As I mentioned last week, I have quite a heavy to do list. I had my days planned out hour by hour, but then my SF bestie Amanda came into town, and forgot to tell me until the night before she arrived. EEK!
I spent Thursday and Friday driving around to her favorite places (most of my fave, too!). It was nice to have her here to talk in person and just be. Bestie’s are your bestie for a reason. They will tell you when you are making mistakes, and they will offer you support the best way they can. We went to Momoko (of course) had tea and talked about life and how things were going. We spent a full afternoon going to almost every shop on South Congress (a.k.a. SoCo). Here are pics of some of the places we visited:
We had lunch here. We rated it a 5 for style, and a 3 for food. It was super cute inside, but the food we ordered wasn’t so great.
I’ve been here before when it first opened. It’s co-owned by my friend’s wife. The inside of the store is styled so well I just wanted to take pictures of everything. It was like being on a 70′s movie set. Seriously, you should check it out. I hadn’t been in there since they opened, when they carried more furniture than clothes, but now the focus is clothes. I was too into the displays and set up of the store to really notice anything other than the pair of doc martens they had that I owned in the 90′s.
This is above the window to Feathers Boutique. This image led to a discussion about designing peacock feathers. Oddly enough, Amanda and I have both had to deal with peacock feathers for clients. Amanda is a graphic designer for a museum in Oakland, and she had to do some work while she was here. I snapped a pic of her on the phone with a co-worker about a file she sent that morning. Hee Hee!
Josh says one of his favorite things about Amanda coming into town is, the three of us always go to Home Slice. There is always a wait there, but the pizza is worth the wait.
I love this sign. It is so cute!
I rarely shop on South Congress without Amanda. I used to work on South Congress, and parking down there is always a pain, so much so that I don’t want to deal with it just for myself. Honestly, most of the places I frequent in town are the places that have easy parking. I’ll let you in on a little secret, I’m not good at parking. I always stay within my lines, but I’m often crooked in there. We also made a stop in the North Loop area to check out the vintage goods at Hog Wild.
I had lots of fun, but now it’s time to double time it to keep checking things off my list. On February 11th I am going on a brief out of town trip for my cousin’s birthday, that day is also the first day of Stellar. I have quite a bit to get done before I leave town. One thing I did check off is the cleaning up of TCL. What do you think? All my roller derby posts will be under Lifestyle now, and all the food posts can be found under Inspired. Condensing my categories has actually helped me with planning out my blog posts for the year. Have you done a review of your blog recently? Time to get back to work. Check back later this week for a sneak peek of new Robo Roku goodies.
sharing sunday: friends and fun
booths through the years
Thanksgiving weekend was the 2nd annual Renegade Craft Fair Holiday Market in Austin. I can’t believe I didn’t take a picture of my Robo Roku / This Creative Life booth! Normally I design a new set up every January for the new year to cycle it through the show season. However, this year I’ve been pretty antsy and have been designing booth set ups when I should be stocking up on inventory for the rest of our holiday shows this year. I haven’t been actively making as much as I normally do because I want to sell off a good chunk of what we have now to make room for new products we’ve been working on this year to launch for 2013. We were going to sneak peek them at the holiday shows this year, but part of me is wanting to wait until the new year. I’ve also been dying to tell you all about the new goods for months! I wanted to share with you some booth set ups we’ve had over the years, these of course are not all of them, just a few so you can see how our branding and set ups have changed.
2009 Holiday Celebration at a Resort Hotel in San Antonio, TX
2011 Renegade Craft Fair spring show in Austin, TX (Our 5th RCF)
2011 Aliday Holiday Show in Oklahoma, TX
2012 Renegade Craft Fair summer show in Los Angeles, CA (Our 8th RCF)
I am eager to finalize next year’s set up, it will still have some of our trademark features, but also give our repeat customers a fresh booth to enjoy. What are you working on for the new year, anything you’re super excited about? I can’t wait for 2013!
music monday: road to renegade
This Music Monday is brought to you by the tunes that have been getting me through prep for Renegade Craft Fair Holiday Market this coming weekend in Austin. If you live relatively close, you should totally make the drive down. Renegade Craft Fair (RCF) draws artists that travel all over to showcase at their fairs. I love the creative community Renegade has built. When you travel and take the time to meet other artists you then have a group of friends near and far that you can bond over the excitement and stress that comes with being a vendor at a Renegade Craft Fair. I wish we would have done more of their shows away from home this year, but it just didn’t work out that way. This RCF show I decided to try sharing a booth with my friend Marci, of Planet Seymour (our resident stop motion girl). I was so happy that she was cool with us putting our AstroTurf down, so we can keep doing our thing. YAY! We haven’t shared a booth space with another vendor in well over two years, and it has been quite a challenge designing the space to fit all our goods and have room to breathe. I had to cut some products from our line up for RCF to fit everything, so I started with the holiday line. A new project we’ve been working on will pop up at Cherrywood Art Fair in December, but the majority of the holiday line will have to wait to be seen next year. Dropping products aside, we will have new and one of a kind goods at RCF this weekend. We do our best to always have new products/designs for each show we do so that people will have something new to find each visit. Since I’ve been busy painting, making, gluing, cutting, etc. I didn’t want to have to choose my tunes, so I’ve been on a Pandora kick. The stations I’ve been playing are Electric Light Orchestra, Ben Folds, Pearl Jam (I wasn’t crazy about this station), and a station I created based on the song Come On Get Higher by Matt Nathanson. The Ben Folds station played a lot of Death Cab for Cutie which reminded me of working on art projects in college listening to them non-stop, that seemed rather fitting. Here are some behind the scenes phone pics of my Renegade prep.
I’m a messy painter.
New Robo Roku mini portraits! We laser cut wood to make our own frames. It was fun deciding which designs were going to get framed.
Death Cab aside, my favorite song that played was on the Ben Folds station. It was a Ben Folds Five cover of Twin Falls by Built to Spill. I immediately pulled out my computer to play the original. It’s a really short song (under two minutes!). I hope you like it.
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