going's on

David is out of the country right now and I am using these lonely nights to get myself organized. I have this frantic feeling lately of only having a few precious hours a week to pursue some of several things I'd like to work on. I've resorted to listening to my Buddha Machine to help me stop feeling so scattered. It's so unlike me to be so unfocused. I truly need to have my hands in the pie to feel like I am keeping the Tiffanie Turner train running. The donuts give me that satisfaction when I'm working on them.

Current to-do list items, none of which there is time for:

•Finish preliminary book proposal work. I'm zooming in on two publishers for now and trying this approach.

•Get down to the planning department to search for existing drawings of a new project I'm starting.

•Buy a new drafting program to the tune of 2.5K.

•Start the new project.

•Paint. After years of half-assed brainstorming, I finally had a little epiphany which marries my watercolor style with subject matter I want to paint and is meaningful to me.

•Help David plot our escape from this apartment. 

•Keep on making the donuts.

And, if I want to be truly present with the kids during summer break, I think it's time for another social media fast. I know it was good for me before. Hard, though. And I've been really wanting to start sharing the Instagram photos I take, but there is no way I can live a good life while spending more time on my phone. 

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Here's a sort of full-circle-small-world-thank-you-social-media-and-also-a-life-lesson story for you regarding the egg piñatas:

•A week or two after I brought them home, the egg piñatas went back up at Rare Device due to popular demand. 

•That same day I got an order for ten piñatas from Australian stylist Megan Morton for a pop-up shop she was curating for the month of May in Sydney. After deciding to take the risk and send the real egg shells into Australia where they could possibly be confiscated at customs, the overnight shipping required to get them there for the remainder of May ended up being too prohibitive. It kinda kills me, because if they had been hanging in that pop-up shop, they probably would've been in THIS VOGUE AUSTRALIA LIVING BLOG ARTICLE. Face palm, at minimum!

•I'm pretty sure Megan or her people saw the piñatas in this photo by Victoria of lovely SFGIRLBYBAY in her Instagram feed, so I thanked her for that.

•Victoria shot the photo of the piñatas at Makeshift Society, where a small selection of my eggs are hanging in the Rare Device pop-up shop.

Cuckoo! Should I have paid the almost $200 to ship the eggs (and also eaten the cost of the eggs themselves)? Was that a huge missed opportunity? Would it have somehow led me to a lifetime of piñata mass-production? Hmmm.

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And finally, something just plain cool:

Remember the braided basket I made with the help of my friend Anna a few months ago? It was a classroom art project which turned into a loooong DIY adventure. Recently, that little basket has gotten some serious exposure. 

In late April it was featured in Redesign Revolution's 15 Ways to Reuse T-Shirts.

Then, a few weeks ago, Kelly from Design Crush and Capree from Curbly both kindly featured the basket on the same day, and then it exploded on Pinterest.

And THEN I somehow discovered a site called Craftgawker, and its offshoots Dwellinggawker and Stylegawker. I submitted the basket and a few other tutorials to these three sites, and it's just been nutty since then. 

If you are a blogger who has a craft or design project you really believe in and you want to show it far and wide, I suggest you submit that project to Craftgawker. The submittal interface is so, so easy, and if your project is accepted it's downright exciting. You might even see your readership climb, a little bit!

This probably sounds like one big brag. Well, it totally is, but it's also me sort of being amazed that something like a basket made of t-shirts could take off like this. I mean, it's just sitting in my friend Randy's bathroom acting as a towel holder now, because he won it at our school auction. It is really pretty to look at though.

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Those are the going's on with me. What's going on with you?

xoxo