Teamwork is Terrific!

Since moving to Portland, I've been lucky enough to meet some amazing crafty folks through the PDX Etsy team (currently renaming ourselves as we become a co-op!). I was immediately enthralled by glass artist Leah Pellegrini's beautiful mobiles, and we quickly worked out a collaborative project.

Using glass scraps from other projects, Leah has created two sets of fused discs, which I've etched with my original designs. One set is a beautiful array of greens adorned with organic-shaped bare trees, the other is icy blues which have cute ocean critters on them. Leah's sturdy mobiles are perfect for hanging indoors or out, and are carefully handcrafted to withstand the tests of time.

We're still testing the waters with this creative endeavor, but I can't wait to work with Leah again since I'm dying to see some other great mobiles come to life (robots, anyone?)!!

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Dr. McNinja

Look what I just made! This is a gift for Dr. McNinja comic creator and artist, Chris Hastings. I hope he likes it.

This is the first of many planned gifts for the creators of my favorite webcomics. As a self-employed artist, I wanted a way to give something back to these great creative folks who put their work out there on the internet for free. I can't afford to buy books and t-shirt from all of them (even though I'd like to!) so hopefully they'll appreciate this token of my appreciation.

I'd like to encourage everyone out there to take a peak at the awesome webcomics in my sidebar, buy something from their creators if you can, or find one nice thing to do for your favorite internet artist today. Just sending a positive fan letter makes a big difference in someone's life who offers their art publicly. You don't have to be shy!The design for this pint glass was based on this panel, where the good doctor has been possessed by an ear-ghost. The storyline is pure genius.

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Muxtape

One thing that will never go out of fashion is mix tapes. Even as technology advances, we still all feel connected to those cute little plastic packages of love that took so long to make. (Check out BraveMoonman's shop for some amazing mixtape-inspired goods!!)

One website I've been in love with recently is Muxtape.com. This is one of those sites that I'd been hearing about on Twitter and around the blogosphere for a while before I ever bothered to check it out.

You basically create a free account, then you upload mp3's to their site and create an online mixtape! You can share the url for your mixtape with friends, and they can listen to all your songs (or buy them, although I haven't tried that yet, so I don't know who you're actually buying from).

One thing that's both charming and frustrating is the layout of the site. It's very "no-frills" which makes it feel old-school and fun, but also a little annoying to use. You can only upload one song at a time, and it automatically saves them in the reverse order of how you upload them. You can drag-and-drop to rearrange the order of the songs, but I found this to be glichy. It often didn't save all the changes I'd made, even though it appeared to.

It's still a super cool site! The front page appears to have the most recently created mixes available for browsing. There's no organization or searching, unfortunately, but I've found some really cool new songs on there just by clicking randomly.

You can listen to my muxtape here: http://breadandbadger.muxtape.com
(Please note that my Muxtape songs are not G-rated and contain obscene language.) Let me know what you think, and post your muxtape urls so I can listen to them, too!

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DIY Coffeesicles

Here's an awesome recipe for Vietnamese-style coffee popsicles! I found it via the Craft: Magazine Twitter page.

If you don't have a fancy popsicle mold, you can make a granita out of the coffee mixture by pouring it into a shallow tray or baking dish, and letting it freeze for 2 hours so that ice crystals have started to form on the surface. Scrape the ice crystals around with a fork, and return to the freezer for another 30 minutes. Repeat the scraping and freezing 3 or 4 more times, until it's all fluffy and frozen. Serve immediately!

You could also serve it before it's completely frozen and have a drinkable slushie icy coffee concoction. I can't wait to try this!

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Magic Pen

I discovered this highly-addictive game after Sean heard about it on a forum, and then continued laughing and cursing at it for over an hour. I knew I had to give it a try.

The object of Magic Pen is simple: get the ball to roll onto the flag. By any means necessary. You have a magic crayon to draw shapes that you can drop, connect together, and build objects out of, all based on physics.

One of the hardest elements to this game was drawing the shapes the way I wanted them, since the program "smooths" out the lines for you once you finish drawing. I don't recommend playing this on a laptop touch-pad!

The best part of the game was that the shapes and contraptions really did follow the laws of physics! As far as crayon-drawn created-out-of-thin-air shapes and contraptions can, of course. It was even fun to see my lovely machines fall off a cliff because I weighted a swinging arm too much in one direction.


It was also fun to see how Sean and I both solved the levels differently. There's more than one solution to almost every level, and you can get really creative with your solutions. Sometimes putting our heads together was the only way to figure it out!

Alejandro Guillen, who created Magic Pen, also wrote another game called Spin the Black Circle (extra points for the Pearl Jam reference) which is supposed to be just as addictive. I haven't played it myself, but watching Sean puzzle out the levels proved that it could be a similar time-suck for me, if I let it.

http://www.bubblebox.com/play/puzzle/975.htm
http://www.mostfungames.com/spin-the-black-circle.htm

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