On A Couple of Cards

This is just a quickie update, with two pictures of recent card-ish-ness fun! :D

The first is from Father's Day. Drawn in pencil, colored digitally, the whole thing took me maybe two hours from start to finish? (That might be an overestimate, I never remember to time these sorts of things ha!) My favorite part is the bouncing tennis ball at the bottom, I must admit. I don't know why, but I think it's cute! What do you think? xD

The second is just a grad thank-you card I made (photo credit goes to my Mom!) for a very nice congrats-on-graduating type card I received from some family friends. :-) Thank you so much! I always get so excited about cards~ (Did you know that I've kept every letter, note, card I think I've ever received in my life? It's true! I have several boxes full now, and I love to take everything out and reread them, especially if I'm feeling unsure or sad. It's a wonderful pick-me-up!)

I will eventually get around to uploading some pretty pictures from our garden; we got my favorite flower, hydrangea, and they're so pretty!! Makes me happy.

Until then!

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On Things Of Late

Spring makes me itchy to create. I want to capture every pretty blossom I see, every sweet song I hear outside my window. This is good for blogging, bad for academics! But if I can just hold on for a few more weeks summer will be here in style, and maybe then I'll have freed up some time for puttering around with my next quilt, or my next drawing, or my next Great Idea. :-) For now, though, here's what you've missed recently!

First, here is a card I made for a very dear friend who's going abroad.

Sadly, I have re-discovered that my computer's color settings are off! So while this card looks remarkably bright on my screen, it didn't transfer to print quite as well as I would have liked. I've been working on a couple of websites for one of my jobs, and I've noticed some color discrepancies between the computer in the lab and my laptop there too, so the verdict seems to be that my poor Dell is just.. off! I've tried correcting it, but to no avail. I'll just have to remember to keep that in mind when I'm designing my next card~ I meant to take a picture of the *actual* card as well, but I was too busy trying to cram all of my love for our friendship into words, so I got distracted and forgot. Oopsies! The only difference were a few tiny shiny star (sequins? not sure) thingies I carefully adhered to the perimeter of the circle by the first letter of her name. Otherwise, I didn't try to modify the card. I'm really quite terrible with paste, so I usually just make images with lots of colors instead of making something composed of different textures. I have a friend who makes very beautiful cards, with such nice combinations of papers and ribbons, but I just get so nervous cutting and glueing- if you make a mistake, there's no und0 button! But maybe I'll work on trying to start branching out, who knows. :) In any case, I spent a lot of time on this card, and I'm sending many good wishes to my friend in her travels! I'm already counting the days until she's back~ <3

As for this image, this is just more linguistics silliness. ToBI is a system for identifying and categorizing pitch accents; a "star" is a convention in this system, and when one of my professors said that there can only be "one star" (per stressed syllable is the rest of her statement), all I could imagine was every competition reality show I've ever (not) seen! xD

Finally, a glimpse at my next quilt endeavor.. a t-shirt quilt!

This is more because I can't bear to give up my old t-shirts than any other creative impulse, haha! But this way they'll still be useful. Let's see if this quilt takes me less than half a decade~ ;D

Perhaps when the websites go live, I will link them from here, for your personal enjoyment. Then again, the only tools at my disposal in their creation were Microsoft Paint and Notepad, so perhaps I won't share! xDDD Hahaha~

Enjoy the warming weather (but still not too hot!) and be sure to take your allergy medicine. :)

Until then, Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On Finish Lines

The completed quilt... finally! I should have waited for some better lighting before photographing, but I got impatient. The weather and I were at a week long stand-off, and finally today Ijust gave in and accepted some slightly moody lighting. :-) This has been a labor of love in every sense of that phrase, and while the finished product certainly isn't flawless, I love it to pieces! (Haha, pieced quilt, love it to pieces... get it?! Oh, the level of humor...! ;D)

There's just something so magical about holding in your hands a realized idea. I've already used it oodles (thus some of the crinkliness of the quilt.. it's been washed, dried, and cuddled with non-stop!) and that's probably my favorite part about sewing. No matter how much you love a painting or photograph, you can't hug one!

Some logisitics:
~began picking out fabrics, figuring out design, and then cutting summer 2006
~began piecing the top winter 2006
~finished piecing top, embroidering back, and piecing back by winter 2007
~tied quilt spring 2008
~bound quilt spring 2009

The quilt measures (about) 46 inches square, and it took me roughly 35 hours just to bind it! I did every single thing by hand, and since this was my first quilt, I didn't know to use a running stitch. Instead, I used a very tight whipstitch, the stongest stitch I could think of at the time. About halfway through piecing the top, I took it with me to a fabric shop in search of some backing material that coordinated well. The employees all thought that I had serged the top, my seams were so dense with thread! By that time I didn't want to change my stitching styles even though I had finally realized that I was going a little bit overboard. So it goes. :-)

It took countless spools of brown thread, multiple trips to various fabric stores, and a good three years, but I've finally finished my quilt. Phew!

AND I COULDN'T BE HAPPIER!! :D :D :D

Now to start planning the next one...! ;)

Until then, love and best
your Bee ♥

On Almost Endings

I have been working on this quilt for a very long time. Years, in fact. I more or less completed it the spring before last, except for the binding. SO now I have finally bitten the bullet, and take up my quilt once more! The tedium of binding off the quilt isn't as heavy as I imagined it would be. It helps that a.) the binding makes the quilt look ridiculously better (I hadn't realized just how unfinished it looks otherwise) and b.) every stitch brings me closer to completion.

I can't wait! No time for more blogging now, off to stitch!! :-)

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On Nerdy Silliness, and Some Image Dumping

Alas, I haven't been able to take any decent pictures of my growing collection of beloved pink items (a pillow, a polka dot robe, some fuzzy socks, even my hair dryer!). So instead, a pink Valentine left over from last month that I never shared~ It's only funny to a very small percentage of people (linguists), but I'm sure you can catch the gist of it without any real background knowledge on who Dr. Labov is! ;-) I know, I have a really sophisticated sense of humor, hee hee hee!

Here, a similar ling-y joke! This one is less clear to non-linguists; the only thing you really need to know is that vowels are classified as having three different levels, corresponding to tongue height, and they are high, mid, and low. A really terrible little word play, but I cracked myself up regardless! (If you want to know more about human language sounds, here's a link to the Wikipedia site on the International Phonetic Alphabet~)

Finally, a random dump of old doodles from last month. I did 100% of these while listening to the same classmate discuss his research every week for a minimum of an hour. My choices were either to stand up and throw something at him (gah! we only need a quick update! there are more of us who need to present!!) or to soothe myself with doodling. I chose the latter! xD (Oh, alright, this is slightly exaggerated, I'm not really that aggressive and it wasn't really that bad. But I did doodle while I took notes.)

I'm hoping to have some time soon to do some little artsy things, but as always we'll see..! Until then. :D

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On A Little Love

Because I'd be "lion" if I said that I didn't love you all~ ;D Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Perhaps in honor of the holiday, I will post some pics next time of all of the pink I'm loving in my life. In the meantime, enjoy the last vestiges of your Valentine weekend with the people you love, and enjoy President's Day tomorrow.

Until then!

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On A (Tiny) Update

Oh goodness! An update a month isn't exactly the pace I had in mind for this blog, but alas, we do what we can. My mind is bursting with fun ideas my hands are itching to create, but equally bursting is my planner- so the hands remain stewards of education for the moment! :P

However, here is an apology doodle to try and make amends, in recognition of your kind patience~ Of course, it follows in my bird-theme.. this time an owl! Only appropriate, since I've been so busy with school. Cheers, to learning and creating!
I hope you're keeping warm, and enjoying winter (safe in the knowledge that spring is coming, just wait and see~) :-)

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On The New Year

Oh gosh! Since I've last posted, I've:
a.) said hello to a new year
b.) gone back to school
c.) and tried to figure out my future!

As you can see, I've been quite busy. xD I worked some over Christmas break on finally finishing my quilt, but alas it looks like it will still be a WIP for a bit longer. I finished the quilt top probably a year and a half ago, I "quilted" it last winter break (tied it), but then never got around to binding it. Oops! So I'm on something like year three of working on it. !!! (In my defense, I only ever seem to really work on it during winter break- otherwise, I'm in school, or it's just too dang hot out for me to really want to curl up with loads of fabric and sew!) It's all sewn by hand, and of course since it's my first quilt I've made an infinite number of mistakes. I figured everything out as I went along, with a little bit of help from Google of course. I think the biggest mistake I made was in piecing it together. I wasn't sure what sort of stitch to use, so I used a very tight whip stitch. For every piece. Of the entire thing. Oh my! Later on, when I took the finished quilt top to a fabric store to get some backing fabric that would coordinate with the front, the salespeople were quite confused. They were surprised it wasn't machine-stitched, too! I went a little nuts I guess, haha. I just wanted to make sure it would be durable, so I did the best that I could. :-) Oh well, it was quite labor-intensive, but a lot of love went into making it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

But next time, I will definitely just go with the running stitch! (And maybe even use a sewing machine, ooooh! Haven't touched one since middle school home ec class...! That could be an adventure in its own right. :D)

Here are some pics of the never-ending quilt~

A close up of the stitching (I like this picture a lot, it's very soft looking, the colors are nice too!)
Laying out the quilt after the main part of the quilt top was done, trying to figure out the border~
Front and back completed, tying completed! (I thought it'd be fun to mix the modern colors with the more quaint tying method.)
Close up of the nearly completed quilt.. bad lighting, but you get the gist. Can you tell I like color? Haha!

Another picture of the nearly completed quilt.. unbound edges, but see how thick and soft it looks all piled up like that? :-)

And here is a rooster pic, to keep the tradition alive!

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On My Very Merry Christmas

My, I haven't written in ages! But I'm hoping you all will forgive me; I was busy enjoying Christmas with my family. I hope you all have enjoyed the holidays with your loved ones too! I was reorganizing some files, trying to clear off my desktop when I discovered a fun side-by-side comparison of two drawings.

The first is from when I was seven, and is a drawing of my shoe. Note the little flowers on the shoe? So cute! Little kids always have such sweet dear little articles of clothing. I am especially fond of the movement lines in the picture; is the shoe jumping? Cart-wheeling? Who knows! I like how unsteady the date is though.

Now, a drawing from when I was sixteen (I believe), another one of my shoe! (Sorry for the poor scan; I don't know where the original drawing is either, so I couldn't re-scan the image.) Apparently I like drawing my shoe! Haha~ :-) I just thought it was cute that I had two different versions of the same item in my life.

I've been doing some stuff in Photoshop lately, but nothing that isn't either a.) for work or b.) too silly and simple to post here. I had grand plans for churning out a dozen different little projects over break, but in the end I'm more grateful for the time I've had with the people I love. I hope everyone ends 2008 well, and I'll try to post at least once more before 2008 bows out. Let's get excited for the new year together!!

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On Some Good Cheer

Well hello again blogland! I have returned, bearing a holiday inspired doodle. I just love everything about the holidays; the warmth of home against the quiet hush of cold snow, the sense of expectation, the way friends and family come together again. It seems like everyone and everything I cherish gathers around the holidays, and I can't seem to keep a smile of my face even if I were to try! I meant to make some Christmas cards by hand this year, but as always time seems to have eluded my grasp once more. I might have to take up my mother's excellent suggestion that I make Valentine's Day cards instead. With the additional time, I have a much better chance of uh, actually completing the project haha! I am quite excellent at scheming up projects, but finding the time to carry them all out is another matter entirely. :D But I think at this time of year it's most important to try and slow down and appreciate all the wonderful blessings in our lives anyways, so I don't worry myself too much. After all, dreaming is half the fun!
Anyways, so here's a doodle for you all, my dear Tiny Makers. (There were a few others, but frankly on review I realized that they're not particularly good, so I'll have to work on some more fun little cards~) Happy holidays everyone!

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On An Aetiology

I realized that I never gave any reason for why I chose the url that I did for this blog... I will remedy this immediately~ :) So, an explanation! I chose Tiny Made because I wanted this to be a craft blog. I like creating things with my own hands, and in general my handmade things tend to be small. I can't mass produce things, so everything is made on a small scale, both literally as in I can only make one of anything at a time, but also in the sense that I like to make things that are tiny as well. So they're tiny made, just as they're handmade! Additionally, I'm a very small person, so I was "made tiny" as well, which I thought was a cute. I also like taking macro pictures. You focus on a small detail of an object as a whole, and all of a sudden you can find entire complex worlds hidden within the mundane. Everything is beautiful close up. Suddenly you can see all the color variations and graceful lines of veins in a single leaf, or you can marvel at the delicate precision in a tiny bug. I think it's astounding.

So there you have it! Welcome to Tiny Made; I hope you enjoy your stay! :D

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On An End Of Roosters

Long time no write! Sorry blog-land, between gearing up for the holidays and then finals, I have been slightly neglectful. But no more! I return, with the last of some roosters for a while (I promise!) :)

The first is a stuffed animal rooster than I created just for kicks. The picture isn't amazing because I was too impatient to wait for better lighting, but you get the gist.

The second is another watercolor painting, this time slightly more realistic. Can you tell I love color? He's a regular rainbow fowl! But I like him.

That's it for now, although I might have some more later with a quilt I'm working on. We'll see if I have anything picture-worthy!

Until then, I hope you're staying warm and enjoying this holiday season as much as I am.

Love and Best
your Bee ♥

On A Series Of Roosters

..And you thought that I was kidding. Ha! That'll teach ya. ;D Anyways, this one is just another random painting I made (at the request of my mother, because she thinks roosters are pretty adorable). Sorry for the slightly bad quality photograph, I was too impatient to wait for the kitchen to be fully lit.

Done in acrylic. Can you tell I'm procrastinating on my next problem set? The bane of my existence, haha! (That's a mighty fine existence, if my only real concern is a series of questions on set theory. :D) I hope everyone is getting pumped for Thanksgiving, and I may or may not be back with some more stuff later. We'll see. I'm debating between cutting up some fabric, doodling, going on a music spree (don't think that I can afford this, haha! what a habit~) or going to the bookstore. I think I hear some books calling, so image-uploading might not occur... xD

Happy Wednesday, regardless!

Love and Best
your Bee ♥

On (A Lack Of) Creativity

So I realized that for a blog that is supposedly about my "creative" life, I have absolutely nothing creative up on here! So because I'm lazy, and I've done my part to deplete the world's natural resources, I've decided that if I want to make a quickie post, I'll just show some old art. Some of it's laughably bad. No, check that actually; ALL of it is laughably bad! But just so long as you promise not to laugh TOO much, I don't mind a good chuckle now and again. :) So for today's first reminiscing drabble, I give you some watercolor roosters.

Behold! Absolutely no technical skill, but geez I like roosters so much. Actually, I could probably do a series on roosters.. yeesh! (Maybe I will... LOL! A series of rooster posts anyways~) Don't get too excited now.. ;D

P.S.- I'm a cheater and got a Flickr, because I thought that perhaps that would be easier than trying to embed every single photo I'd like to share. Plus this way, you can browse at leisure! But it looks like I'll run against my monthly allotment of space in about.. twelve images. Oops! Time to resize~ :) Hope the link works, and that everyone is getting excited for Thanksgiving. I know I am!

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On Life's Simple Pleasures

Our outdoor Christmas lights are up. And I'm very very happy! I don't care how old I get, it never ceases to bring a smile to my face when I start to see Christmas lights. They're like warm little fairies, beckoning you home, each bright color a tiny lighthouse for your very own harbor.

Happy holidays everyone, this day and the next and all the rest. :D

Love and Best,
your Bee ♥

On That State Up North

So when I said I would update later, I guess I really meant.. much later! Haha, oops~ Well for anyone wondering, we *did* in fact beat that state from up north, pretty thoroughly actually. (This is only proper. xD) Sadly Michigan State couldn't win their game, but ah well; can't get everything one wants in this world. ;D Anyways, enough about M*ch*g*n.. we don't give a.. particular care for them anyways!

Okay, so this long awaited story- I'm sorry that it isn't actually a very good story. Too much build up! Basically, it goes like this. I get to campus at around 8, but my first class of the day doesn't begin until 9:30, so usually I spend this time productively. You know, working on homework, catching up on reading, or at the very least checking my email. (I really need to go through and delete/respond to a bunch. I'm sorry!! I'm behind again..) But on this particular morning, I decided to instead go and revel in nature. So instead of sitting in a warm, if empty, classroom, I trekked around the Oval taking pictures. As I'm engrossed taking pictures of one tree in particular, all of a sudden out of nowhere someone asks if I want my picture taken.. with the tree. Startled, I jump, she jumps, and I realize it's my professor, unintentionally snuck up on me. I don't think that I can quite convey the very dubious way she looked at me, and the flat out hilarity of her expression as she asked me this. I politely declined, and then got stuck walking to class with her a full hour early, where we discussed a previous lab. So instead of some quiet time alone to reflect on the beauty of nature, I looked over my previous lab results. Haha! Oh goodness. (This also resulted in her telling me that I have "a very weird head" which additionally cracked me up. She meant in the sense of my pronunciation of the word "head" and the vowel therein, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the comment immensely. She sounded so scandalized, oh goodness! I guess I'm a deviant dialectal... :D)

So yes. That is the story. Aren't you all glad you waited for it?? No?! xD Too bad~

Love and Best
your Bee ♥

An Inaugural Post

I have considered getting a blog many times over. After all, who doesn't like to talk about their own life?! ;D But time restrictions and lack of content have always driven me away. However- no more! I am now the proud owner of a blog. I'm not entirely sure what I plan on doing with this space; I feel like I have to have some sort of target function and audience in mind. How personal should this be? I'd like to be able to talk about things that matter to me, but I also want to maintain my privacy. I'd really like for this to be a craft blog, but I am uncertain about my creative pacing; currently I'm in slow slow maybe-I'll-finish-this-before-I-die mode! So I think I'm going to settle on having a "happy life" blog. I want to collect, recollect, create happiness in my life and share it with you all. I think that having a blog to keep me accountable will make my goal of finding happiness everywhere much more tangible. So that's where I'd like to take this- phew! What a tall order~ :]

I guess I can only promise to do my best (and forewarn that sporadic updating will probably be the only constant around here, haha!)

Love and Best,
your Bee