It took 24 hours from door step to door step, but I made it to Austin yesterday afternoon.

I've had my fill of gingerbread pancakes at 2 different cafes - Kerby Lane Cafe and Omlettery.





Bike racks at the convention center:


Surface demo a the Microsoft booth:

I'm on my way to South by South West in Austin . I started the journey yeterday, leaving the Boy and the Dog around 1 PM. My flight was delayed for several hours - just long enough to miss a connection in Denver.

I spent the night at the Double Tree Hotel - their squichy beds and cookies are awesome. If it were not for several calls from the Boy, a timer on my phone, a wake up call from the hotel, and an alarm clock, I would probably still be asleep.

Here's the view from my room. It's a crappy phone cam shot but still - it gives you an idea of day.


One good thing though - I got to see the sun start to rise over the airport as I was coming in. so pretty....

Hopefully, I will be able to sleep on the plane.

Time to go catch up on work stuff.

So I'm not one of the finalists, but I had a request from Alice at Future Girl to see the full repeat of my leaf design so I thought I would go ahead and share.

I swear that I will be adding something other than spoonflower contest entries at some point but literally very little has been done creatively outside of making tiles for these contests.

Spoonflower teamed up with a company that makes baby carriers called Boba . There were tons of entries (260 total - eep:) ) so they are asking to narrow down to 16 finalists!

right now you can vote on which designs will make the cut!

Here's my entry:


vote for all the ones you like on the spoonflower site .

well - I have been spending time making patterns... and I entered another contest on Spoonflower!!

Check it out:



I like it alot!!

You can vote for all the entries on the spoonflower site.

Lee finally posted the best photo!

My apologies for being away so long the puppy and work are taking far more time than I ever thought possible.

Here is the little guy at Runyon Canyon this morning - all tuckered out before we headed home.

I thought I would show the process by which I made the repeat below. I had a lot of help from Julia Rothman's tutorial on Design Sponge.

First step was to draw something:



I then cut it into 4 quarters and re-taped them back together so that the middle was open to draw in (you essentially put the origianal out side edges together in the middle):



I added some doodles between the original parts of the drawing:



Then - the image was scanned into Illustrator, producing this:



I then tweaked the edges of the repeat in Illustrator and recolored to match the palette for the Spoon Flower contest

AND VOILA!


Please vote for me!

I need some moral support :)

As you may or may not remember, I've been dabbling with surface pattern design for a few years now and this past week I entered my first fabric design contest on SpoonFlower.com. I'm SUPER nervous! I'm not sure I even have a chance, but would you please vote for me?

Blog post with all the entries is here:
http://blog.spoonflower.com/2010/01/81- ... brics.html

I'm #51 and here is a link to my design:
http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric_items ... _id=137164



The poll shuffles the entries every time you go to vote so I can't tell you which page (of 4) I'm on :(

thanks a lot for your help!

...Please.... '09 sucked and I want it over and done with. I am over joyed to start a new decade in the 2000's.

Thinking about what I was doing 10 years ago today, I realized I was having a tough time then too.

In 2000, I worked for a struggling boutique web company at the tail end of the Internet Boom. My boss was a passive aggressive scam artist with a swelled head because he just sold his company to another, more crappy, more corporate internet development firm.

I had moved back to Austin from Houston a few years prior and was hating life because Austin, Texas was (and still is) a cess pool of selfish, self aggrandizing, schmucks who literally don't do anything but brag about how much money they make. But Austin was home and I was scared even with Lee to back me up. I had chickened out and lost my confidence when my job at ADV Films went away.

Ten years later, I am doing much better both at work and personally but this year was hard. Really tough international project at work that took up most of the year, saying goodbye to Faust, my friend Glynda had a brain hemorrhage, and oh yeah - I got hit by car door being opened while biking. Best part of this year was Japan but even that had problems - Mobiky breaking down and the heat that was overbearing.

I am now a senior manager working on a major entertainment company's web site, I married the best boy ever, I ahve a puppy again, I have good friends and know who I can count on and who is genuine.

As much as I've just complained about '09 I have to say "Thanks" to 2000 - 2009, I actually learned a lot about myself and a lot about people.