SOHO!

I am very excited about being accepted to be a mentor in the Visual Arts Center's program SOHO.
A Space of Her Own.

13 mentors work together with 13 girls from Gilpin court to develop her own space through art based projects. At the end of the program we get to implement all our projects into her space at home.

I can't wait to meet the girls and mentors. I volunteered at Friends Association earlier this year. They are a partner with the Visual Arts Center and they hand pick the girls!

Training for mentors should be next week and the program starts Oct 29 through June 3.

Letterpress

I took a Letterpress class the Visual Arts Center over the summer and it was pretty awesome. The process is very different from how I am working. Most of the time is spent on the preparation or designing the palette that you want printed. This takes forever! You have to fill up all the empty space that has no letters so that the letters you do want to print are tight and you have to layout everything backwards. It is like tetris, first time was killing but after that you get a hang of how to do it effectively. I actually think the palette is much more interesting than the final print!

This is my palette and prints for Thankyou cards I made for all the folks in Akron that showed us around on our company field trip to the Ten Thousand Villages corporate headquarters.



This is the palette for the Mystery Meeat poster. I need to take pictures of the print but I still need to acetone our graphic on the poster, so once I do that I'll post it.



I also printed some tiny cards but didn't photograph the palette or print. This was my first palette and it was quite complex due to spacing. I really wanted to get the most out of my paper so the layout was challenging. I wish I had a picture of it, but I'll post I'll prints soon.

Graduation Cards

I am super late on posting these but 2 of my favorite people graduated in May! I made them some graduation cards from other folks wedding cards.

John my brother in law from University of Pennsylvania - got his MBA - Whooohoooooooooooooooo - now has a killer job in NYC.
[yes...i spelled congratulations wrong on this card...ahm..i was playing of off of the word graduate?]
Divya my cousin/little sister from Virgina Tech - got her undergrad in Spanish and International Studies - yippeeee another Tech grad!!!!!!!!!!!!! - now has her dream job in DC.

Cards

While searching on the Fair Trade Federation website for jobs I came across this at Cards from Africa.

"The idea for Cards from Africa came to British founder, Chris Page, in 2004, inspired by a Kenyan doctor who had started a similar endeavor to generate income for women in a Nairobian slum. Chris teamed up with Rwandan artist Gabriel Dusabe and together they learned how to make paper and create simple card prototypes. Their first employee was a young orphaned woman named Ariette. After one month's time they asked her to bring another friend to train but she brought two! Shortly after, twenty more orphaned youth were trained and the business was born. Our profits are continually reinvested into company operations as well as the lives of our staff. Our hope is to grow to provide steady employment to 300 orphaned young people in Rwanda and to provide a model for sustainable job creation in Africa."

It's a great program and it's fair trade!

I sent in 5 designs and I don't know if any of my cards will be chosen till December but here are pictures of them.