needs to make some money for food. Grass is expensive in Hong Kong. ;D

It's a "peeerrrrfect" Valentine's Day gift.

I hope you like it. Click here for the shop listing.

Happy Chinese New Year

Finally, we'll be done with the year of Rat. Chinese New Year is this coming Monday, so I'd be off for at least first half of the week and this weekend. I need to do some spring cleaning.

This year will marked as the first year I hand out red pockets, which I don't enjoy, since what's inside the red pockets are my hard earn money...

I'm kind of frustrated with what I've been working on lately, just when I thought I'm done, I screwed up some little steps then I have to redo the whole thing, that's why I haven't been posting as usual lately. Anyway, I hope the coming day offs will help me to get things done.

Whether you're Chinese or not, Happy Year of Ox to you. :D

photo credit: Beezy

Flickr Find - Sea Beach House

Love the mid century furniture and it's by the sea, makes it all the more dreamy.

Photo of CathyL

Garbage Box from Askul

This is probably for office where you dump paper and plastic in different boxes. Askul is an online supply store in Japan. These boxes though, are designed by Swedish designer. Lovely.

via lovely package

Do I need another reusable shopping bags?

The answer is Yes. As much as I love my 2 sets of bright and lovely ENVIROSAX, they're more than a year old now, durable as they are, wear and tear is inevitable. They are available at my local high end super market, but the price tag is staggering, and you are better off order online. However, it took them an extremely long time to arrive last time I brought them.

Enter the new loopt bags from flip and tumble. I have seen their bags before, but I didn't like their 24-7 bags which folded into a round ball. The loopt bags folds into a roll with elastic band, which I like, and they're slightly cheaper. The plain grey one is on my wish list now because it goes with my current winter color scheme, grey, bits of black and white. The do ship international, yay.

O for Obama

It's Obama madness all over the world and the Internet. I watched the inauguration last night, and I'm amazed at how an estimated 2 million people braced the cold and waited to experiencing the historical moment of American history.

If you haven't already, make an Obamicon to go with the celebration.

I want this

I'm one of those mixed bag in terms of things I like. I love all things old and vintage, but also all the futuristic design that looks, well, future.
As much as I want an old sewing machine, but those are only good for display, it's too hard for me to sew without the easy computerized buttons from my current Brother machine. This Cyclops sewing machine is not in production yet, but hopefully in the near future, so my husband can become some sort of sewing ibot...mailed ordered kind...I should stop my crazy fantasy in mid afternoon.

via Curbly via core77

Be My Vintage Valentine - Esty Treasury Monday

This is my own Etsy Treasury Monday, it will become a regular feature here. Why? Well, I've made this treasury for a while now, but every time I check, it never drop below the magic no. 333. This no. feels like 666, sort of devilish. I even timed the availability and tried to get in, but I'm not good at being swift and fast.

The thing about etsy is that, it sort of make things kind hard for people who use their regular hours do regular things, like writing here or thinking and designing about my next line. I don't have time to lurk around the treasury to wait for it drop below the magic no. Let alone that I'm running on a different time zone.

Anyway, enough rant.

This week's Yellowgoat Treasury is Be My Vintage Valentine. Pink is never my color, but since Valentine's day is just around the corner, I decided to give you something kind of vibrant and pink, yup, I surpised myself too.

Click on the image to take you to the products. I know this may not generate as much traffic for the sellers, but any little traffic helps.

Photo inspiration - one blue wren

I've been admiring one blue wren's photostream for a while. Saw these bright yellow card and bowl and love them very much. Visit her blog for more.

Sunday sewing project

We were planning to go out this weekend, the weather is absolutely nice and there's this local art fair thing that we wanted to go, but my other half's ankle got some sort of inflammatory infection, and he woke up Sat a cripple. So we ended up staying home, and he decided to make a pant with the denim fabric he picked last week.

It actually turn out pretty good, and I always thought making pants are very very hard, because with a few exception every time the designers had to do pants in Project Runway, all kind of ugly stuff happened.

I made the print with some fabric ink using my Objectication line vintage spectacle silhouette. I was so inspired by the Lina Corwin book, I think I will do some more printing projects later on, if only I can get hold of the Freezer paper. The contact paper on fabric is not sealed completely, it caused some bleeds.

Paper Doll Frida & The Wrestler

English is already my second language, so I don't understand German or Spanish. If anything I write about these paper doll is incorrect, please do let me know.

I found these very cute paper doll on DaWanda yesterday, the shop is called White Monkey, but it's in German, so I can't tell you anything about the owner either, but I love how it use Frida and the Mexican mask wrestler as the subject.

Paper Magnific

You may already know paper is one of my obsession if you frequent your visit here. Peter Callesen is one of those paper art that's just magnificent. I can't think of other words other than WOW.....with my mouth wide open.

A blank piece of paper always scares me, because of its possibility.

found via Design Boom

Abstract color

I'm kind of inspired by leelaford's abstract drawing & painting. I like how she mix all the color together but all with a just a slight bit of muted tone. Having one of these hang on my wall would be kind of nice. I don't like things being too explicit, like wordy sort of poster, but this I love. Visit her blog for more.

Daily find

Love these new porcelain minis from Ashley and Drew's etsy store. Especially the top right one, it looks like me, my head is really a big round balloon with a little cone as my chin.

I'm in dire need of a hair cut to restore my bob hair. With my current financial status, I'm trying to find a cheaper "stylist", so I don't know where to go. I once cut my own hair, when I was a cashless student, the result was, "wow, I can't believe you cut your own hair" with a evil laugh from all my friends...

found via inside a Black Apple

Beloved Design

Nice cute paper accessories and motif card from Japan called Beloved Design.

Hisano Takei

Love. Especially on a cold week like this week. The chunky accessories trend is one of the few trend that I actually like and would so want to wear.

by Hisano Takei

Eiffel Tower and Mammoth

I was reading about Rachel of Black*Eiffel's post about the Urban Outfitter DIY Eiffel Tower, and I was like, wait, I have one, but not from Urban Outfitter. Even the UO one seems cheap, I remember I got mine for half the price and the one I have actually has more details (more holes and stuff). You probably can get it at some toy or art stores. I love browsing those neighborhood toy or art supply stores, there's always something nice and surprising waiting for me in the hidden corners.

And if you like this kind of self assemble toy, I also recommend the Mammoth from Muji. It did take me some time to get the all the pieces together, (one should never disassemble all pieces at once with over excitement...) but I don't know if they still carry it, I brought it last last Christmas.

For a while I wanted this, but I couldn't quite justify the price. My coworker once suggested we could make our own, but that never happened.

Tulle Obsession

Ever since I got married and tucked away my wedding dress, I've been thinking about doing something with tulle. When I was in the fabric store Sat, this woman brought a brunch of black tulle, so I couldn't help but brought myself some yards of white tulle also.

I thought I will make a tutu like short skirt for me, but then it seems too "in fashion" now, I see "trendy" young things flaunting them all around the places, so now I'm stuck, I don't want to look as if I desperately try to belong.

I love the Barbara i Gongini's SS09 collection (bottom right), may be I should think of something like a top, but then, I need to master the skill of how to make a top first. Then I remember Design Mom has this little tutorial of what she made for her daughter (top picture). I can start from there I guess.

I want this

Ok, I have to admit, I don't know how to handle a two-wheeler. Sigh, it comes from seeing my brother's kneecap bone sticking out of his flesh and my lack of balance and confidence in my body....

But somehow I'm in love with cool looking foldable bicycles, it's strange how I've been checking out the latest models and woo and ah everything I see, not that I can afford to buy one or anything, let alone to ride one. I guess its a fantasy sort of thing, the one thing you don't know how to do, you day dream about doing it.

via Inhabitat

Cute handcrafted stamps

Love the cute handcrafted stamp from sjane. Sheep, lamb and goat are all of my fav.

Little People in London

This may be very old "news" to you, but I only found it out yesterday browsing a bookstore, so it's "new" to me anyway.

Slikachu's Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project now has a book. It's the collection of his photos of his little people project where he put the tiny people and setting on London streets and take photo of them. The set ups are relevant to the real situation.

I like how in his blog, he suggest how we spend our hard-earned cash on his silly frivolity. I nearly did, but I will put his book in wish list first. It makes a nice gift.

My week in review

1. I enhanced an old Tee.
2. I enhanced a new Tee which now became old.
3. I broke a fire king tea cup.
4. I made a cover for the head cushion.
5. I painted my wall for no reason.
6. I painted my IKEA mirror, because it looks boring. I've wanted to do this for 2 years.
7. I wrote 14 blog posts, this is the 15th one.

Nothing much, but small things that makes me happy. What did you do for the past week?

Hello homemade pancake Sat Morning

These blueberries pancakes are awesome. :D I love Sat morning large breakfast. Happy Weekend.

Ingredients:

1 1/4 cup of wholewheat flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of salt
2 Tablespoon of oil
1 1/4 cup of soy milk
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract (I prefer non alcoholic)
2 Tablespoons of maple syrup
1 cup blueberries

Cook:
Mix dry ingredients, then the wet, mix well, if you have time you can sift the flour, I didn't, but it turn out ok, I keep my whole wheat flour in the freezer to prevent lumping.

Fold in blueberries

Scoop the mixture on to a preheated non sticky pan, use medium heat, spray oil. (My spray ran out, so I pour little bit oil, use a paper towel to spread it even) Cook until golden brown on both side.

Serve with maple syrup, my husband added the little bit of organic butter for his. And he requested the boiled eggs.

This is absolutely quick and easy.

And I love to use the FireKing plates for special weekend meals.

Adapted from Veganomicon

Resolution

It's never to late to start new. I've been hitting some rug and I blame myself, and the evil Internet.
I've been sitting in front of my laptop too much, now that my butt is growing and in pain...

So my resolution of the coming months are:
1. Cut back the Internet. For at least 1 day per week just do whatever I love to do at the moment.
2. Take shower before anything, because by afternoon, like right now, I feel I smell.
3. Go out.
4. Don't eat take out.
5. Go to the gym.
6. Get some me time.

All of the above is not too ambitious because the easier I set the goals, the more likely I can achieve them, sounds like the underachiever secretly living in me :P.

Painting Love

 
I should really pick up my old art supply and start drawing. I forgot how I once love it so much, not that I draw or paint well. I just love how Dilkabear has such female sensitivity to her painting while has the off beat kind of style. It serves so well for my inspiration of the day.


Dilkabear's etsy shop.

Nice

Nice work by Pen and Paper.

Polaroid

I've been looking at all the lovely Polaroid photos on Flickr and I really want to buy a Polaroid camera for myself. I used to have one when I was a little kid, but when the film that came with the box ran out (which was only a few), I couldn't afford to buy more films (When I was a kid, I was only into buying snack food, so all my money went into my mouth and consequently down the toilet).

This will be a cool way to use it. I should check out ebay.

photo by Marc Brubaker

Still Dreaming...

Yes I do. A lovely small set of photos by Yvette Inufio.

Old Socks

I forgot about I starred these yesterday. Turning old socks and sheets into interesting crafty arts.

Neta Amir from Tel Aviv, Israel

Garbage

No no, not the band. Just when I was telling people on Twitter how I'm feeling utterly uninspired lately partly because I'm on cold meds, I found this. I just love designs that turn one thing into another thing, it's the big trend right now. I just read this post about how MMM made a bracelet based on hospital tags (honestly I don't quite like hospital tags), but I love the Garbage lighting by Gilles Eichenbaum much more, pardon my lack of French, I think that's his name. It just really use the objects, and make them something great. Not to mention they are vintage objects. I love the Mercedes Grille, remind me of the family car in the 80s. Now I want to raid the garbage dump right next to my apartment building. I heard it has the smelliest bathroom. If you smell something over the Internet, that should be me.


via NABE Fabric

Do it yourself Wedding - 01 - Photo

I've said that I'm going to do sort of a wedding series about my wedding, and it just so happen Joanna of A cup of Jo's gorgeous engagement photos is now making the round in the blogosphere. She's so lucky that she employed Max Wanger's exceptional talent for her photos, and the outcome couldn't be more delightful and lovely.

So after sitting with my google reader for the whole morning, I've decided to just talk about myself instead. So self-centered...that's the reason I'm kind of hesitated to do this post, but after reading the debacle of Anna at Door Sixteen with her Homies Award incident, I've decided to be carefree and just write about what I want to write.

Anyway, I have to say, we love our wedding photos, and mostly because we lived it, and shot the photos ourselves. We didn't have the "resource" to hire a very good photographer, we've quoted a couple ones in Greece, honestly, their portfolio wasn't what we were looking for, but they're based in Greece, and we thought that'd be cheaper, but it was August, when the Euro was at it's all time high, and we figure, with the money we're paying for a photographer, we can buy ourselves a good camera (and then some), and take as much photos as we pleased and that's what we did.

After we came back from our honeymoon, people had been asking who took the photo for us, and they're all kind of in awe that we did it all by ourselves. The funny thing is, before we decided to buy a camera, my husband, the main photographer of our "shoot", has no concept of how to take photos but he did have concept of what kind photo he'd like to be in. That's a good start.

Based on our experience, I've come up with a couple tips for people, for any reason, planning to take your own wedding pictures:

1. Invest on a DSLR. Ok, not that having a DSLR automatically means you can take good pictures, but it gives you the flexibility and the most important thing, a good depth of view. The lower end digital camera usually come out with a flat picture, because the foreground and and background are all equally sharp, a DSLR, with a good lens and some learned techniques, can give your photos more depth.

2. Learn your DSLR. No matter what kind of equipment you get, you need to learn it. We did a lots of trial runs before we actually went to Greece for the real thing. The trail runs are for learning different lighting situation and how you adjust the settings with your camera to get a good picture(we specifically went to a place with many white house on a sunny day to simulate what would happen in Greece).

3. Use continuous shots. We don't really like the very posed photo, which probably you get from some photographers. They will tell you to pose this and pose that, and all you end up with is a series of photos that sort of look like you, but somehow something's off...For most of the photos we took, we move in front of the camera, and take a long series of photo, then pick the good ones, so that we make sure we're in motion, and doesn't look very stiff. It doesn't matter that some of them is blurred, technically correct doesn't equal aesthetically pleasing, play with it, you will find it very interesting.

4. Bring a tripod. We only had the both of us, so without the tripod, we can't take pictures of both of us. Make sure you learn how to focus with the tripod and a moving subject. (We didn't, and that wasted quite some time for us. Lesson learned.)

5. Spread out the time. We took pictures in several different days during our trip, so that we can get different location background. Besides, taking picture is a very tiring thing. Lots people do a whole long day shot, by the end of the day, with the most beautiful lighting of sunset, you may already look like you need to get to bed. That wouldn't be a good thing if you plan to retouch your own photo later on.

6. Practice. Practice makes perfect. If you're not a model by trade, you may need to practice your good angle and your smile, but don't practice too much, or else it will look kind of fake. Don't practice in front of a mirror though, practice in front of the camera. It's very different thing. What you see in a mirror is what you want to see. If you practice in front of a camera, it will be just like the real thing, and you know how your pose and smile is taken by the lens.

The good thing about having your husband as the photographer is that I can tell him directly, this is not what I want, let's try something else or I don't like this angle, let's do it like this. He knows me, he know my face, how I look like. To hire a stranger to take your photo, you do run the risk of they look at you very differently then you want yourself to be portrayed. On my wedding registration day, we did hire a photographer to take our photo, because we really can't do that on our own, the results turn out good, but not great, because he keep using low angle, which didn't play in my favor, but in the midst of a wedding, you can't really say, hey, photographer, I don't like you to take low angle picture of me. The people who've seen both sets of the photo, like the one we took for ourselves much better.

7. The most important thing of all: BE HAPPY. I've seen many stressed out bride, too much into perfection. To us, we treated it as a fun project. I'm the art director, he's the photographer. We had fun, and we were really having the time of our life, that, is what really matters. Being perfect doesn't make me happy, enjoy what I do, makes sweet memories.

Would you wear it?

Usually I share with you things I definitely would like for myself. I'm not so sure about the above. A Tee that makes you appear to have dark hairy armpit....I don't think I would want to buy it, but the reason I post this because I was kind of intrigued by how some design went with some strange directions. It gave me a chuckle and I asked my husband to look but I don't think I want to fork out €29 to buy it. Will you?

Besides, if you like this idea, you can definitely do it yourself, and with more realistic results:

Material:
1. A fitted white tee.
2. Some black threads.

What to do?
Cut up the black threads and bunch them together, sew it on the armpit area of the white tee. Let the thread hang out. Viola. Probably takes you 5 mins.

What I did with the IKEA fabric

A couple posts down I told you about my cheap IKEA fabric. This is how I use part of it. We got this head resting cushion from a friend, but it didn't come with a cover. A light bulb radiated on top of my head, the rest was just some simple cutting and sewing. I didn't have zipper with me, so I left it half open on the bottom edge.

It's my first time working with a pattern...so I forgot to match the pattern on the seams . Oh well, you learn new things everyday.

Logo Tee

I'm too lazy to take out the big camera, so pardon my phone camera quality. Sometimes I like how my phone pictures turn out. It actually require less tweaking and my image editing software is acting über weird lately because I think I messed with some color settings mindlessly, now i can't command it to work normal for me.

Back to the tee, it's yellow felt on grey jersey tee. I had to "force" my husband to wear it. I told him I wanted to make just a small goat on the right chest, he said it's too logoish, so I made it a full A4 size, to "appear" as a graphic, but he ended up saying how he is a walking BIG logo...sigh..hard to please this guy. He even asked me if the goat can be white!!! Really? Did you marry to Ms. WhiteGoat I asked? What was he thinking????? I even tried to make him feel better by telling him yellow is the new black, Mimosa to be exact, but he just wouldn't have any of that...sigh more.

Anyway, I like how the tee turned out, regardless what that person sitting right beside me thinks. -_-

IKEA find

Of course, not the rocker, nor the vintage suitcase, but the fabric. We went to our local Spotlight yesterday, and find the price too crazily mark up, because we know we can get the same thing for much cheaper on Fabric street (Ki Lung Street) in Sham Shiu Po. We passed the nearby IKEA, we just thought we want to go in and walk around a bit then we found this fabric is for HKD19.9 per meter which is quite surprising, because usually the IKEA fabric costs around HKD50ish to 80ish.

As the Chinese saying goes "Cheap goods compete with the Poor", we couldn't help but brought 1m home. Now, what should I do with this out of print fabric? I'm thinking a tote bag or cushion covers.

Play

Not that I know how to play Chess, but if someone is willing to send me this set, I'm willing to learn.

via Mid-Century Modernist