Lily Inspiration: Leather Scraps

-A pile of patches awaiting silkscreened adornment-

You remember the other day how we got a whole bunch of leather patches and made them into adorable little wallets? Well, even more excitingly we just got all of the scraps that were leftover from when those patches were cut out in the first place! Perfect ovals are fun to work with, but scraps! Scraps of anything are so inviting. They are all oddly shaped just begging to be re-worked into something.

-The extent of our small scrap collection-

I sat down yesterday with Mr. Smith our leather sewing machine and started to see what we could come up with... A patchwork bag perhaps?? The girls joked that I should sew ALL of the scraps into one big piece that we could roll onto a tube. Yeah right. Mr. Smith said that he wouldn't have any part of that.

-The beginning of a patch bag I'm working on-

I am excited to see all the great things that will come out of these boxes of srumpled and cast off bits! Very inspiring indeed!

- Scraps being cut into Cameo Belts-

Inspiration: Victor Dubrovsky

Today I was searching the web for hardware for the "perfect bag" we are currently designing (read yesterday's post), and somehow, through the mystery of side-tracking, I came across this. Love Victor's work. There are a lot more example here of felted animals. Check out the photo gallery here, too, if you need to look at some nice cat and dog photos (am I pms-ing?)

Lily Inspiration: Tugboat Printshop

I've been following these artists online for a while and thought I'd give a shout out to the awesome Tugboat Printshop from Pittsburgh, PA. I started printing in college and tried out etching, lino cut, and various different kinds of screen printingvia photo emulsion, cut images that you stick to the screen and painting screen filler directly onto the screen (harder than you think because you have to remember that you're drawing the negative part of the image).

This printshop specializes in wood cut, one of the oldest of printing traditions. It's quite a long process (I've only ever done one small wood cut that was about 6" wide and 3" tall) and this husband and wife team (Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth) collaborate to do some incredible large scale wood cuts. Check it out:

Bonfire, 2010

Pulling up the black detail for America the Beautiful, 2009

Forest drawing.

You can see all of these images in higher quality and read lots more about Tugboat Printshop at their website http://www.tugboatprintshop.com/

Where I Went on My Vacation: Seattle

This weekend Trish and Jan (our friend and Milkman's Daughter resident interior designer, of Modhaus) and I went to Seattle. W enjoyed the usual girls weekend activities - shopping, drinking and eating. We had a fantabulous time wandering and taking in the sights of a place that was "other" - not Victoria, not Vancouver, refreshingly other. Don't get me wrong, we looove where we live. It's just that a change of scenery is great for inspiration, for rejuvenating the imagination, and for the living in the moment experience of it all.

Trish was drawn across the middle of the street to check out this art work, which turned out to be a paper collage of a First Nations bust with a feather headdress and diamonds with diamonds. It is difficult to detect from the photo - and that's why we had to cross the street. It was really cool up close.

Love this view of the Camlin Hotel from the colourfully tiled I-5 overpass to Capitol Hill. Great ornate/concrete and glass juxtaposition.

I had been joking that my latest manicure looked like I went to an auto supply store, had them duct tape around my nails and spray them down with car paint. Then we passed by this car - hilarious!

This shop was under construction and must have had over 300 old Singer sewing machines in the windows and ready for other display.

A view from the central Seattle Public Library. It is an amazing place, designed in part by Rem Koolhaas. The ground floor wood flooring is completely covered in raised text of the first line of classic novels - amazing. It just gets more astoundingly interesting from there - the spatial design, the escalators, the carpeting, the sound scaping. Jan said it was so cool that she was still processing it the next day. Me too! It was so much to take in.

Lily Inspiration: The 70s

I don't know what's gotten into me lately, but I am seeing the 70's everywhere. Am I crazy? Do you guys see it, too? (I know Jo-Anne was last week.) In no particular order, I present a smattering of evidence!

Exhibit A: Music! The 70's-tastic style featured in this video for a single off the new Black Mountain album, Wilderness Heart, is perhaps outdone only by Kevin Barnes channeling David Bowie in this Pitchfork TV concoction.

Exhibit B: The colour brown. With its muted, "earthy" vibe, brown was definitely the old black. Personally, I am a big fan of the colour brown--it goes so well with so many other hues and, with its richer tone, is a softer alternative to black. The funny thing is that, while we never used to have brown in the shop (I even had a fabric wholesale guy once tell me in passing that Trish hated the colour), it's been creeping into the store bit by bit over the past year or so and now we have tons of it. Look out, Trish--the 70s strike again!

Exhibit C: My ridiculous 70's grandma sunglasses. Purchased a year ago for $9.99 from a rather crazy-looking vendor on Venice Beach because they were funny, I am now actually getting legitimate--and frequent!--compliments on them. I even really like them at this point--weird!

Thus, after this exhaustive exploration of the current 70's invasion, I rest my case. And, really, why not join in the 70's-inspired fun; at least it's not the 80's again, right?!!

Lily Inspiration: Nature

While photographing tees yesterday, Diana noticed a snail hovering on the cement wall near her.

At first she thought it was dead, but when she gently removed it from the wall, she realized it was alive.

We admired the structure and colours of its shell and the delicate movements of its antennae (maybe a snail print would be strange/beautiful?), and then gently placed it on the grass nearby. We got all caught up in the moment and giggled in our childlike state of being in awe of nature. Beauty and joy are everywhere - even on cinderblock walls in driveways - how uplifting!

Too bad we won't be quite so enamoured with the slugs who are soon to creep out onto our wet sidewalks.

Lily Inspiration: Other Blogs

I have to admit to a daily addiction of perusing a number of cool blogs. Design blogs are a particular guilty pleasure. I balance my guilt by keeping tabs on TED and BBC News, but all those gorgeous photos, showing off peoples' ever impressive design creativity, continue to draw me in.

Lately I was inspired by a DIY post on design*sponge, one of my daily sources of eye candy. This particular photo got my mind working on a Lilyfied project.

Brenna's waxed paper chandelier is so smart and super pretty. I decided to use her awesome lamp as inspiration for a Smoking Lily window display for our new shop, "the milkman's daughter".

I sandwiched Lily images between the layers of waxed paper and created a backdrop for the front window. Here are a few shots of the final product.

It's nice when inspiration is at the tip of your fingers! Thanks Brenna!

Yes, Eggs!

I was charmed by Nicole's last blog post - so cute that you have chickens Nicole! And yes, I agree, pleasure and inspiration can come from the smallest of things. Well, in the case of Nicole's giant egg, it was a humongous little thing.

I too was recently inspired to photograph eggs. I was vacationing in Cherryville, B.C. earlier this week and woke to our hostess coming in with fresh eggs from the barn - in a basket nonetheless! She gently washed each one, and as she placed them on a towel to dry the most beautiful linear arrangement of orbs appeared. She must have thought I was crazy as I photographed her regular morning chores (oh, silly city girl!), but I couldn't resist.

They are beautiful, no?

Smoking Lily Inspiration: Not always what you'd expect

I am not saying that I necessarily get inspired by eggs. Although I would say that going out each morning to collect the eggs from the chickens in your backyard can be quite the experience. I could go on about how beautiful it is at 5-8am (depending on the time of year that the sun is rising) or how cute it is when each of my three girlies takes the morning leap from coop to ground rushing her way quickly to the shed to get fed. Yet I am not going to. It's nice, but not super inspirational.

I am instead going to go a slightly more Smoking Lily route with things. Here we are all about getting inspired. We love sunrises, outdoors, chickens, and all that, but what's extra awesome is weird things. Things that don't happen every day.

The other morning I went out to do my morning routine, just as usual. There was a fine mist in the yard, the sun peeking it's way over the edge of the clouds, casting rays of sweet light through my fruit trees and onto my face. I opened the coop and... there was this HUMONGOUS egg. Normally there are three normal (well not by grocery store standards) but normal, to me, eggs in the nest. Today there was only one really huge egg, as though the three that were normally there had conglomerated into one single egg. I was astonished. I looked down at the girls, and said out loud at 7:15am, alone in my yard, wearing my Hello Kitty housecoat and rubber boots. "Holy crap. That must have hurt." I took it inside and lining it up next to my quilting ruler, took a picture. (it was 3 inches tall!) I'd say a grocery store egg is probably about 2'' tall.

I thought about how I would have to tell all the girls in the studio, and of course, how much you'd all like to check out this feat-of-nature chicken egg. I ended up selling that particular egg to the guy downstairs in the Pita Pit, and he asked if maybe one of the chickens was actually part ostrich. I asked him to tell me how many yolks were inside. Later he reported only one. One big one.

So yes, this is perhaps not your traditional inspiration, but it is something that brought me joy and excitement, as most inspiring things should do. I hope that today brings you giant eggs as well.

Lily Inspiration: Strange and Beautiful

Strange and Beautiful is one of our favourite combos around here - esthetically speaking. I'm sure you are all pretty aware of that, having taken home a-line skirts covered in flies, leather handbags with peek-a-boo anatomical hearts, and silk scarves with chrysantemums and sperm (our "Mums and Dads" print).

In September of 2008, Trish and I were strolling around Toronto, taking in the the sites and smells and tastes. Gathering inspiration as one always does while travelling. One day while walking well down to the end of Queen St. W., we stopped to inspect a wooden ladder that had been wrapped in colourful rags. It hit the strange and beautiful mark dead on. That ladder was filed away in our minds for future inspiration.

Then, last summer, the memory of that ladder became a Lily window display. We silk-screened 60's floral bedsheets, tore them into strips, and wound the rags around a lamp, a chair and some antlers. Strange! and Beautiful! we thought.