For the love of all things vintage, clever, designed, and/or delicious, we celebrate objects and rituals in all their glory!

1.29.2010

Newly Coveted From Grain

I'm totally psyched to share that I got some of these AMAZING purses from our friends, Chelsea and James of Grain Design. I been thinking about them since JOIN's Design Shoppe event last November....and FINALLY decided to just make a nice field trip over to their house on Bainbridge Island and pick them out myself!

Their new line of purses,
Sololá, is one of their awesome collaborative efforts to
celebrate the artistry of Guatemalan women weavers in creating beautiful, one of a kind purses.
"Each purse upcycles a vintage huipile (traditional women's blouse woven on the backstrap loom) to create an individual statement. Turned inside-out, the huipiles are an explosion of color and handwork. Each purse is assembled by Guatemalan artisans in Antigua from textiles sourced at the famous Chichicastenango Market."
I love how they highlight the textural quality simply by using the back side as the exterior. So clever. I had the hardest time picking the ones I want since they're all so beautiful! I'd take them all if I can...

They're available in the Grain Shop!

Also I'm excited to share that they'll be in the NY International Gift Fair starting Jan 31-Feb 4. Grain
have been selected to to participate in the "A+: The Young Designers' Platform" section of Accent on Design along with 6 other designers.
Both Chika and I will be going there to check out the NYIGF for the first time, and I'm totally excited to see some exciting new things, eat good food, and ride the stinky subway!
Can't wait!

1.28.2010

L&G/Chikabird in Meg Mateo Illasco's Upcoming Book!!

So around last August we briefly mentioned that Meg Mateo Illasco is working on some home decor book....but we forgot to mention that both Chika & I are also gonna be her book!!

Ok, you totally want to hear the whole story, right?
Well...let me tell you! It was a total serendipitous thing.....
It all happened on lovely mid-July day in San Francisco when Chika & I traveled there to sell our goods at the Renegade Craft Fair......But this particular day was more than any other craft show days we worked at. We had the pleasure to meet Meg for the first time that day when she was doing book signing for her book "Craft Inc."
I decided to get a copy of her book to have her autograph it since I'm a big fan of her work and I love the book and wanted to get it for a friend..but instead of acting like my normal self....I some how turned into a giant dork too shy to say much besides looking awkward and mumbling some less than significant words like "uh..your books is, uh, really cool...yeah...I like how you talk about business...and stuff...but for crafters....uh...that's pretty cool...yeah, totally."
Well...those weren't the exact words..but I'm sure it was pretty close. :P

But of course, Meg was totally cool and SUPER friendly and just started asking me what I do...and as it turned out, Meg actually knew about our work!! AWESOME!

On top of what was already an exciting interaction with Meg, things just escalated from there. Next thing I know she was in our booth checking out our stuff and chatting with us as if we're already friends (I love friends!)...and JUST when I was thinking that things can't get any awesome-er..Meg all of a sudden says to me "Hey, I'm working on a home decor book and is looking for people to submit some creative projects with a personal story, you guys wanna do it?"
I looked at her like a deer in the headlight....then looked at Chika who also had the same look as me......I looked back at Meg and thought "Could this be real?!"....then realized I should provide some sort of response since she asked me a question....then finally I responded with great confidence "......yesssss?????"
I totally thought it was too good to be true and thought maybe she just wanted to feel it out and so I was prepared that at some point we'll get an email from Meg saying that she found someone better with a better project or for whatever reason.....but everything fell into place....and we realized it was truly official when both Chika & I went back in SF 2 weeks after we met Meg, and found ourselves hanging out at Lisa Wong Jackson's lovely mid-century modern house doing a photo shoot with Meg, Lisa, Joy, and Joanna with Thayer Alllyson Gowdy the photographer for the book. Everything happened so fast I couldn't even register it all!!!
The book will consist of of 25+ other well-known designers/artists/crafters each with a DIY home decor project that has their personal stories or memories. We were thrilled when Meg told us all the awesome people like Joy from Oh Joy!, Lauren & Derek of The Curiosity Shoppe, Lisa Congdon, Lisa of Good on Paper, Cathy Callahan of Cathy of California, Tootie of ReForm School and more were all contributing to the book!
With a power group like that, I don't even have to know what sort of projects they are doing for me to just KNOW that this book will amazing!

Here's some photos from the shoot. I want to live in Lisa's house!
Lisa & Virginia (Meg's lovely assistant) in their matching striped shirt watching the photo shoot take place.
Below are the projects that got shot that day....
My Mega-Doily Rug....Oh how I wish my living room looked like that....it looks much better than my long skinny coffee table sitting on top of it...
For Chikabird, we made a Coat of Arms for the Dupe with all the graphic icons that represented us and then we wood burned them!
Joy's beautiful gold leaf glass lamp
Joanna's lovely stamped door curtainAn here's everyone sitting down for a nice lunch break. It's amazing how exhausting styling a shoot is! There were lots of moving objects back and forth going on, standing back to look at it, framing the shot with our hands, tilting our heads, squinting, and then repeat....
Yum yum almond croissants from my FAVORITE SF bakery, Tartine!!
I still couldn't really believe that this whole book thing is actually happening even after several months in when we already done the photo shoot and submitted the instructions and story...for some reason I just feared (and was trying to prepare myself) that there would still be a chance that we could get edited out.....for simply looking stupid in our photos or something like that...but they decided to keep our project! Even though I wouldn't argue one bit that I probably do look a little stupid in the photos... :P

I'm just more than excited the fact that not only will this be our FIRST time getting published in a book...it's gonna be in a book by Meg along with an amazing group of people that we've always found inspiring, too!
There's just too much awesomeness all around! Can't stand it!
The real book is plan to launch this early fall!
Stay tuned!

1.21.2010

Calder's Cirque

I got to go see the Alexander Calder exhibit the other day at the Seattle Art Museum.
Besides seeing his beautiful mobiles from small to large in person, I was most delighted to see a video of the Le Cirque puppet performance during his years in Paris using all the little handmade figures and props made with mostly found materials. I was totally entertained to see how he manipulates each charming figures and re-creates a circus performance that's more than impressive and entertaining than seeing the real thing!The perfectly orchestrated circus is made up of numerous elements of kinetically activated wire figures and animals, live sound effects, mini-stage props, and Calder himself performing in front of a live audience. There's a great mix of really impressive well-engineered performances of Calder using wire figures doing trapeze to some occasional humorous act of when Calder throws couple of peanuts on the floor by the circus lion as a signal that it pooped. Who would have thought that lion pooping can be so delightful?! But Calder pulled it off.
This is a 2 part video of his Le Cirque performance below... ( it's much better to see it at the museum on a big projection) But you can get a rough idea of Calder's sense of playfulness and how much pride he takes while doing the whole performance...just don't get creeped out by the way he laughs and talks....but hey, when you're Calder, you can get away with that and it's a-ok.

Part 1


Part 2

1.20.2010

Mega Doily on Craft Magzine!

If you're not sick of this yet....Here's Mega Doily featured on Craft Magazine! Woo Hoo!

1.06.2010

Happy New Year From L&G!

This year, L&G is starting 2010 by sharing this little card we made for the New Year.We're looking forward to yet another exciting year, and plan to...
and of course, there's always hopes to...
I suppose that means we need to put that on our resolution and actually start playing the lottery. :D
But really, we'd like to be better about planing ahead this coming year and....
To explain....this past holiday season, I really dropped the ball in terms of sending out presents and holiday cards, and getting into the holiday spirit. I know...horrible. That's why we made these cards to make up for it. Hopefully that worked...
But for ourselves, we didn't even get a Christmas tree or put up any lights or decorations! We had the most non-holiday Christmas day where Dylan and I just roasted a chicken and made some stuffing....and didn't even bother making the gravy....I know...I can only imagine the looks that I'm getting right now...
We already got scorned by Dylan's grandmother when we told her what we ate. It was sacrilegious....
Still...we had our dinner with only chicken and stuffing and watched The Royal Tenenbaums in our non-holiday spirited living room. Despite our atypical Christmas day, it was still nice to just spend some time with each other and enjoy a nice homemade dinner by ourselves (let's just not dwell on the lack of gravy part...)

Sometimes I feel like its okay to just change things up a bit..right? We're not a Grinch, right? I think because we had such a low key holiday for 09', it'll be that much more exciting to go all out for this coming year's holiday and get a 20ft tall tree....where we'll have to lay that across our living room. That should be fun, eh? :D

We're looking forward to the new year and hope everyone will have an awesome 2010!