Tito and I had a very good weekend at our first summer show. Thank you to everyone who came out to see us, or sent well-wishes! Next up; we’ll be at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Market Saturday July 11th and July 18th, more details coming soon :)
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Carla – a blog reader who drove all the way from Paris, Ontario to come and see us! 
Sunday was projected to rain all day with afternoon thunderstorms, but it was pretty much like this all day long. 
These samples are from a spinner/weaver who has been gathering and spinning the hair from Kim’s highland cattle – I was amazed at how soft it was. 
This is John, from Alpacas from Eighth and Mud – a farm that we plan to visit in the near future. They sell yarn and roving, can’t wait! 
I got to hold Kim’s baby chickens, so soft! 
Pam, of Looner Creations, where Tito and I both bought chainmail bracelets. We love them! -
<><><><><><><><><> Showtime this weekend! <><><><><><><><><>
We’d love to meet you! The Blue Brick will have a booth at ‘Art in the Vineyard’, a free event being held by
Frogpond Farm Organic Winery this coming Saturday and Sunday.Frogpond Farm is located at 1385 Larkin Rd. L0s 1J0, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and the show will be one from 11am to 5pm both days. If you’re free this weekend and you live in Southern Ontario, take a drive out to drink some fabulous wine, enjoy the country
and, of course, see us and a host of other amazing artists.We’ll have all kinds of goodies, including jewelry, accessories, shawl pins, sterling silver pieces
and printed copies of Resin Jewelry, 2nd Edition for sale!
When I’m very tired, I have the nuttiest, longest, most vivid and detailed dreams. Tomorrow is the show, last night was my last evening to do inventory and I was exhausted by the time I got to bed. My dream was so weird I had to share it!
While I’m detailing my bizarre little dream, here are a series of photos from the production days leading up to this show. We have a great selection, including sterling silver, printed copies of Resin Jewelry, 2nd Edition, shawl pins, leather wrist wraps, rings and earrings. Hopefully I’ll get to see a few of you this weekend!
I dreamt I was on a cruise ship, and we were at some random island. Now, it’s important to know that the only bug that will have me running for the hills instead of running for my macro lens is the mighty centipede, and I dreamt that this island had the biggest, thickest, most horrid centipedes ever.
BUT there was this team of knitters who had scientific evidence that when you knit a centipede into a cosy they became as loving, cuddly and playful as kittens.
So here I am, dreaming about all the banal details like taking pictures, eating at a buffet and even dropping my phone, But through it all is this thread, that I’m trying to work up enough courage to give a cosy’d centipede a chance, because everyone says they’re really wonderful, but I’m just full of NOPE.
To boot, a a centipede cosy sounded like a really complex knit! Forget gloves with fingers!
So that’s my silly dream :) And now, it’s showtime!
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<><><><><><><><><> Showtime this weekend! <><><><><><><><><>
We’d love to meet you! The Blue Brick will have a booth at ‘Art in the Vineyard’, a free event being held by
Frogpond Farm Organic Winery this coming Saturday and Sunday.Frogpond Farm is located at 1385 Larkin Rd. L0s 1J0, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and the show will be one from 11am to 5pm both days. If you’re free this weekend and you live in Southern Ontario, take a drive out to drink some fabulous wine, enjoy the country
and, of course, see us and a host of other amazing artists.We’ll have all kinds of goodies, including jewelry, accessories, shawl pins, sterling silver pieces
and printed copies of Resin Jewelry, 2nd Edition for sale!
One of the facets of my day job is photography; I’ve been shooting since I was 8 years old and my dad taught me how to use his Minolta SLR. Photography was my first love.
Ever wondered what the shadow of Toronto’s skyline looks like? The most fun I get to have on the job is aerial photography. I love working from rooftops and helicopters, and it’s a good thing because aerial is a fairly specialized skill. You have to be able to shoot from a moving object, often in challenging light conditions–especially if the client wants evening light.
You have to be able to stabilize the camera in strong winds, and constantly adjust your settings for the changes in light that are inherent in a shoot where you are slowly circling your target.
Finally, you have to know that 90% of your shots will be winners, because it’s not cheap to get you up there. I love the challenge, I love the perspective it gives me, and I love these shots!
Because recent events have made me paranoid, and because these shots belong to the client who financed the shoot, please do not use these photos, or ask me if they can be licensed, because in this case I will have to decline. Thank you!
The Don Valley Parkway, and a great view of how green Toronto is 
The intersection of two of our two major highways, the 401 and the DVP 
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<><><><><><><><><> Showtime this weekend! <><><><><><><><><>
We’d love to meet you! The Blue Brick will have a booth at ‘Art in the Vineyard’, a free event being held by
Frogpond Farm Organic Winery this coming Saturday and Sunday.Frogpond Farm is located at 1385 Larkin Rd. L0s 1J0, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and the show will be one from 11am to 5pm both days. If you’re free this weekend and you live in Southern Ontario, take a drive out to drink some fabulous wine, enjoy the country
and, of course, see us and a host of other amazing artists.We’ll have all kinds of goodies, including jewelry, accessories, shawl pins, sterling silver pieces
and printed copies of Resin Jewelry, 2nd Edition for sale!
<><><><><><><><><> Update on Me vs. Elastoform <><><><><><><><><>
There is no update, sadly. They continue to use my photography and ignore my emails. I am continuing to email them and share my story, along with the other artists. They have an Etsy site, and I found a Facebook page, so I will be contacting them through that avenue as well. Fingers crossed!
I’ve really had the design bug lately, and my latest is finally starting to take form! As soon as I saw Tanis Fiber Arts’ new colours, Graphite and Saffron, I knew they had to appear together in a garment, and so the ‘Leslie’ top was born.
These are only sneak peeks right now because the design is not ready yet. I need to rip back the front to where my neckline shaping begins because it’s slightly off-centre and I’ve had to tweak my charts. On the whole though, once it’s ready I believe it will be a very fast, comfortable knit with no complicated shaping or techniques.
Stockinette in the round rocks. Is there anything so fast and mindless? I loved working the middle of this shirt, as silly as it sounds.
Can’t wait to finish this up and get shooting. On a slightly unrelated note, I have finally acquired a mannequin and I’m dying to take pictures of her :)
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This company (Elastoform) has shamelessly stolen images from my website and blog and are using it to promote their own product. In addition to that, they have stolen my logo form along with the graphic, added their own type to it, and to add insult to injury, they have watermarked the entire thing with their company name. Watermarks are done to prevent others from stealing, so you can imagine how I feel about this.
My original image from my Shopify site 
Their horribly altered image, keeping my logo form and jewellery and adding their own watermark and text. The company is in the Ukraine, so legal recourse is basically unavailable. An effort to email them has had no response. I explored the rest of their site and discovered that they also stole this image:
In addition to my work, I recognized the work of 8 other resin artists that I am familiar with. I have emailed all of them, and they are understandably upset. One of them happened to speak Russian and alerted me to the fact that there is actually an “I stole the photo. What can be done” section on their site:
So this happens often enough that they don’t care. They put the onus of proof on the victim of the violation. They ask for EXIF data which, because I work with graphics in my day job, I am familiar with, but which I bet very few others are. Furthermore, EXIF data can be altered in any number of ways; they edited my graphics on another machine, the original might be a screen grab, there is metadata removal software etc. The other option is equally absurd – send them an unprocessed high resolution original to prove my ownership? Are you mad? “Here, let me facilitate your theft with a better quality file that you can edit easily” Right.
I’m pretty angry. This is my personal artwork, of our one-of-a-kind creation and our company logo, lovingly made, staged, photographed and processed and it hurts to see it stolen and altered. It is, for all intents and purposes, a photo of us. This is their attitude towards it (taken from the site):
“We would like to draw your attention that according to the user agreement:
«Prom.ua is not responsible for the use (both lawful and unlawful) third party information posted on the website, including reproduction and distribution, carried out both within the portal, and any other means possible.
All the information posted on the portal is considered to be the property of Members to place it as long as there is no reason to believe otherwise. Portal users do not receive any rights to use the information posted by other Users are solely responsible to the owner of the information for its misuse. “
At the same time, all the information contained on this website is owned by the user who posted.
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There is an email for reporting abuse of intellectual property rights; abuse@prom.ua which I will be practically spamming until they take my work down. I don’t know if they will listen, and I don’t know what other options there are if they ignore me. If you’re reading this, and you’re one of the other artists who has had work stolen by this website, I encourage you to email the heck out of them as well.
While I was loathe to play into their BS (and I will not be providing EXIF data or high resolution originals) I also submitted their form here for reporting image abuse (Google translate link). Here is what happened when I tried to submit the form:
So that’s obviously not something they pay much attention to either. The fact that I’m even dealing with this makes me sad and disappointed. This is a disgusting business practice that steals from the talent and hard work of others and it needs to be shut down. I will not drop this and let these people continue to use my work and my logo with impunity. If anyone has any suggestions beyond social media exposure I would love to hear it!
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There is a Pinterest board that I follow called ‘Yarn‘ by user Viola Bow that showcases yarn from around the internet, with a great focus on indie dyers and Etsy shops, as well as larger companies. If you’re always looking for fresh yarn options I highly recommend. Through her, I discovered See Jayne Knit, and immediately fell in love.
Shown are 2 very similar colour ways; ‘Tut Tut, Looks Like Rain‘ and ‘Sand and Sea Glass‘. I bought sock and lace weight (perhaps another featherweight cardigan?) and I loved them even more in person. I especially love that she ties a little stitch marker to each skein – so cute!
What’s the best pattern to showcase such gorgeous, variegated yarn? After angsting over my decision on Ravelry I settled on the gorgeous Henslowe by Beth Kling (of whom I’m a huge fan; I’ve also made Jackson Square, and I’ve got my eye on Loie). I’ve made Henslowes twice before, and gave both away as gifts, I figured it was time for my own.
A gift for Leslie 
A gift for Tito’s mom; modelled by Leslie ;) In other words, I am no Henslowe rookie. I cast on, aimed for 64 yarn overs (thanks to the generous 500 yards in her sock yarn skeins) and cast on. This thing flew off the needles in no time. Helped in no small way by how gorgeous and addictive the yarn was.
And I love how it looks with my resin jewelry – perfection! But then comes the bind off. I’ve done this before, I know what’s coming. I know that Henslowe is so beautiful that it’s all worth it in the end… but somehow that never helps.
I feel like this took me an hour. And after a Lord of the Rings marathon? It looked like this:
I mean, is there any progress at all there? Can you tell? Spot the difference? I feel like I’ve entered a knitting time warp. I shall persevere though, because it’s working out to be one cool, wet summer and I really want this shawl!
What about you ? What patterns never seem to end but are totally worth it? What do you do to make knitting go faster? A stiff drink seems counter productive, and you can’t run on a treadmill and knit (I’ve tried, I put my yarn cake in the drink holder, huge mistake). Ideas?
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I’ve had a revelation about knitted sweaters, and it seems so obvious in retrospect that you’re gonna laugh. I have always had trouble knitting a sweater that actually fit me, and generally they’re too small. All of a sudden it came to me; I’ve been choosing my bra size (36) instead of my actual bust size (40). Obvious, right? But this one silly thing evaded me. Now, go on and laugh.
Armed with my new knowledge, I’ve decided to take the plunge again. To make sure that I wouldn’t screw this up, I decided to give Amy Herzog’s CustomFit a try. I had Tito take my measurements to make sure they would be correct (his mom is a seamstress), plugged them into the system, swatched up some fabric using a skein of Tosh Lace that I’d had for a long time (colour way: Earl Grey), washed, measured, and chose the Featherweight Cardigan by Hannah Fettig.
Amy has a different way of measuring gauge swatches that is supposed to be more accurate. I followed the directions as carefully as I could and cast on. I even decided to be brave enough to knit the seamed version.
My first thought was ‘there is no way this is the back of a sweater’.
Rayna assured me that every knitters she knows who created a CustomFit sweater loved the results, to trust the pattern and keep going. Once I’d knit my way to the armholes, I stretched it out, and lo! The size was dead on. CustomFit rocks!
I’ve finished the back (took no time at all, for anyone who wants to try but is intimidated by the idea of a lace weight cardigan) and have started the fronts. My only concern now is that when I stretched it out I noticed some extremely strange pooling at the bottom:
See that diamond? Very weird. Looks like a coffee stain. I had to choose between frogging a lace weight sweater down to the hemline, vs living with the coffee stain. I put the question to my online knitter club (e.g. Instagram) and the overwhelming response was ‘it will be ok, onwards!’. So onwards I go, fingers crossed!
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On Saturday night I caught this beauty rising over the lake – a perfectly timed blood moon is such a lucky shot!
Sunday I caught this lovely angle. Sadly, not such a rare occurrence around here.
Sunday was also the day that I finished our latest batch of sterling silver, bought the table, chairs and tent for our first art festival (<2 weeks away!) and got a chance to shoot some of our latest! I am in LOVE with how this viola preserved:
And this purple iris has so much lovely detail:
And these days I’m really hooked on how sterling silver, turquoise resin and birch bark look together!
Finished off a few gorgeous rings as well:
And then got another shot of my handsome cat, doing his thing. Almost as majestic as that moon shot, right?
We are totally pumped for our first show. Check out this link to see our summer art festival schedule! As always, if you love my work and feel inspired to make your own resin jewellery, check out my how-to book for everything you need to know; supplies, techniques and tips on how to not only work with resin, but choose and preserve flowers. You can learn more here :)
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Yesterday we went out to do a little shooting for a table banner we could use at the festivals this summer. I wanted something that showcased the spectrum of materials, and flowers that we worked with. We took a bunch of our pieces and laid them out on a dark, distressed wood background:
Though it’s not a complete spectrum, and I think I would have preferred a lighter background, I do like the results! It translated into a lovely banner;
While we were at it, we also tried hanging some of our sterling silver work in the trees:
And laying out some of my favourite pieces (turquoise, of course!) on the wooden seating areas:
We’re getting closer to showtime, and everything is ramping up for us; production for one, but also the small things involved in running a business like graphics and marketing, promotional materials, book keeping, inventory and materials (like tents, tables etc.). It’s fun, but a little tiring too, and it’s taking a lot of time away from my fiber’y pursuits. It’s not taking anything away from how excited I am for the first show though! Check out our summer show schedule here!
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I love spring for lots of reasons; the temperatures are comfortable, the novelty of nice weather is fresh, the nights are still cool enough for knitted shawls and scarves. Most of all though, spring is a time of great inspiration for my work because so many beautiful flowers are in bloom. When we did our marketing shoot, I couldn’t help but grab a few quick shots of the flowers in the area as well, I can’t wait to preserve some new batches for my jewelry.
I have always said that the beauty in what we do is taking something transitional by nature; and turning into a permanent piece of wearable art. I love the bright colours and texture that resin preserves, to be admired for years to come. Though our humble work comes close, nothing really beats the beauty of freshly bloomed flowers!
The Blue Brick 