New KittenPaws Blog!

My blog has moved! Find me over at the Kitten Paws Vintage blog!

Silly 80s Sweatshirts

Just a few more images from this weekends shoot. Lately I've been finding quite a few silly 80s sweatshirts that are in awesome shape. Pictured above are some of my favorites. In other news looks like I have models lined for the next two weekends so expect many more awesome pictures very soon!

Sneak Peek: She Brought the Fierceness

Yesterday I went on a little photoshoot with the lovely Miss Rachel Sherman, and boy did she bring the fierceness! We decided to go all 80s and do the shoot with a more Urban landshape. Downtown Phoenix was the perfect spot with all of it's brightly colored buildings and artist friendly environment.

For whatever reason half of two of the rolls were not scanned onto the photo cd so I need to go back tomarrow and get a new cd. Also Walgreens has a tendency for overexpose on their negative scans for whatever reason so I may just get them scanned somewhere else! Anywho here's a few of my favorites. They should be up in the Kitten Paws shop very soon.... :o)

KittenPawsVintage Buisness Cards

Simple business card I made for KittenPaws. I've slowly started to put a few in coffee shops around town, even left a few in China, and now will be including them in most packages when I think of it... :)

Its Raining Its Pouring

So I live in a place that is classified as a desert. For whatever reason over the past couple of days it has been raining like crazy. Arizona got as much rain yesterday as it gets in an entire year! There was even a tornado warning. Besides the burning hot sun, southern Arizona usually has the most incredibly mellow weather so it's just so strange....!

Anywho I have lots of exciting projects I am working right now and I can't wait to share. I made some cute greeting cards I am going to most likely put up for sale on etsy sometime this week after I go feel some paper at Xpedx and pick out my envelopes then take pretty pictures of the final results. I keep going back and forth on whether or not I should open up a separate etsy shop for my creative work but for now everything is going to be under the umbrella of KittenPaws. Theres something about keeping a strong brand identity and I don't want to lose that, but it's just a lot less work to have two different stores and I think buyers on etsy appreciate a vintage seller who is also a creative. Clever Nettle is one my favorite vintage sellers, based out of Portland (one of my favorite places!) and she occassionally sells her artwork alongside her vintage goods so yay! Much inspiration to be found.... :)

Tour De Coffee

This week I decided to do a little celebration of being American by way of coffee drinking. While I was in Asia I did not have a lot of good coffee. Sure they can do tea pretty darn good, but not so much on the dark delicious coffee beans. So everyday this week I went to a different favorite coffee shop....yum! Here is my list of coffee shops and drinks:

Wed: Starbucks-Peppermint Mocha
Thurs: Coffee Rush- Coconut Mocha
Fri: Dutch Brothers- Double Chocolate Mocha
Sat: Xtreme Bean- Cafe Mocha X
Sun: Gold Bar- Straight Up Mocha
Mon: Cartel- Dirty Chai
Tues: Steves Espresso- Aztec Mocha

Apparently I have a thing for Mochas...... so good!

Little Red and the Big Bad Wolf

So I like to make gifts for people. For Christmas I decided to make Andre a little drawing. He currently has this obsession with having a pet wolf. I, being a somewhat safe and cautious person, am against this idea. For a while he was collecting pictures of baby wolf puppies to try to convince me that I wanted a wolf puppy too. They are awfully cute I will admit, but I still don't want one as a pet! Anyways that is part of the back story of this drawing. One of my nicknames is little red due to the red hue of my locks so it just kind of made since, me as little red and him as a carebear wolf child boy... :)

River Jones Music Label Tees

Lets take a little trip down memory lane, shall we? About four years ago, I had just turned 21 and it was one of my first nights out. I was on the dance floor at a little dive bar called Rogue. At the time their Saturday night dance parties were completely out of control, lets say off the hook even. I couldn't help but let the music take over. I was what some would call a dancing machine. It was on such a night that I met Mr. River Jones, a local rockstar, who seeing my true potential through my crazy dance party moves asked me to be in his band. He didn't care that I didn't play bass, he would teach me.We got together a few times and the whole band thing didn't end up working out but we became friends and I think we both knew we would work together sometime in the future on some exciting project.

With this introduction, I present tshirts for the River Jones Music Label! A few years ago River started his own record label and began to record and promote local indie rock and folk bands. He started mainly working with Courtney Marie Andrews, then signed on several more bands. This year he has signed on even more artists and I am so excited to hear all of the new talent. Every single band he currently works with I absolutely love listening to, so this year should be an incredible year for music. River is such a swell guy and I am very excited to see his label grow and succeed. So cheers to you Mr Jones!

Treasures!

So today I am finally ready to make some updates to my etsy shop! I wasn't able to put anything new up while I was away so the shop is in major need of beefing up. This week I'm focusing on jewelry and accessories which is something I haven't really done before and am quite excited about. I had some mustard yellow vintage disposible coasters that worked perfectly for the jewelry packaging. I also recently aquired some absolutely adorable block cut printed cards from lisabretrostyle  and am planning on using them for my next set of packaging yay!

Breaking the Silence

“Consume Less,

Contribute more

Speak the words

that are welling up inside

Open my mind

To the possibility

That I am relevant

That I am alive

Breaking the silence

The invisible is visible

WAKE UP!! Wake up.

Participate Anticipate

Feel the Weight

Give, Live

Share the Love”

So I took these pictures right before I left and kind redid the coloring a bit which I think looks much more interesting. The battery in my Pentax died during this shoot so half of the images weren't metered correctly and looked kind of dull so this kind of makes up for that. Anywho I've been wanting to make something for awhile now on this topic of "loosing my voice". Its something I've felt over the last few years, just becoming less of an outgoing person and strangely more and more silent. The silence is something I don't enjoy but for whatever reason it's something that constantly takes a hold of me.

In contrary since I've arrived back in the states I've felt uncharacteristically talkative. Part of it is that I have a lot of catching up to do with friends and many stories to tell, but part of it also is in response to being in a foriegn country for three months and not really being able to adequately communicate with people around me. Obviously I talked with Andre a ton and a few of his friends a little bit, but not being able to communicate with a waitress or someone who works in a store or someone you bump into on the street is a strange thing. I've been awkwardly delighted this week interacting with random people who I can understand and who can understand me! The things you take for granted....! Anyways I hope this spirit of talkativeness doesn't go away. I really hope this is a new chapter and I stop taking my voice and ability to communicate and share ideas for granted!

Illustrated Story Book Poster Series

While I was away I planned on doing a ton of photography. Because it was so freezing cold I didn't do quite as much as I had planned, but I did start getting back into some illustration work which had kind of been put on the shelf this past year. The posters shown are some of my favorites out of the collection. They are inspired by the characters and style of vintage childrens story books. Enjoy :o)

More Travel Pics- Film

 Here are a few more images from my winter travels! These were taken in Nanjing and Shanghai. I got this roll developed at a Kodak while I was in China and they somehow totally gashed the bejesus out of the negatives which is why there are scratches and burns in some of them. I'm not really sure how this is possible, even the first rolls of film I developed my self in school never ended up this mangled! A bit frustrating, but at the same time it's just kind of another layer of the story which is kind of cool... Anywho enjoy :o)

Winter in China

Hello all,

So for the past three months as this blog has been growing more and more cob webs I have been overseas in Asia visiting my bf who is currently stationed there on a year long study abroad. It was quite a trip with much love, many adventures and a surprising amount of creative productivity! I was unfortunately not able to update this blog because blogspot (as well as freedom of speech) is blocked in China. There are definitely ways to get around it but I was not successful at any of them so again my blog was neglected...!

On top of hanging out with Andre, eating lots of chinese food, traveling, studying the culture, meeting lots of cute kittens and one big bad wolf I worked on a few creative projects:

1. A series of Tshirts for River Jones Music Label
2. The new Kitten Paws Vintage website (!)
3. An illustrated poster series project inspired by vintage childrens story books
4. A line of adorable greeting cards
5. Lots and lots of research on vintage selling
6. New design of my porfolio site (still pending)

Images to follow in the next few blog entries of numbers 1, 3, and 4 as well as some more artistic photographs of some of the details of my trip :o)