I’m extremely honored to have a guest post featured on Luster today, my friend Jenn’s beautiful inspiration blog.  My long-time obsession with the history of the Romanov family brought me to St. Petersburg, Russia for her Wanderlust dream travel series.  Check out my full post over at Luster!

For about 2 years I’ve been trying to complete my series of five vowel posters, as an homage to the diction lesson scene in the famous Gene Kelly musical, “Singin’ in the Rain”. The hardest part was trying to follow the movie inspiration artwork as close as possible, even though the lip postures felt incorrect. Well, I’ve finally finished and have posted the series to my other etsy site: fineartslab.etsy.com. Right now each poster is 13×19″ in size, but I’m hoping to source more art paper soon in order to offer the prints in smaller, more manageable sizes for the home!

My last 8 weeks have been completely taken over with revamping the layout and photography of the catalog for April Cornell, one of Danica Imports’ major lines.  It’s been chock full of late nights and weekends full of exhausting planning but I’m proud of the work that my fellow teammates and I have been able to accomplish.

This apron photo was styled and photographed for the initial proposal presentation for April herself.  This shot was for the Fall 2010 Harvest Patchwork Skirt Apron, which is still available for purchase on April’s website here.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to make this shot work with any of the new products for the revamped catalog, but I wanted to be able to share it anyway.

Two Apartment Therapy appearances in one day!

My living room was featured again today in an Inspiration Gallery all about the color red!  I really need to take some new photos of my apartment with some of the changes we’ve made this year…

In addition, my Aviary table runner for Danica Studio was also featured in a Fall Table Linens Roundup along with the beautiful Danica Studio Margot floral, designed by Jennifer Cameron of Luster.

Matty and I invested in a studio lighting kit from a local distributor last week and finally got around to playing with it tonight.  These are a couple photos of Matty that I took during our test shoot.  Click on them to see the higher quality photos on Flickr.  No Photoshop was involved in fixing any levels or curves to get this blown out look, unlike most of my other shots where I always have to adjust for lighting.

Although Inspiron Photo has an online store, they sell their kits for cheaper on eBay, so we managed to get a pretty decent discount, plus we picked up locally for shipping savings.  We purchased the kit with two strobes plus modeling lights, stands, a softbox, umbrella, barn doors, two reflectors and some gels; all complete in a handy carrying case!  All-in-all I think it was a really good deal.

Matty and I managed to score a lot of these vintage wooden crates that we’re turning into mini-container gardens.  We’ll be putting them up on our etsy site, foundry.etsy.com, soon.

We’ve already started harvesting some of the oregano in the corner!  For our balcony, we found a good shelving unit to make into a tiered planter for these cute bins, so I’ll post more photos when we get it all set up.

Every summer I get obsessed with the Passion Tea Lemonade from Starbucks.  It’s an expensive habit.  We also like to make our own organic lemonade from scratch, but being lazy and needing a constant supply during the muggy heat waves, Matty concocted his own recipe using my favorite organic lemonade brand, Santa Cruz. A quart size bottle is always for sale at our neighborhood grocer for $1.99!

Passionate Palmer

2 cups of boiling water
1 Tazo Passion Tea bag
1/2 bottle of Santa Cruz lemonade

Steep the tea bag in the boiling water until it cools.  Mix with the Santa Cruz lemonade and chill in the fridge.  Adjust to your preferred sweetness taste with more water or more lemonade.  One batch usually fills up an Ikea Slom bottle nicely!  Matty likes to make a couple batches and keep them in the fridge, but they never last long…

My friend Jenn and I had a Groupon for a great art bar & lounge called Raw Canvas a few weeks back and last night I finally got a chance to pick up my masterpiece, “Doug the Pug”.  Inspired by the internet phenomenon, Mr. Newman, as well as a few glasses of red wine from our wine flight…  Although I’m usually wary about venturing out to Yaletown, I definitely want to test my drunk-painting prowess again sometime soon.

After a year, the posters are finally up on our etsy website: foundry.etsy.com.  These babies were saved from an attic in Point Grey.  They were thankfully still in their preserved plastic wrappers from 1977, or they probably wouldn’t have lasted long in that place.  The deceased homeowners really put the Collyer brothers to shame with their collecting habits…

I’ve been obsessed with this cute little succulent for the past couple of years, but I can never seem to keep them alive…  So this year I stocked up on a total of three little plants from Figaro’s Garden and Garden Works.  But I scored the biggest hanging plant full at the Cloverdale Flea Market for $15!  I’ve been trimming the guy down and attempting to propagate more in as many spare containers as I can find.  It’s been one week and these mini pots seem to be doing well, so hopefully my luck will change this year and I’ll have a house full of these happy plants.