Gyotaku Prints

OK- for those of you that have been following my blog, you may remember that I promised to show you what my brother was sending me (from the mainland) to sell at my craft fair... Well, the package only arrived yesterday, so it didn't make it in time for the fair. Anyway, a bunch of you had inquired what he was sending me, so I thought I'd post it anyway. He took a class earlier this year on how to do Gyotaku (I think it means fish printing). I remember going to summer fun and making fish prints, but we used really junk paint and it never really looked like the fish. I was quite impressed to see that my brother's prints came out so nice... though I really shouldn't have been that surprised, since he's pretty much a perfectionist. Yes, he's the painter in the family. My sister draws, I craft and he paints. So here's the prints he sent... they are all on 8x10 rice paper. If you are interested, email me. Otherwise, I may try to sell them at a craft fair here in Hilo in the near future. If you are interested in a larger sized print, you can email me and I can put you in touch with him directly since I don't know what he has in the larger sizes. OK here goes... this first two are of minnows... Here's a baby octopus he found one day at the fish market. Score!! It think this is my favorite of the bunch. Here's the Ebi (Shrimp)... One shrimp.... Two shrimps... See his Chop??? He made that himself too!!! He actually carved it because he couldn't find one with our name on it in that larger size.

Easter Seals Gingerbread House

This past Sunday was the annual Gingerbread House Decorating Event for Easter Seals at Sanga Hall. Ever since Akemi was a toddler, we took her to decorate a gingerbread house. It was so much fun, I even bought this lazy susan to make it easier to decorate (I'm crazy I know)... Akemi is finally old enough to decorate the house herself, so all I did this year was put the icing on it for her to add her candies. Grandma Kat is our construction crew, so she helped us to put the house together. Its so much fun to get together to do this project. Akemi wanted to make one half of the roof in M&M's and the other half in snow caps (yum!). We put a heart over the door to show our love! When Akemi asked for lollipops this year, I didn't know how she was going to put them up. Daddy figured out that if you stick the stick end into the gumdrops, it makes a good "pot" for them. She said the lollipops were her plants/trees. I think she's been playing too much plants vs. zombies! About 1/2 way through, someone came by and offered us extra gingerbread pieces, which we could not resist... Daddy made Kiki a dog house outside (yeah right, like she'd ever sleep outside!), and you can't really see from this blurry photo, but Grandma Kat made a little Kiki doggie out of mini marshmallows. I think Akemi ate more than what went on the house! Our neighbor sat on our table and was nice enough to take our photo with our gingerbread house. We had a blast this year making our house and watching what everyone else came up with. The commercial side was even more impressive- too bad I forgot to take photos of those too! The bestest thing about this event (other than decorating the house) is we don't have to clean up!!!!

Class Goodies

Christmas Break has arrived! Well, not really for me, but for my family, so I've been busy (in between my calendar making) finishing up making xmas goodies for Akemi's class. We went more practical this year and bought some xmas themed pencils from Walmart. It was about a dozen in a pack (3 designs) for $1! Can't beat that price, so I picked up several packs so that I could give each child one of each pencil. Packaging pencils has always been an issue for me- its long, skinny, and never seems to fit nicely in a bag. Luckily, I remembered Jean's post on Dandelion Designs Blog which would work for my pencils. Jean has really neat ideas, so if you haven't visited her blog yet, you'll want to check it out for great templates and ideas for her cute stamps! Thanks Jean! Anyway, all I did was measure the size of the pencils to come up with my custom packaging. I don't have a crimper for the ends, so I just sealed it using my double stick tape. Punched two holes on the top and tied it with some curling ribbon and added my tag. Here's all 25 that I made (xtras for her friends not in her class)... Used my new PTI stamp set called Tiny Treats Christmas since they fit nicely onto the heart tag I wanted to use. Since the images are small, I colored them up in no time and taped them to the scallop heart. The set comes with 18 designs but I only used my favorite 5 stamps. I picked these because I thought the kids would like them more than the other designs... Can't forget the teacher right?? Every year I make a calendar for my daughter's teacher in a school theme. Sorry- didn't take a photo of it before I wrapped it. I did remember to take a picture of the tag though... used the bear from LOTV holding a star. It was a nice break to be able to make something other than a calendar! Well... back to work!

Lemonade Anyone?

Akemi asked me once if she could have a lemonade stand. I just pictured her sitting on our corner with her lemonade and no customers. It would just break my heart if no one came and bought anything from her... so I decided to bring in the customers by doing a craft fair. Of course the craft fair took up a lot of time, but in the back of my mind, I knew I had to make that lemonade!!! We lucked out and scored some free lemons from some of our friends and neighbors. Then I spent most of the night before squeezing lemons, making the simple syrup, and mixing them all together. We even bought a dispenser to make it easier for her to serve. Daddy built her an actual stand shown here... she made the sign and we decorated the sides with some old silk flower vines we found. Oh yah... also made some other goodies to see at her stand. Here's Akemi serving her first lemonade! Do you see her assistant Daba helping her?? A couple of weeks before the fair, Akemi told me that it was her "dream" to have a lemonade stand. I'm glad I could help make her dream come true! I just have to make one last comment... when we said we were gonna charge $1 per cup, everyone thought that was sooo expensive. I guess cause they assumed we were using those small juice cups or the ones you use for brushing your teeth. DH actually picked up larger cups than I wanted, but it worked out in the end. She ended up selling out! And for the record, she did much better than we thought! She used only about 35 cups, but made much more than that. We think its cause everyone was giving her good tips!

Recpie Books

Just thought I'd share a great gift idea with you. I printed up some recipe cards from my computer with a template I made, but you can use ready made recipe cards too. To make life easier on myself, I printed them on pre-cut 4x6 index cards, so I wouldn't have to cut them all too. I think there's about 25 cards in each book. Then I just used my Zutter to bind it all together into a recipe book. Too bad I didn't take photos of the cards themselves cause they matched the covers. Anyway, you get the drift.

Another Bunny Calendar

We had a great time over the weekend! Had so much fun talking story with everyone and seeing what my crafty friends created. It was a lot of work but well worth it! Here's another bunny calendar for Year of the Rabbit. Decided to go with more traditional asian colors this time and used my trusty red, gold and black. My sister's designs were pretty popular, which made me really happy! :)

Out Of My Comfort Zone

For all of you out there who can sympathize with the difficulty of making masculine cards, think of what a hard time I had making a whole calendar based on sports???? My friend special ordered this calendar and I really should have said I can't do it. I found paper, so I agreed to it, but it was not that easy let me tell ya! Luckily Michele let me borrow and old cuttlebug set of dies that cut out the ball then embosses it to look like a basketball, baseball, volleyball or soccer ball. They had one more that was for a football. If I didn't have these, I don't know how I would've done it. I'm thinking this is a one time only calendar for me!

In Just A Few Hours...

I really gotta hit the sack... my craft fair will be starting at 9:00am, so I will need to wake up in just a few hours. We had a lot of last minute stuff to do today and just finished off the last of it! Talked to the other girls who will also be participating and they are nervous too. Hopefully the rain won't chase everyone away! Its been raining pretty much all day. It's been raining hard too, so most people wouldn't want to leave there homes unless they have to. Oh well, if no one comes, we will all have a good laugh and get to eat some butter mochi and lemonade! Oh yah... I know some of you were asking about what my brother was sending me to sell at the fair... well, I was hoping to post photos of his work but the package didn't arrive yet. Just my luck, it will arrive on Monday... we'll see. Anyway, he recently learned how to make fish prints or gyotaku. I saw some of his work and its really nice. He's pretty much a perfectionist (soooo opposite of me!), so I'm sure his stuff will be good. He was sending me a bunch of 8x10 prints to sell at the fair, but now I'm not sure what to do with them when they arrive. I'll post them here and if you are interested, send me an email with "gyotaku" in the subject line so I won't delete it from my in box. So just wanted to remind all your Hilo folks out there about the craft fair! Hope to see you soon!