Willamette Week's new Pocket Shop features local Portland Etsy sellers

One of the other guests on AM Northwest yesterday was Byron Beck from local paper Willamette Week. He was there to promote WW's brand new "Pocket Shop" shopping guide, "A guide to 259 fun and fabulous places to shop in Portland."

I asked to see it and while flipping through it I was excited to see the above picture, taken at Tender Loving Empire, which shows my Roman Record Cuffs (displayed on a funky old red-painted game piece)!

A few pages later, I was blown away to find a whole column devoted to Etsy and local Etsy sellers (including Eye Pop Art)!Here's what it says:

Web Stores
National indie entrepreneur emporium Etsy.com is a gold mine of Portland-made gifts, clothes and one-of-a-kind art. Here's a few of our favorite local Etsy finds.

Curly Girl Glass
Jewelry that runs the style gamut from sterling silver mod to ring-toss chic to downright bauble-icious, CurlyGirl plays nice with geometry and gemstones in each design.

SoHip Bags
Messenger bags with ethereal prints- and crocheted business card holders - are offered alongside cupcake-shaped luggage tags and pendants made from repurposed Manga pages.

Dolls for Friends
If the Ugly Dolls had a rager that ended in carnage, and the splattered remains of the cloth creatures were miraculously reassembled, Frankenstein-style, you would have Dolls for Friends. Strangely, they're pretty damn adorable and even appropriate for the preschool set.

Harvey & Eileen
Keep these designers on your radar for all your bridal-shower needs - their flagship image (a line-drawing representation of the uterus) endears itself to print on skivvies and postcards alike.

Eye Pop Art
Surely sacrilege to the vinyl purist, these wares are all crafted from the remains of LPs. Take your pick of striking mirrors and bracelets that are ideal if you've moved on to the almighty MP3 and never looked back.

Maya Bella
Crocheted chicks and wholly original plush-toy designs, all handcrafted as the antidote to Dolls for Friends, apparently, and perfect as a gift for the little 'un in your life.

Pretty cool, huh? But now, I'm wondering - is my work really "sacrilege to the vinyl purist"? Please take my poll (on the right column of this page) and let me know what you think!

"This is Wild!" - Mandala Records on AM Northwest

This morning I did a live craft demo on the local Portland tv show AM Northwest. It was a blast! Helen Raptis (on the left) and I had a great time painting mandalas on vinyl records (in five minutes!) Here's what Helen's mandala looked like:

In her introduction, Helen called this "one of the brightest and most unique techniques we have ever seen."

I showed off this clock during the segment:

Wanna watch the video? Click here and check it out!

TV personalities

This is Grace and Tangereen with the hosts of AM Northwest, Dave Anderson and Helen Raptis.

We had a great time doing our live printmaking project and it was so exciting to come home and get to watch the video online!

Click here to watch us make some cool Valentine's Day cards!

Preparing for my LIVE TV debut!

When you tape a show for HGTV, you go through six hours of filming to get 15 minutes of on-screen love. Not so for live TV! I will learn more about how that works TOMORROW when I will appear on the set of AM Northwest, a popular local morning news show on KATU in Portland (channel 2! 9 am!).

From time to time, teachers from the DIY Lounge are invited onto the show to demonstrate crafts and promote their classes (my friend Linda Womack recently demonstrated her beeswax collage).

I am teaching a kids art class on Saturday mornings starting this weekend, so when I was invited on the show, I decided to come up with a project that kids can do. I rounded up my daughter and one of her friends (they are 8th graders), and the three of us will be in the spotlight for five whole minutes tomorrow morning, making some fun Valentine's Day cards using simple printmaking techniques.

Now, as you probably know, I am totally NOT a printmaker and I have never even done this before, but I did help to modify the 4th grade Pop Art lesson at Duniway School last year, when we switched it to a printmaking class. I also helped out a couple of weeks ago in Julius's science class at Da Vinci - the kids were making animal prints and it was so easy and fun I figured I could do it too. But please bear in mind that this is designed to be a project for young people and I am not claiming to be a big expert on printmaking!

If you happen to watch the show, let me know! I will hopefully be able to post a link to the show some time after it airs.

Here's the project if you'd like to try it:

The materials you'll need:

I am using Speedball brand "Speedy Kut." It comes in small pieces for about $3 each. You can actually use both sides so it's like getting two for the price of one. You'll also need some water soluble block printing ink (I am using red and magenta), linoleum cutters, brayers to roll the ink, something to roll the ink out on (I am using some pieces of Plexiglass), and some cardstock to print on. I scored mine first to make it easy to fold.

Start carving your design into the Speedy-Kut using a linoleum cutting tool. I started out by making a heart and then somehow or other it took on the face of a cat. Oh, well. I was also planning on doing some sort of heart-based mandala design, but instead it came out rather abstract and strange.





If you want to add any words, you have to make sure to write them backward, as your print will be a mirror image of your design.

Squirt some ink out onto your Plexiglass tray (you could even do it directly on a table top as it washes up with water).

Roll it out. You will hear a nice squishing sound. Your purpose is to get your brayer coated with the ink.

Now roll your ink-coated brayer over your carved block. Coat it completely.




Place your cardstock over your inked block and press down on it by rolling it with another brayer. Make sure you rub it down all the way to the edges.

Pull the print!

You can keep inking and printing until you make all 24 Valentines that your kid needs to take to school on February 14!

You can also blot the ink or let it dry on the block and then recoat it with a different color for your next run! And, you can mix colors or layer them in weird ways. You could also embellish your cards by drawing on them with markers ( a black line might look nice) or adding glitter or whatnot. Add matching envelopes and you're set to go!

The finished size of my card when folded is 4.25" x 5.5" so you can get two cards out of a regular size 8.5" x 11" piece of cardstock cut in half to 8.5" x 5.5" and scored at 4.25". Try to use recycled or reclaimed paper if you can - if you are in Portland check out SCRAP for amazing deals on salvaged paper. The paper I used for this project was all "end cuts" that were donated to Trillium Artisans by a print shop.

There is also a great way to do this project for younger kids. You just give them blocks of styrofoam and they can impress their design with a pencil. Styrofoam is really bad for the environment so only do this if you have some old styrofoam picnic plates sitting in a cupboard - please don't buy it new!