This morning we signed a lease to rent an adorable little shop in Eaton Rapids, less than a block from our apartment! As you can see, it was previously (briefly) a taco shop and in the building’s history has also been a donut shop, a tanning salon, a bait shop, and a frame shop. We’ll be transforming it into a hybrid graphic design studio and handmade gifts & art supply shop. It’s the perfect size for us, and the location couldn’t be better. We’re very, very excited.

Here’s Tod pulling the “for rent” sign out of the ground.

We’ll be calling our shop “Riverside Art & Supply Co.” You can see why: our cute little shop is right on the beautiful Grand River. Check out the amazing view out the back window!

Tod and I are ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work turning this into our dream shop. We’re hoping to celebrate our Grand Opening the first week of October.

We’ll be launching Riverside’s own web site, facebook, twitter, et al a little later this week, with lots more information about what we have planned. Keep an eye out!

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”

- A.A. Milne

It’s amazing to me how quickly everything can change. My family and I moved to my home town almost a year ago, and it’s mind-blowing to realize how fast the year has already flown by. I haven’t even finished hanging our family photos and yet, I look at photos of Jonah when we’d first moved in and they seem like baby pictures already.

Sure enough, just as things were starting to feel “settled”, things are changing again. :) This week, Tod and I found ourselves in the (earliest) planning and exploring stages of renting a small retail shop here in Eaton Rapids. We got to check out a cozy little shop (it’s a block from our apartment!)on Friday, and it’s been a long-weekend of crunching numbers and writing notes and doing lots and lots of research.

This is something we’ve dreamed of for years, and it could be a big game changer for us. It’s too early to get excited about anything just yet (not that I can stop myself…), but I expect I will have more information and more share more details very soon.

♥xocm

On July 4, I had the opportunity to set up a booth here in my home town to celebrate not just Independence Day but also Eaton Rapids’ 175 anniversary! It was over 100 degrees, but we suffered through the heat and got to say hi and sell art journals and other one-of-a-kind recycled goodies to lots of local folks!

Here are a few shots of PAPERCUTS handmade products and how I display them at local craft shows. I put a lot of effort and careful planning into my displays, packaging, signage, etc. and I’m very proud of how it all comes together. :)

Upcoming Shows:

If you’re in the Mid-Michigan area, you can come see me in Eaton Rapids at the E.R. Historical Society’s Dam Fest on August 25, and at Frontier Days in Charlotte, MI  September 7 – 9.

I recently discovered a fun, DIY way to take faux “toy camera” photos. Best of all? It’s fun, cheap and easy.

For the unfamiliar, toy cameras such as the Diana and the Holga are plastic cameras first manufactured in the 1960’s  and 1980’s, respectively. They feature a plastic lens and use medium format film. Due to their construction, they yield an awesome lo-fi aesthetic with often unexpected results, creating a cult following of toy camera enthusiasts.

I got my Holga back in 2002, but (unfortunately) it has  spent most of its life sitting unused on a shelf, because the specialty film & developing can quickly become an expensive hobby. Don’t get me wrong: I love the experimental nature of the unexpected light leaks and lo-fi aesthetic, but the cost can be a bit prohibitive for those of us who are on a tight budget.

So naturally, I was stoked to discover I could produce a somewhat similar (yet unique!) effect with my digital SLR and one of my son’s toys. Total cost: about six bucks!

Crayola makes a line of “3-D Sidewalk Chalk” – actually just regular sidewalk chalk with super-saturated colors. The set also includes a pair of plastic glasses with Chromadepth lenses, which…

“…[create] a stereoscopic effect based upon differences in the diffraction of color through a special prism-like holographic film fitted into the lenses.

Chromadepth glasses purposely exacerbate chromatic aberration and give the illusion of colors taking up different positions in space, with red being in front, and blue being in back. This works particularly well with the sky, sea or grass as a background, and redder objects in the foreground.” (source)

In order to get these photos, I simply set my D-SLR to its automatic setting, and allowed the auto-focus to shoot “through” the glasses. This required holding the glasses with my left hand (less than an inch or so from the lens) which was initially a little awkward, but I found it pretty easy to experiment and get neat results in just a few photos.

For Best Results:

• Shoot in the full sun. The more light, the better.
• Plastic cameras like the Holga have offset viewfinders, which result in a parallax effect. To simulate this effect, try holding your camera at a slightly different angle than you typically would.
• To further the effect, try enhancing the colors after the fact: use photo-editing software such as Photoshop to apply faux “cross-processing” effect. Here’s a great list, though googling “Photoshop cross processing tutorial” will yield hundreds of tutorials and free actions to download. 
• With a very large, soft edged brush, use the Burn Tool in your photo editing software to darken the edges of your photo to reproduce the “tunnel vision” effect of toy cameras. You can also easily recreate a fish-eye lens effect using the Free Transform tool (Ctrl + T) Remember: less is more, and being subtle with effects will give you a more “believable” photo.
• Don’t forget to experiment and HAVE FUN!

If you try out this DIY tutorial and shoot your own Faux Toy Camera photos, please leave a comment below so I can check ‘em out!

Why did you stop blogging? I just found you and you make me smile. I love your style and I would love to see more art journal pages!

Hey Dixie!

I promise didn’t quit blogging, I’ve just been super-busy getting PAPERCUTS ready for Summer shows. :D (I’ve also been sick more frequently this year than ever before in my life. My doctor says that’s what happens when kids start school: they bring home all kinds of germs to their parents. :P)

My schedule has opened up a bit, and I’m going to be devoting time to blogging daily again for the foreseeable future. (By the way, guys: if I disappear, don’t worry about me! Remember, I’m an introvert. sometimes I just have to hide from the Internet for a couple of weeks. ;D)

Re: Art Journal pages. I have been still working on my 366 project, but I am sorely overdo for scanning & sharing some pages!! (In case you haven’t been following along, I’ve been sharing art journal pages on tumblr & flickr. I’ll have some new pages to share this week(!), along with a fun DIY tomorrow ($6 faux plastic camera anyone?) and photos from PAPERCUTS July 4th (It was also the 175 Anniversary of my home town!) craft show booth.

By the way, even when I don’t blog, I update my tumblr pretty much daily. If you don’t use tumblr (no really, why are you not using tumblr?) you can also see my most recent tumblr updates in the sidebar of my blog! It automatically updates when my tumblr does.

I’m also on instagram! Follow me and say hi! :D

PS: This video is crazy inspiring! Jonah Lehrer is amazing!

Yesterday, Andrea and I were chatting about taking photos of flowers. I take a lot of nature photos, and while I don’t post or share them all, the act of taking the photos has become a simple but inspiring meditation.

We frequently hear the suggestion to “stop and smell the flowers” and I think this meditation takes that idea one step further: When we train ourselves to stop and capture the beauty that we see in the world around us, and make a habit of doing so, we begin to seek out that beauty.

And the best part? The more we train ourselves, the more beauty we see.  The world around us is suddenly full of tiny pieces of art.

As you walk around your corner of this Universe, notice the beauty around you and capture it with a camera, or jot down a few words or a quick sketch in an art journal or sketchbook. Or just take a moment to notice and focus on it.

This meditation need not be limited to nature photos, however, nor is it only for people with fancy cameras. Beauty is subjective, after all, and remember: it’s the act of taking the photo, not the photo itself. My husband has an awesome collection of photos of doors that he’s taken with instagram.

Where do you find the beauty in your life? How do you capture it?

I’ve also been having a lot of fun attempting to “capture the essence” of my home town in photos and blog posts. I keep discovering parts of the town that I’ve never seen before. Yesterday we went for a walk through the Old Athletic Field (where my dad used to umpire baseball games when I was a kid!!) and followed a wooded path to a clearing where the river just creates an awesome view.

Here are some of the photos we took:

Yesterday, Tod & I went exploring and checking out (the outside of) a cool, possibly abandoned book store here in town. I’m kind of in love. How amazing is this wall behind me? Paint + masonry + nature + time = beautiful wall.

Mah Hurrrrr. I’ve officially been blue for over a year now!! I’m really proud of that in a kind of dorky way.  I dyed my hair for most of my early twenties, but I wasn’t sure if I thought I could pull it off long-term now. I sort of feel like I wear it better now than I did then!

…and my favorite Nerd Hunk. (He’s wearing a rad Built to Spill shirt we got at their show & a Converse Jacket.)

I’m wearing a turquoise striped tee, olive denim skirt, and the same grey sweater that I always wear. Silver tights & my favorite scarf. Everything either came from the thrift store or my sister, except the scarf (which I think I got at Target a few years ago) and the tights (which came from Kohl’s.)

Now that I’ve done a few of these outfit posts, I’m slowly starting to feel more comfortable in front of the camera. I’m also quickly realizing that I am overdue for some new threads. A proper thrifting trip with my sister is imminent!!

PS: This is how I wore my hair (like basically every day) when I was in high school. Truth.

We took a little break and walked around town for a while. We picked up lunch and stopped in the comic shop for a while, and shot a whole bunch of pictures. It’s so much fun getting to work with Tod every day again. I love taking walks and exploring our town together. ♥

Today I wore my Food One tee over a grey long sleeved tee from Target. I practically live in that grey sweater (Aeropostale, Jordan gave it to me.) & olive hat (American Eagle, courtesy of some thrift store, forever ago.)  Jeans and Shoes are Converse. Necklace by one of my favorite Richmond crafters, Julia Dent.

I’ve been secretly trying to think of something neat (but positive) that I could paint/paste over this graffiti, guerilla art style in the middle of the night… Not sure what I’d paint there, though.