Hello Memorial

I used to love going to the La Habra library when I was little to either checkout The Boxcar Children Books (my favorite one being The Pizza Mystery because duh what kid didn't like pizza?) and Tiffany's debut cd because I would listen to I think we're alone now over and over again! My point being is that I love having an awesome library close to my apartment now where I can go get neat things for FREE. We've checked out a ton of movies and documentaries from there. Sometimes I just like taking the walk over when Karl is going to check out the sale they have every Saturday. Recently a movie crew took over and added on extensions of brickwork to the sides and made it look like a small prep school that will be in an Adam Sandler movie, it was so neat to see how fast they put it all up!

Below are some gorgeous pictures taken by Floyd B. Bariscale, he has a cool blog where he takes pictures of monuments and landmarks in and around Los Angeles called Big Orange Landmarks.

flickr finds

I found the following while browsing through flickr yesterday. Absolutely gorgeous stuff, I can't wait!

Letter Head

Since registering for class I've been researching letterpresses like crazy.
Pretty much every website you can find about the subject tells you to start with reading David S. Rose's Intro to Letterpress Printing. Briarpress.org is another site that's crucial to learning about it. The forums here are great. Hopefully stuff will make sense once I start the class. While it's a challenge to secure a press to buy, it seems like once you do there are a lot of people out there willing to help you find any parts, manuals or just troubleshoot so that's really reassuring.
Later I can post some of my favorite print pieces I found on flickr.

I'm (finally) getting around to working on a t-shirt design for the Nerds of Design blog. A blog my friends from school and I started to help us stay motivated and design for fun.

I shouldn't start posts as I'm leaving for the day...

Women's League

Last night was the Biz Ladies Meetup organized by Grace from Design*Sponge! My mind is still reeling from it. Walking into Design Within Reach was really overwhelming, there were so many ladies there who just looked fabulous. After grabbing a snack, I didn't want to feel like a loner so I introduced myself to the girl next to me and ta-da(!) she's rad! We sat down at the first group which had a speaker from Smith Barney to discuss financial planning and investing as women and as potential small business owners. So much information to process but really good to hear. She recommended this book to read On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl's Guide to Personal Finance

Second group was with Tanya Aguiniga, originally from Tijuana, Mexcio and a RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) grad with her MFA. It was really inspiring to hear her story and to see how driven she is is what's making everything work for her in the interesting niche of furniture design. What would YOU do if you got a $50,000 grant for your work??

The third session was with Grace. She broke down amazing PR/Marketing tips for someone who's just getting started. It's crazy how simple it actually is if you just focus on what your audience is. I think my biggest fear of what I want to do is that the market is just getting too saturated but I also think that keeping true to my vision is what will set me apart from others just following a fad.

The last group were really exciting to hear from because I love their website and wish I could buy everything from it! The ladies that started Reform School in Silverlake talked all about how they took their idea and got it off the ground. They made it clear that they are still learning and starting small is the best way to go.

Leaving the place we were asked if there was some kind of women's lib/women's league meeting in there haha which just made me think of that red hat society.

I came home just wanting to get started on planning and still as I'm writing this I'm thinking of ideas I need to jot down and organize.
------

My college pal Brenda and I registered yesterday at Armory Center for Arts for their summer session Letterpress class! I've been wanting to do this since last summer so I'm really glad it's finally working out. I've found a few other places that teach it but it was double was they charge at Armory. So my Saturdays in July will be filled with this. Here are some pictures Karl took when we went to visit it last summer.



That's it for now!

My friend Carla got me onto reading design sponge a little while ago and I have to say I'm addicted. It features all sorts of neat stuff from DIY before&after's of stuff, up & coming students designs and shop&design store guides in different cities. I was so excited to read about the girl who runs it doing an event here in LA. It's called Biz Ladies Meetup, and it's going to be at the Design Within Reach store on Beverly in a couple of weeks. This is the description of it:

"We’ll break into four groups and rotate between speakers covering PR/Marketing, Wholesaling/Retailing, Business Advice and a local designer talking about their real life success story and how they’ve balanced their life and job while taking their business from hobby to full time job."

I hope to learn a lot and use it when I get working on my personalize stationery/wedding invitation business.

Here is the photo from the Paper Source catalog of the inspiration for the cabinets on the wall thing I was talking about...



Back to work!