it's good to be home

i am in ohio for the weekend, marveling at the perfect combination of very cold air and very bright sun.

first batch of prints

in preparation for MICA's annual art market, i have finally started making prints of my illustrations, on high quality, white enhanced matte paper. prints will shortly be available in my etsy shop (coming soon)!

embroidery experiment

this is what i did today. i liked working on it, so i might incorporate embroidery into my thesis to give it a more special quality.

doll

i am slowly expanding my horizons, starting with embroidery and attempting to hand-sew this doll, which i designed last year. i have off-white muslin for the body and cotton fabric remnants for simple clothes. if the experiment is a success, hello corduroy and tweed!

this bird had flown

i have just discovered that there is going to be a film adaptation of haruki murakami's "norwegian wood," my favorite book in the universe, starring ken'ichi matsuyama and rinko kikuchi (from "babel"). i am reading it for the third time right now, and it feels like crawling under the coziest down blanket on a starry winter night.

daily sketchbook, nine

daily sketchbook, eight

i just checked out two books from the school library that i am very excited about: "wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers" by leonard koren and "six names of beauty" by crispin sartwell.

previously unseen prague sketchbook pages

above are some pages from my prague sketchbook that i have not shared yet. i remembered them while re-scanning the other ones today. they are all from my last days in the czech republic, which i spent reflecting on my life in the previous five months and slowly preparing to look forward.

positively kafkaesque

before leaving prague, one of the last things i did was visit the franz kafka museum. photography is not allowed in the museum but i just had to sneak one in, of a small drawing that kafka did of himself sitting at his desk. i did something so similar in my sketchbook last year!

daily sketchbook, seven

i have recently become fascinated with people photographed by the sartorialist and of course, the best way for me to fully process the images is to draw them.

contemporary japanese fashion

yesterday b. and i went to washington and finally paid a visit to the textile museum, which is hidden away in neat and quiet embassy row. the current exhibition, "contemporary japanese fashion," features three designers: yohji yamamoto, issey miyake (top), and my favorite of the three, rei kawakubo of comme des garçons (bottom). her work is extra bizarre and some of it is quite unflattering to the body, but her explanation - "what is beautiful doesn't have to be pretty"- really resonated with me.