Decorno strikes again

This blog will pass the two year mark in a couple of weeks and I've been thinking a lot about how I got to where I am now over the course of those two years. There are a number of blogs and bloggers who helped and inspired me along the way and very high on that list is a blog and a woman who goes by one name, Decorno.

Until I came across her blog, I had the idea that I needed to remain objective and un-opinionated in order to be an effective blogger. Reading her columns for a couple of days cured me of that, let me tell you. If you've never read Decorno, I encourage you to do so immediately.

Decorno is a community of clever commenters as much as it's a well-written and thought-out design blog. Sometimes, particularly noteworthy comments turn into posts in their own right and that's what happened over there recently.

Last Saturday, Decorno wrote a post about costly design mistakes. Her post consisted of a list of things she'd have done differently if she were given the chance to do them again. She ended the post by encouraging her readers to tell their own stories of design regret. Tell stories they did.

One of them, left by a reader named John, prompted another post all together. To wit:

Her comments section that follows that post is a riot of creative color naming and casual obscenity. Do yourself a favor and read through it. Since there's a pony at stake, leave a color story of your own. Look for a heart warming story by me and really good one from Sara Baldwin. The hands-down winner has to be a woman who goes by the name Goddess of Purple. If there's an award for best comment left on a blog, the Goddess of Purple deserves it. So again, cruise on over to Decorno's color post and wade into the comment pool.

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 by Giltgoods

This one's for Melody McFarland:

A Parade of Pigeons --Yellow by Charclam

Western Meadowlark by Nightgarden

Bird on a Wire by Nalo Hopkinson

Brick Bird by Nalo Hopkinson

Caroline Fern by Giltgoods

Birds by Lydia Meiying

Cardinal by Aimee Elizabeth

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.

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.

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.

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!