it is upon us.

it's late friday/early saturday and i just got back from hanging lights in the space with mark.

city of craft begins in just about ten hours. i will be back there in six.

of course, i have let my own work fall by the wayside and will need to tend to a few sweetie pie things before falling into the much needed sleep i should be getting.

if i can figure out the wireless, i will make some updates as the day goes by. those will either appear here or on the city of craft website. again, if i can figure it out. but really, you should just come on down and experience it all for yourself.

see you there!

love, attention and broadcasting.

photo by a nice lady from eye weekly
(tell me who you are and credit will be lavished upon you)

1. up there is a picture of evan webber and myself from the 'party pics' section of this week's eye magazine. that's where i sit once a month hocking buttons and comics for trampoline hall. evan's not always there smiling beside me. he did a lecture on monday about the social and economic values of auctions. this resulted in the live auctioning off of three buttons. that was a real hoot! danny shapiro's lecture was a real hoot, too. i can't even do it justice by trying to explain what went down. suffice it to say that i now think enough laughs have happened on this planet and i feel safe abandoning comedy forever.

2. i got a note this week that old friend and fellow former west coast girl guide, katie varney, has launched a new art and design blog for the canadian southwest (more commonly know as the pacific northwest). the blog is called in my back yard and i am deeply honoured to have found myself in the beginnings of her blog roll. katie and i actually reconnected a few years back when she came out to one of the catch23 shows i was in and recognized me as the little brownie she once knew. and the rest is...well, i don't know yet.

3. aitor's friend heidi also found the ugly beautiful cbs sunday morning piece on mo rocca's youtube cannel. you can now see it wherever you are!

4. speaking of aitor's fame, we also had a private viewing this evening of a short video journalism piece that our old friend q and his compatriot aaron made about aitor (and the unflattering portraits) earlier this week. it's great! while not public yet (they are trying to find a buyer in the news media), we shall let you know when it goes online. it's really beautifully shot and assembled - aaron is a photojournalist and as a result they made a piece that combines video, still images and still sequencing. really interesting stuff.

looming city.

these new buttons will be available for sale at city of craft on saturday. they will also be pinned to the swag bags that are handed out to the first 100 shoppers. don't worry, vendors and volunteers, you get some for free.

the artwork is by the ubiquitous (around here, anyway) shannon gerard. i hope i haven't mangled her vision too horridly with my layouts. she's such a genius.

another motherload.

i am sorry, rest of the world, but i have to declare that the current forerunner for envelope pattern greatness to be the united kingdom. this is all in my own humble aesthetic opinion. i would also put autralia/new zealand in a close second (i know it's uncouth the bundle australia and new zealand together but neither country seems to have much envelope distinction - the same goes for canada and the united states and i am supposed to care passionately about things like that). who knows, though? i know i have many more packages to go through including one from germany and one from lithuania. i wonder if any challengers will emerge.

but for now, i am sorting through the above contribution from sophie in london. each envelope she sent was different with most of them being new to my collection. i know the bricks are new for sure and i will have to go through the dots and honeycombs to see what's what. regardless, i am going to allow myself to make a few buttons tonight so that these new patterns can make it into my city of craft installation.

did i mention that you should come to that?

a new leaf.

i never get political with my buttons but when my friend albert requested that i make him a single pin of this design (in tory blue, at his suggestion, which i took from the cbc website), i decided it was time to go public. this country is really bizarre right now and i want to maintain some rights as a worker, a woman and an artist. so stephen harper's not the evil elf for me.

if you feel differently, i am not really up for a fight as i am usually the type who votes with my vote. but should you feel so moved, i suggest you just make your own buttons.

these are available for purchase as cheap as i could make them at both the blue house and my etsy shop.

tally ho.

if my calculations are correct (and they may not be) i have personally made 103,191 buttons since i began recording on may 26, 2005.

dutch wife.

above is my first (and only, thus far) contribution from the netherlands. it comes from designer andre brocatus who also included personal notes attached to each envelope. falling right into design stereotype, these dutch envelopes embody the type of clean design that i tend to associate with northern europe. they have also presented me with a new problem - how do i deal with solid colours for my project? this is something i am going to have to turn over in my head because although they do not house the patterns i had originally expected to find, they do represent a unique approach to design and security. that top one, though, is aces. i really like the fact that the pattern is so big, too, so that buttons will only present a small part of it. some will be bleak, some will be busy.

i should also mention that these envelope updates are not happening in real time anymore. i have been so busy with city of craft and last week's trip to montreal that i have a contribution backlog of at least twenty packages. on weekdays i am still receiving more envelopes than i can properly go through in a day, so this backlog will only grow for a while. i thank all contributors for their patience in waiting for their blog attention and rewards. trust me, if i could i would just fall into an envelope coma and do nothing else. but currently it might be more important to make next weekend's city of craft the best craft show ever.

did i mention you should go to that?

ps: the multipurpose definitions of dutch wife.