Filed under: design, favorites, friends, paper by ramune

A few weeks ago my friend Vaiva and I dropped by Philly for a night to visit our friend Rasa and help with any wedding planning/decompressing/relaxing. One of the things we did that day was help come up with themes for the tables at the wedding. After a few duds it was decided that the theme would be different kinds of leaves. I volunteered to make the leaves and the seating chart for the wedding and I am pretty excited with the results. At one point I sent Rasa a text message with a photo of the first two leaves I had cut and she asked if they were real.

The green leaves were for all of the guest tables and the gold leaves were for the head table.

In total I hand cut 39 leaves out of card stock. It was fun and completely worth it even if my wrist was screaming a few times during those spiky leaves.

Two of my favorite (and most difficult/time consuming) leaves to cut were the sycamore and chestnut leaves. Please excuse the distracting blur used to protect the innocent (and not so innocent).

I am not sure who suggested it or if it was a joke at first, but the leaf chosen for the head table was an Ent leaf. This posed a challenge because there is no one Ent leaf (well, there is no such thing as an Ent either . . . or is there?) and I didn’t want to make it too cheesy.

Len the Oak Ent

Rasa the Maple Ent

The seating charts were posted on a column in front of the garage (the reception was in a tent in the driveway and the food was served from a nicely disguised garage).

The centerpieces came together quite well I think. The wood bases were made by Aistis (a fellow friend of the family) and the Krupnikas (Lithuanian honey liquor in the little bottles) was made by my friends Vaiva and Aleksa earlier this summer when we were in Philly.

Since I was in the wedding I didn’t take too many photos, but I managed to get a few here and there. It all came together so well considering all the stress involved. Rasa planned the entire wedding herself with help from family and friends. The ceremony and reception were both at her parents’ house and her catering company catered the event. Those of us who were there before the wedding, from the locals to those who came a week to a few hours before, all helped out in the kitchen, setting up and doing pretty much anything else that needed to get done. All in all, it was a fantastic time!

Filed under: collage by ramune

This project was actually meant for Super Arrow‘s first assignment, however I missed the deadline by a day (thinking that they would still accept it, which they did not) and now it is a creative project for my blog. Yay. I don’t think I’ve made a collage since I was in college, and normally I am not that interested in cutting stuff out of magazines and putting it together for some greater meaning, however that was the whole point of the assignment . . . to do something that is not your specialty.

This collage started out with probably five times as many elements and then I drastically simplified it. I like it better this way.

Filed under: music, photography, travel by ramune

For the past couple of weeks I was in NYC enjoying the company of my sister and friends. It was a lovely time filled with several concerts (two of which were free!), lots of walking, wandering and eating. Here is a selection of some of my favorite photos from my visit. More can be seen in my NY set on flickr.

My sister and I spent a good portion of this day wandering around in the rain until eventually we found an umbrella . . . but by then it had mostly stopped raining.

No pair of shoes on a wire is complete without a baby or two.

Hyperspeed through the Williamsburg Bridge

Let it be known she did not build that sandcastle, she just posed by it.

One of the main reasons I planned my trip when I did was to coincide with Warp Record’s 20th anniversary events. I saw Flying Lotus, !!!, Battles, Hudson Mohawke and Clark (shown above). I have wanted to see Clark live for a while now and didn’t think he would ever make it to this side of the Atlantic, so I was thrilled to be able to see him play with a variety of nobs in person.

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Filed under: doodle, favorites by ramune

This guy materialized in front of me while sitting in my car last week. He’s a little shy and gets nervous when people look him in the eye, which is why he has all those decoy eyes . . . to throw you off. He doesn’t have a name yet but I think maybe he would not be as freaked out by you if you gave him one. Not Mr. Bubbles though . . . that just isn’t his style.

“Why were you drawing in your car last week?” you ask . . . well here is that story. A couple weeks ago I drove up to NYC for a change of scenery and to visit my sister and some friends. I could probably have taken the Bolt Bus up as I do quite often, but for a number of reasons I decided to drive instead. Although driving has it’s advantages, there is also the (necessary) annoyance of biweekly alternate side street cleaning (although I really think weekly would be fine). On my sister’s street I can either move my car every Monday/Thursday or every Tuesday/Friday depending on the side of the street. I opted for the Tuesday/Friday special. On each of those days during my visit I would go down to my car at 11am, sit with my windows open and wait until the street cleaners came through, at which point I would drive around and come back to roughly the same spot and then continue to sit until 12:30pm. Cops would come and go, but as long as I was sitting in my car I would not get a ticket. At first I dreaded these 1.5 hour disturbances in my day, but then I came to embrace them as forced moments away from my computer (I did try to bring my lappy 486 into the car and get wifi, but had no luck). Sometimes I would knit, sometimes I would draw and sometimes I would try to get some non-internet work done on my laptop. My friend above was one of these creations that kept me company.

The funny thing about all this is that I am not the only one doing the biweekly car rotations. There are loads of people all over NYC taking their lunch breaks in their cars twice a week while the cleaners clean their streets. What blows my mind is that most of them just sit and do nothing for those 1.5 hours. Please excuse the very brief and poor quality video I took with my cellular device, but you can kind of see the silliness of the situation. Cars sit on the street, then the cleaner comes up behind them and they basically just drive around in a circle and pull right back into their spots. I had to cut the video short because it was my turn to turn like the rest but I think you get the idea. I would really love to get an aerial video of the whole thing but that might have to wait.