little dear

Our latest! Your little one would look so dear in this shirt!

xo
andrea

cupcakes & bangs

Jette got a hair cut. Up until now her hair has been all one length. Actually, I think that her grandma cut bangs on her when she was just about a year but since she didn't have much hair to begin with it wasn't so dramatic. She looks like a little lady to me now! It's cute. It's just hard to get used to!


I was home alone over the weekend while Chad was in Ilinois visiting his family with the kids. I got a lot accomplished around the house and did a little bit of crafting, too. The one fun new thing that i made is these cupcake cards. They're printed with metallic gold ink and adorned with little cut out hearts. I made them in the wee hours of the morning when all of my best work is done. I really like how they turned out. The shimmery ink is hard to see in these photos but it's very pretty!


I am off work for a few days this week. We have friends from out of town visiting for a few days so we will just be spending a few mellow days with them. Hope this slightly warmer weather sticks around for awhile!

Have a great week!

printing printing printing

Some new goodies we made this week! Robots and owls for the little ones. I foresee a heat setting party in the near future.

Stuff I've made lately.

1. Triple Berry Cobbler. Recipe HERE. I used raspberries, blackberries , strawberries.

T-shirts Gocco Printed using my 6 year old nephews design. He cut the little heart shape with a spiral cut into it all on his own. It was so adorable that my sister-in-law decided to turn the design into shirts! We had a fun night printing. Love how they turned out.

More food! Puffy Oven Pancakes, also known as panakuken.

I made the apple variation:

2 Tbsp butter
2 large eggs
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup milk
1/4 tsp salt
lemon juice and powdered sugar

1.heat oven to 400. melt butter in pie plate in oven and brush butter on side of pie plate.

2. Sprinkle 2 tbsp packed brown sugar and 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon evenly over melted butter in pie plate. Arrange 1 cup thinly sliced peeled baking apples (1 medium) over the sugar.

3. beat eggs slightly in medium bowl w/ wire whisk. Beat in remaining ingredients except lemon juice/powdered sugar.

4. Pour batter over apples. Bake 30-35 minutes. Immediately loosen edge of pancake and turn upside down onto heatproof serving plate.

Serve immediately sprinkled with lemon juice and powdered sugar if desired.

---or omit step 2 and cut baking time by 5-10 minutes to make this without apples

a whole lot of printing.

I spent a few hours printing like crazy today.

First I finished up a small batch of adult VIVA LA VINYL t-shirts. We sold almost completely out of them after our last couple of shows and needed to restock. While I was at it I decided to print some hoodies that I had been holding on to for ages. I just wanted to have fun with it and decided to give these a fun, messy, mixed up look. It feels a little bit like graffiti and a little bit like a kid made it by themselves. I'm really happy with how these turned out!























Next I printed some RAD DAD t-shirts. I have had several requests for these and since I had some shirts on hand I decided to make a few for upcoming shows. These are also listed in my etsy shop.

















Early in the day I was waiting on the mail in hopes that the gocco ink I ordered would arrive today. It never came so I didn't finish all of the bibs I planned to print. I did make these cupcake bibs, though:






















and I'll be printing another batch of owls later this week when the ink arrives. I also hope to find time to print more tote bags before the weekend. The question is: can I heat set ALL of this stuff by Saturday morning? Ha!

Oh! So even though I didn't get my gocco supplies in the mail it was still a super exciting mail day. I received a package stuffed full of goodies from Bare Tree. They sent some seriously awesome items for the WIST Trunk Show swag bags. You're not going to want to miss out! Mark your calendars for December 13 and come early!

Well, I'm exhausted. It's back to my day job tomorrow but I know I'm going to have some late nights between now and then. I'm so excited for all of the shows coming up! If only I had it in me to plan better. I have just never been much of a planner. I don't know how all of you organized crafty ladies do it. Kudos to you!

xo
andrea

what's new?

I have a few new things in my shop this week. First, I listed some fun Star Wars and super hero pins














I am lucky to have lots of comic scraps left and plan to make lots more of the smaller pins, magnets and maybe some bigger magnets and mirrors for upcoming shows.

I also decided to print more owl-iday cards this year since they seemed to be pretty popular last year. I cleaned up the image and revamped the text just a bit to give it a slightly different look than last year. I'm happy with how the cards turned out.



















Well, we are leaving town and will be gone for a few days. Enjoy your halloween and the last gasp of autumn!

xo
andrea

a whole lot of cupcakes.

Last night I decided to use up my brown gocco ink to print a few random blank onesies I had in my bin of supplies. I printed the 3 onesies and still had some ink so I decided to print on one of my favorite shirts. And then on the pocket of a sweatshirt...and then I started digging through my laundry to find more things to print cupcakes on. Luckily I ran out of ink, or I'm afraid that pretty much all of my wardrobe would have been adorned with chocolate brown cupcakes. Once I start printing it's hard to stop. I'll often dig through the kids' dresser drawers to find anything blank that I can print for them. Am I the only one who does this? Ha! I start thinking...would my son like a cupcake shirt? Could I use cupcake dish towels? Eventually I either run out of material or out of ink, thank goodness.

It's too early and I am already feeling like it's going to be "one of those days."

Blah.

The Cupcake Tote!

I hope you all had a lovely weekend! Mine was busy as usual. Guess what? I have a new tote bag design ready to reveal!

Introducing....

The Cupcake Tote:























This is another one that has been stuck in my head for a long time! The cupcake tote comes in light pink or light blue and includes removable cherries (pinback buttons.) The buttons are made from all kinds of papers including french text (a favorite of mine), pretty wrapping papers, fabrics, etc. - so each cupcake tote will be unique.

This bag has already got me wanting to frequent the bakery more...yes, I am seriously that impressionable.

We have two shows coming up in MN this weekend! I'm super excited and will post more about them in the next day or two!

Hope your day is the sweetest!

I'M TOTALLY INTO_______RIGHT NOW

It's been a crazy week!

Geek.kon was fun but super exhausting. I was definitely ready to come home and relax on Sunday! I am working on a lot of random projects this week and trying to get enough inventory ready for the two shows in MN next weekend. Of course my kids have not been in the mood to play quietly while mommy gets stuff done in the evenings! Chad started a part time job and so far it's been totally fine. We still have a few nights a week together and they are being super flexible when he needs weekends off for shows.

Jette has been totally into hats this week. When she doesn't have a hat to wear she is totally whining MY HAAAT!






















It's so annoying and cute. You know, like cute little kid annoying. :)

And then there is this:













































These totes are the new item that I was super excited about last week! I gocco printed the text and the idea is that you can change out a text button (BIG 3" buttons!) whenever you feel like it. I'm going to be selling packs of buttons in sets of 5 - right now the only listing I have is for a CUSTOM set but I plan to put together fun themed packs. New phrases coming soon! You can look at the bags more closely HERE in my etsy shop.

Also I have to tell you that the 'gnomes' pin was a huge hit at geek.kon. I never knew that gnomes had such wide appeal!

Have a lovely day!

busy busy busy + a WINNER!

Congrats theresaj! You are the lucky winner of the geeky goodies giveaway! Thanks to everyone who entered. It was totally fun to hear about all of your favorite robots.

Lars is four years old today. I took the day off thinking that we'd go to breakfast and maybe a movie (we've been wanting to do a movie for like 2 weeks and it hasn't worked out) but sadly I don't think we'll have time to do much more than breakfast. I have 2 big custom button orders, a show to prepare for this weekend, and several other projects in the works that are time sensitive. When it rains it pours! I'm happy to have lots of work and lots of things to keep me busy. It's just funny how it always works this way, isn't it? Plus Chad went to sleep with a headache and woke up with an even worse headache. NO FUN! I hope he's back to 100% soon so we can both get to work.

I'm off to get started on my gocco. Here is what I hope to accomplish today in the world of craft
(maybe writing it down will help me get organized?!)::::

print dragon bags for geek.kon
package pins
finish one of the custom button orders
work on craftacular flyer design
start printing one other bag design (the one that I was talking about earlier this week that involves kittens and gnomes, ha!)

But in all honesty, if I get even half of those things half finished it'll be a good day.

Tomorrow is going to be all about the heat setting. Ugh. My least favorite part about gocco printing.

I will leave you with this cute owl man that I found while thrifting recently. He's found a home on top of our (again) broken record player for the time being.























ok have a lovely day everyone!

fall shows, to-do lists, stuff

Look, a new mirror!


french text mirror
Originally uploaded by space oddities

I can't believe it's already Thursday! The week has flown by. This week at work I've decided to force myself to be severely cheerful. To my surprise, it's really working and is making my days go faster and things generally more pleasant. Not that my work isn't generally pleasant...it's just that lately there are a lot of times when I'd just rather be home with my family, you know? It's funny how the pretending to be in a good mood can work. I'm really in a good mood. But...well, it's 3 a.m. and we'll see how I feel at six when I get up to go to work again. Ha!

Today I made a massive list of things to do to prepare Space Oddities for upcoming fall shows (see the list on the top left for Fall Shows!) and the upcoming holiday season online and in brick & mortar shops. It turns out I have a LOT to do! One thing I have to do a lot of is packaging. I have a ton of pin and magnet sets and mirrors ready but need to make them look pretty and and finished. I've started to cut paper in bulk which makes things faster, and have realized that I should probably begin to print my labels instead of hand stamping them all due to the time it takes. But I really love the hand stamped look even if it's NOT so perfect and polished. So I think at least for now I'm sticking to it.

I'm excited for our non-eventful weekend. I'm hoping we can just hang out at home, maybe go to the market on Saturday, and spend some time crafting! I just ordered a batch of new tote bags to print on and just maaaybe I'll get them in time to bust out the gocco and print this weekend. Fingers crossed!

viva la vinyl!

A new design!
















We love playing records and recently had our turntable fixed up after being out of commission for awhile. Well actually...it's already broken again but hopefully it's a quick fix. So anyway...we were totally inspired to make a fun design showing our love for vinyl! I made adult shirts with black and yellow ink on brown, a few onesies, and a small batch of bibs. These items will be added to my etsy shop this week.

olive oil & gocco

Olive oil is magical. Tonight I found out that instead of wasting money buying expensive gocco screen cleaner, I can just use olive oil. It seriously works just as well, probably better. Many months ago someone suggested this online and it sounded to weird to me. I wish I could remember who/where this suggestion came from so I could thank them but I just don't remember. If it was you: thank you!! You've saved me time, money and screens.

whoa!

Another long night of more gocco experiments at space oddities headquarters ended with the following results:

gocco:::what I learned

I am pretty new to gocco printing and burned some new screens to try printing onto fabric for the first time tonight. I am learning a lot with every new gocco project. Tonight was no exception!













Here is what I learned tonight:::

When burning screens:
*do NOT put any sort of tape behind the image you are burning. i used double sided tape to adhere several small images to a piece of paper intending to burn the screen that way. well the tape showed through the image when i burned the screen! weird.

*in my opinion for the best results, don't expose the screen for too long. i have already found that shorter time (2-3 seconds) results in a better screen than if I expose the screen longer (4-6 seconds - bad bad!)


When printing on fabric:
*use more ink than you think you need. re-ink often.
*do several tests before the real thing.
*don't give up
*the sixth times the charm!

I printed 17 tote bags and a onesie for my daughter. 12 of the bags turned out pretty darn good and 5 are well, not as good. I am not sure what to do with the poor imperfect owls! Well anyway I figure this isn't so bad for my first time. I have 3 more designs I am hoping to crank out of the gocco in the next few weeks. Wish me luck!

Go Gocco!

I am anxiously awaiting my birthday present.















My husband and I decided to go with the smaller, less expensive model when we realized that the only model available at paper source is $395 and probably much larger than we really need for our printing purposes. I am so excited to collaborate with my husband with gocco printing. He is the idea man and is also such a talented artist. I want him to get drawing NOW so we can have some new designs ready to get going right away!

I need to get a LOT done before Renegade so it's time to get busy. Lately I have been falling asleep super early when my kids go to bed, waking up at midnight-ish and either going back to sleep or staying up for a couple more hours to try to work on something. But instead of working on something productive I end up just surfing online or doing things that I HAVE to do like dishes or laundry (not that it's not productive, just not what I want to be doing.) Ugh. I really need to get on some sort of schedule and crank out the craft!

I'm hoping the gocco will be a bit of a source of new inspiration. I also need to start drinking more COFFEE.

xo
andrea