My First Printable: The Trouble With Reincats!

I ran into a roadblock with my current sewing project -- the fabric marker that I planned to use turns out to be not quite laundry-safe. I did a test run with the marker on the same fabric that I intended to use it on, heat set it, then washed it in cold water. The black of the marker itself didn't fade, but it did bleed a faint yellow outline around each stroke. Not quite what I intended for my graphic black and white dress! Time to find another brand of fabric marker.

See the yellow around his mouth and paws? (This is not the printable.)

In the meantime, I decided to take a break from sewing and get back into a little drawing. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy doodling until Elaine asked me to draw something for her and her fiance's anniversary. Anyway, I had so much fun with that I decided to do another full-scale illustration, this time Christmas themed! I know, I know, it's still too early for Christmas since Thanksgiving isn't even over yet (although Jo-Ann's and Target don't seem to realize that), but this just popped into my mind this afternoon in the middle of doing laundry and demanded to be drawn. I drew a couple of preliminary sketches on a Post-It, then drew and colored the actual thing in about an hour. I think that's a record for me. I didn't even use pencil first! I used a normal cheapo black pen we had lying around for the line art, then colored it with my precious Copic and Tombow markers. That was a challenge, since those markers are expensive and I only own eight colors total between the two brands. I bought all the Copics back in 2002 when I went through a manga-drawing phase, and it's remarkable that they've lasted this long. But enough blathering on, here it is:

I have no idea what actual sleigh harness is supposed to look like, and I couldn't be bothered to look it up.

It was inspired by Walnut and how my husband is always commenting how useless of a cat he is (facetiously, of course, we don't expect anything out of Walnut other than cuteness). We're always jokingly assigning him chores (not letting any ants into the apartment is his main responsibility), which of course he doesn't do. I don't know how I got from our useless cat to what if Santa's sled was pulled by reincats (like reindeer, but cats), but so goes inspiration, I guess. All the cats' poses are totally based on Walnut's actual lounging positions.

Feel free to use as random Christmas art, on Christmas cards, or as a computer desktop background. Or you can print it out and laugh at my feeble attempt at illustration and pin it up and throw darts at all the cats. And the obvious rule, don't claim it as yours, copy, reproduce, modify, or profit from this in any way. If you post it to your blog or Facebook or whatever, please credit/link back to me...thanks! And now that I've written all that, I feel incredibly silly -- as if anyone would even want this. Do you ever suffer from a simultaneous artist possessiveness and inferiority complex like that?

Download the pdf, the jpeg, or the black & white jpeg here.

The Eric Chan Ice Cream Sandwich Relay Car Rally Improv Extravaganza Birthday Farewell

What a crazy weekend! I feel weird for not having sewn for a week...haha is that bad? That is probably some kind of indication of an addiction of sorts. But I've been having so much fun with my sister visiting, the wedding of two friends from our church, and running my husband's birthday party. Even though there was no sewing, it's still been craft-mania around here. I got recruited into helping out with flowers for the wedding, and my sister kindly agreed to come down to San Diego to help out, since I have no idea what I'm doing.

That took up a good amount of Friday, with a break to go to the Jimmy Eat World concert at the Del Mar racetrack! It was my first time seeing a real concert (the King's Singers at Davies Symphony Hall probably doesn't really count as a "real" concert), complete with crazy jumping up and down, people smoking and drinking all around us (yuck...someone spilled beer on us accidentally), and my ears ringing afterward. But I love JEW, so it was worth it. The wedding took up all of Saturday, what with delivering flowers in the morning, the ceremony, reception, and hanging out afterward. I'll wait to talk about the flowers until I have the official photographer pictures.

On Sunday, my husband and I threw his belated birthday party -- a combo of an obstacle course relay and car rally/scavenger hunt, ending with an improv show -- which involved my big project of the week, a Ticket to Ride-themed program. By my husband's request, I was going for a loosely vintage, generally old-timey, slightly steampunk look. I had so much fun finding appropriate fonts and graphics and putting it all together.

We started out at a local park after lunch, where the teams met for the ice cream eating and obstacle course relay portion. Since we were awarding bonus points for coordinated outfits, some teams went all out.

This team was hardcore.

For the car rally portion, teams were given the booklets I put together, which listed several locations in San Diego that were important to my husband. At each location, teams had to perform a task and take a picture to document it.

Just like in Ticket to Ride, teams could choose whether they wanted to go for the "big ticket" items, which were all pretty far away, or easier tasks that had smaller point values. They got bonuses for completed tickets, and if they located us during the afternoon they got wild cards that were good for one task. The whole thing was dreamed up and put together by my brilliant husband, who, as one friend put it, definitely has the non-Biblical, but still important, gift of making things fun. I loved seeing all our friends enjoy themselves (and get ultra-competitive) trekking around San Diego. We ended the night with an improv show put on by another of his brainchilds (brainchildren?), the improv comedy troupe Still Improv-ing.

This was the perfect way to send ourselves off to LA as well, since now we have pictures of all our friends at our favorite San Diego memories!

Playing at Being a Graphic Designer

Going off of yesterday's post, I often wonder what my life would be like if, instead of choosing the approved-by-Chinese-parents path of being a science major, I opted instead for something like, say, graphic design. Or costume design. Not that I knew, ten years ago, that I loved these things. Actually, I still don't know if I love these things. After all, I have no idea what a real designer's life is like. I just pretend to be one when the opportunity arises, like last year, when I made my own wedding invitations.

Making maps was so easy with this strategy.

I found this graphic of a couple doing chemistry, which I changed to look like us, in our colors, for our thank you cards.

I really enjoy coming up with a theme and then designing paper goods to match. Even when I was teaching at my first school, some of the projects I was most proud of were the AP Chem, Chemistry, and Biology lab manuals that I wrote. There's a weird pleasure that comes from compiling the best labs for student learning, designing the appropriate diagrams, and putting in thorough appendices.

Anyway, for the last couple of days I've been prepping like mad for my husband's combination birthday and farewell to San Diego party. If you've ever played the Days of Wonder's amazing board game, Ticket to Ride, you know that it is a fantastically fun game -- accessible to all ages, different every time, educational -- that has beautiful graphics. Set at the turn of the 20th century, with a theme of railway travel, it definitely has some steampunk elements. The characters all have an old-timey look, and the borders actually have little gears! This board game is definitely a staple in our marriage (enough so that we named a table at our reception after it); we've had nights where we play five games in a row (it's only about 20 minutes a game with only two players)! So when my husband announced that he wanted a Ticket to Ride-themed event, with a car rally/scavenger hunt to mimic building trains to connect locations, I got super excited about designing the program/booklet that gives people their tasks.  I've been working on it for the last couple of days, and it's coming along swimmingly. It's not quite period-accurate, but it all has that historical feel. I can't wait to have these printed up and handed out to everyone on Sunday! I'm pretty sure most people won't be as excited about or even notice the details that I put in, or how everything coordinates, but it makes me happy inside to know they're there.