05 January 2010

Spoonflower's for the birds, thankfully



Kim Fraser and the gang at Spoonflower have managed to combine two of my favorite topics in a Fabric of the Week contest on their site this week. Those two topics are mass customization and birds in case you were wondering.

Spoonflower prints small-lot custom fabrics and I wrote about them quite a bit last summer. 2010 will mark their second year in business and I'm sure that anybody up there will tell you that the last two years have been one heckuva ride. Business has exploded for them and how could it not? Spoonflower allows anybody with a computer to design and have manufactured fabrics for use in home accessories or sewing with no minimums. It's incredible really and in the time that they've been doing their thing, they've built up a vibrant community around their company and the fabrics they produce.

One of the ways they build community is through a weekly Fabric of the Week contest. Every week, they pick a subject and hold a design contest based on that subject. They announce these contests through Spoonflower's blog and you can find it here. Voting ended yesterday for their Mythical Creatures contest and voting starts today on the subject of birds.

Spoonflower's contests highlight some amazing fabrics and some real talent. Most of the designers who enter every week are not professionals, rather they are regular folks with a passion for fabric design. What's cooler still is that you can buy any of the fabrics that catch your eye.

Paying attention to Spoonflower's Fabric of the Week contests is a great way to spend some time around some seriously creative people and it's a good way to keep an eye out for fabrics to turn into throw pillows, window treatments or anything else you can think of. Check it out!

In the meantime, here are some of the fabrics from the Birds contest that have caught my eye so far. What do you think?


Caroline Blue

Caroline Blue by Giltgoods

This one's for Melody McFarland:


A Parade of Pigeons, Yellow

A Parade of Pigeons --Yellow by Charclam


westernmeadowlark

Western Meadowlark by Nightgarden


Bird on a Wire, yellow

Bird on a Wire by Nalo Hopkinson


Brick Bird

Brick Bird by Nalo Hopkinson


Caroline - Fern Colorway

Caroline Fern by Giltgoods


Birds

Birds by Lydia Meiying


Cardinal

Cardinal by Aimee Elizabeth


birdslovesky

birdlovesky by Kim Lennox

And remember, they are just some designs that caught my eye. Believe me, there are plenty more. Hats off to everyone who enters Spoonflower's contests while I'm at it. Anybody who engages in this kind of self-expression's OK in my book and to do so in public elevates them to nearly heroic status. Bravi! And on behalf of creatives everywhere I'd like to thank Spoonflower for opening up such a great space and allowing people to do their thing.

04 January 2010

Ellen Blakeley's shattered glass mosaics

Yesterday, I wrote about Ellen Blakeley's amazing mosaic composition Meredith that won Mosaic Art Now's Best in Show juried competition for 2010. For Meredith, Ellen took shattered glass and applied it as a mosaic to a section of live oak bark.



With Ellen's skillful hand and practiced eye, that piece of bark appears to be iced over with a subtly-colored frost straight out of Lewis Carroll. That piece is at once Alice's looking glass and at the same time it's the glorification of what it is to be a tree.

Ellen Blakeley started working with shattered glass mosaics in the '90s. She was walking down a street near her home in San Francisco when she came upon a vandalized bus shelter. Somebody had shot out the safety glass window of a bus shelter with a BB gun and the shards lay sparkling on the sidewalk. She picked up a handful of the glass pieces and with a little consideration she found a new direction for her art. From a vandal's careless destruction on a San Francisco sidewalk, a body of beautiful work was born.

Ellen Blakeley makes show-stopping fine art mosaics, that much is true. Her work's also available in custom colors, shapes and sheets for use in homes and commercial spaces. You can buy her work through a network of tile showrooms nationwide and they are listed on her website here.

What follows is a series of images from Blakeley's current collection. Imagine how some of these patterns would look as a back splash, a wall or a fireplace surround. My mind reels from this stuff.

























What an amazing and original idea these patterns represent. Any part of this collection would add depth and a story to a lot of the projects I work on. You know, sometimes you just need a little of that Looking Glass mystique. You can see more of Ellen Blakeley's collections on her website. Go take a look and let me know what you think.

03 January 2010

Mosaic Art Now releases results for 2010's Exhibition in Print



Mosaic Art Now is an organization dedicated to the promotion, understanding and appreciation of contemporary mosaic art. They maintain a lively web presence and produce a series of publications to meet those ends. Without fail, they deliver provocative and inspirational content for artists, aficionados, curators, architects, designers, collectors and educators. They are also an organization very near and dear to my heart.



Every year, Mosaic Art Now publishes an annual exhibition in print called, fittingly enough, Mosaic Art Now. The 2010 issue is currently in production and will be available in mid-February of this year. The 2010 edition promises to be nearly double the size of last year's 76 pages and for the first time in MAN's history, will feature the results of their juried, international Best in Show competition. The call for entries went out in August, 2009 and 301 artists from 25 countries submitted their art for consideration.

The competition was curated by Scott Shields, PhD; the chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA. Shields evaluated the 525 individual works of art submitted and selected the 18 finalists whose work will appear in the juries section of MAN's 2010 exhibition in print. Out of those 18, Shields awarded the title Best in Show to artist Ellen Blakeley for her three-dimensional piece "Meredith."



For "Meredith," Blakely attached shattered safety glass to a section of live oak bark. She used various surface treatments on the work to achieve the subtle, soothing effect shown here. Blakeley celebrates the natural, earthy essence of her substrate without disguising it. In treating her materials with a quiet respect, she elevates and enhances what would have been discarded under ordinary circumstances. "Meredith" reminds me that every day, I'm surrounded by miraculous and beautiful objects and all I have to do it pay attention to see them. Brava!

If you're interested in the world of contemporary fine art mosaic I encourage you to pre-order a copy of MAN's 2010 annual publication now in anticipation of its 18 February release. I will post more information as soon as it hits the stands. Buy one for the art of course and as a bonus you'll get a feature story written by yours truly. In the meantime, the previous editions of MAN's art annual and their other publications are available now through their website. You can also follow the regularly updated MAN blog and Facebook fan page.

02 January 2010

The People's Choice Awards



So I went through my 2009 archives and pulled out some of what I call my crowning achievements as a blogger. Those columns ran on Wednesday and Friday if you want a refresher.

One of the reasons I like Google Analytics so much is that is delivers the sometimes unwelcome news that the posts I like aren't best aren't usually the posts that drive traffic to this site. So according to Google Analytics, my top ten posts from 2009 are:


  1. Paint That Porch Roof Haint Blue
  2. Here's an Awful Kitchen
  3. Christopher Peacock's Back
  4. Don't Do This
  5. Behold the Power of the Blogosphere
  6. A Christopher Peacock Follow Up
  7. Meet the Frigidaire Flair
  8. Caveat Emptor: Ikea Sells Appliances
  9. New Ravenna Defines the Term Mosaic
  10. Of Spiders and Silk


Paint That Porch Roof Haint Blue won by a large margin, and I find that really wild. That post also leads the pack so far as stickiness goes. By stickiness I mean the duration of a visit when someone lands on that piece. Readers who find that post stay and read for an average of three minutes and 31 seconds and that's pretty good. Hear that advertisers? Three-and-a-half minutes!

I am just happy that people find this site useful. And with this post I am done indulging in looking back and I'm now ready to start looking forward. Thanks to one and all and happy new year!

01 January 2010

2009's greatest hits, part two

I love it when I get the chance to go all science-y in this blog and I take the opportunity any time it presents itself and sometimes when it doesn't. The basics of chemistry, biology, physics, geology and the rest are not hard to master and understanding the underlying mechanisms of everyday life are the first step in facing the world from a place of knowledge instead of a place of fear.

I have very little tolerance for conventional wisdom that's born of ignorance and scientific illiteracy and one of the bogeymen I enjoy slaying is the cloud of fear that surrounds a little concept called radiation. In June of '09 I wrote a series about radon with the help of Chris Forrest, a physicist from the University of Manchester.



Reader Question: Are My Counters Giving Me a Headache?

That radiation series was a real highlight for me. It is my supreme pleasure to help other non-scientists like me understand how the world works.

I love ancient Roman art and mosaic was an form where they excelled. My appreciation for Roman mosaics sits underneath my passion for mosaics now. In June of last year I wrote a post based on some ancient Roman mosaics that had been unearthed recently in Israel. I'd been alerted to their existence by the great Sara Baldwin of New Ravenna Mosaics.

That mosaic post from June cemented my friendship with Sara and her company and it introduced me to the amazing group behind Mosaic Art Now. Mosaic Art Now has been a real boon to me both within this blog and outside of it. My life's been enhanced immeasurably by my contacts and friendships in the world of contemporary mosaics and I am anxiously awaiting what great doors are waiting to be opened in the new year.



Roman Mosaics Make Me Swoon

Many thanks to the artists who opened up their work and their studios to me and many thanks to my readers for indulging my passion for the things I find there.

If at the beginning of the year you would have told me that I was going to change my pro range brand loyalty from Wolf to GE Monogram I would have called you delusional at best.

Well July found me in a GE test kitchen in Louisville, KY where that exact brand loyalty shift happened. I learned so much from the gang at Monogram not the least of which is that they really know what they're doing. They also host a hell of a training seminar.



I'd Like to Add Some Initials to My Monogram

Big thanks to the whole gang at Monogram.

I got nominated for a 2009 Homie award from Apartment Therapy last week, a development I find toe curlingly hilarious when I stop to think how much mileage I get from ragging on that site. Big thanks to Nim for that nomination.

Anyhow, at some point in July some misinformed but no-doubt well-meaning soul wrote into AT about her unchlorinated, "natural" swimming pool. The irresponsible staff at AT wasted no time praising this hare-brained plan as a "healthy" alternative to yucky chemicals. Never mind that the pool they were praising was a waterborne disease outbreak waiting to happen.



Please Don't Try This at Home

I say it all the time, chemistry is your friend folks. So my question remains, when a website pushes some kind of alternative medicine nonsense (whether it's the Huffington Post's embrace of the anti-vaccination movement or AT's endorsement of swimming in untreated pool water) are they responsible for the typhus or polio outbreaks that follow? Just wondering.

Second only to my love of Italy is my deep love and respect for The Bahamas and her people. Few places I've encountered expose me to more and make me take stock of my own life the way a little island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean does. I wrote a lot about The Bahamas in 2009, but my favorite post involved the retelling of an adventure I have with a broken down jeep on a Thursday afternoon.



A Traveler's Tale: High Adventure with a Broken, Rented Jeep

All hail the Bahamian people for showing this white face how enjoyable life can be when you have less stuff and even fewer expectations.

September found me at Fashion Week in New York thanks to my friends at Brizo. Going to Fashion Week has been a running joke between my friend Kevin and I for years. I call it a joke because we're both fashion-illiterate and aren't the kind of folk who attend such things as A-list runway shows under ordinary circumstances.



New York Day Two and What a Day It's Been


Sittting up close and personal with a major unveiling that like was an experience I'll remember forever. I still don't know anything about fashion, but I certainly have a better appreciation (if not awe) for the role those runway shows play in every day life. I came away from that weekend with an insider's look at fashion design but thanks to Judd Lord and the rest of the gang at Brizo, I got an insider's look at industrial design.

That same month, I found out that there was an exhibition opening at the American Museum of Natural History and it opened within days of my leaving New York. Drat!

A couple of Malagasy artists had found a way to spin spider silk into thread and then they wove that thread into fabric. Finding a use for spider's silk has been a quest for dreamers and schemers since the dawn of humanity and these guys pulled it off.



Of Spiders and Silk, of Silk and Textiles

This story appealed to me for a host of reasons. For starters, it involved the American Museum of Natural History. Secondly, the spiders in question were Nephila inaurata, a close relative to Florida's Nephila clavipes pictured here. Nephila clavipes is an arachnid of such majesty it's hard for me to put into words what amazing creatures they are. That some of their relative's silk would be woven into what's arguably the world's most expensive textile is perfect on a bunch of levels all at once.

In October I'd been done wrong by some missing appliance specs from Sears Kenmore Pro and I wrote a blog post about it. My complaints were bitter and my criticisms were pointed. I wrote that post to get my frustrations off my chest.



Sears' Blue Crew Needs Some Work

Well imagine my surprise when I heard from Sears about my blog post. They were genuinely concerned and they really wanted to help. Within two weeks of that post's going live I'd organized a conference call between the Kenmore Product Team and a handful of design bloggers I hand-picked. I think it will go down as the least expensive focus group ever assembled and a whole lot of good came out of it. Not only that, I have a respect for Sears as an organization I would have never had otherwise. Social Media works gang, let there be no doubt.

I started off this round up with an admission to my fondness for getting science-y on this blog and I don't think anything fired my curiosity quite as much as an invitation I received in November from the Aspex Corporation.



A Microscopic Look at Some Counter Materials

Aspex makes Scanning Electron Microscopes and I had them scan some granite and quarts samples I had lying around. I spoke with a couple of their techs and with their help wrote a great post about Scanning Electron Microscopy in general and the results of my sample scans in particular.

And so I wrap up 2009 and head into the new year. Thank you to everyone who reads these screeds. Putting this blog together every day is a real peak experience and the feedback I get from you guys keeps me plugging away at it. Happy new year to one and all and keep coming back for more.