Wild Ones Art and Design Market on Sunday

Hello! Yes, I know I have been absent for quite awhile :( After the craziness of Christmas time, I spent a lot of time doing not much, which was great! Alas, I must have been too relaxed over the holidays because it's taken me some time to get back into the swing of things. And so I'm very excited to be having a stall on Sunday at the Wild Ones Art & Design Market held at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre. It's their second Market with more stalls and heaps of fun things happening to coincide with Hazelhurst's 13 birthday celebrations, include Festoon "a craft explosion" which sounds pretty exciting. You can check out all the goings on here. Hope to see you there x

Big Toast online shop now open!

It's been awhile coming but I'm pretty excited to announce that my new online shop is now open! Yes, I have been talking about it for ages but finally managed to put my head down and get it done, just in time for Christmas. You can click on the link at the top right of this page to visit the new Big Toast shop (yay!) It is filled with Christmas cards and Christmas gift tags as well as canvas and paper prints of my illustrations. I’m also happy to post cards and goodies directly to your loved ones if you’d like to do that and can hand write a message for you (I have neat writing I promise). Just send me an email from the contact page when you place your order and we’ll take it from there. I’ll be adding the rest of my card range and other goodies as soon as I can, but I wanted to start with all the things that would make great Christmas treats first. I hope you like my little shop, feel free to share it with anyone else you think would like it! x

Christmas Gift Tags

I was photographing some of my cards over the weekend for a little something I'm working on and wanted to share these with you. They are my Christmas illustrations printed as cute little gift tags and I must say they are quite sweet. I will have them this weekend at Eveleigh Artisans' Market, along with my Christmas cards, framed and unframed prints on paper, canvas prints and handmade books. If you can't make it to the market I'll be letting you know how you can get your hands on some illustrated goodies very soon x

Christmas cards

Chaos in Cookie Land

Stuffed Animals

Relaxing Reindeers

Christmas Birdies

The Great Escape

Christmas is almost upon us once again and that means time for Christmas cards! It is usually such a busy time of year for me and having been up to my ears in Christmas cards for months I always run out of steam before I send any of my own. I know, it's a pretty poor effort seeing as I'm in the card business! This year I'm determined that I will send cards to my friends and family! I'll have my Christmas cards and gift tags at the market this weekend and at all markets for the rest of the year. If you're not in Sydney or you can't make the market and would like some cards, please send me an email and I'll be happy to post to you.

Wild Ones Art & Design Market at Hazelhurst

Happy weekend my friends! It is such a beautiful sunny day in Sydney today. I hope the good weather continues tomorrow as it is the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery's open day tomorrow and I'll be having a stall at the Wild Ones Art & Design Market. The market is inside but it's always so much more appealing to get out and about when the sun is shining. I've never been to Hazelhurst before so am looking forward to checking it out. There's lots of things going on for the open day as well as the market- exhibitions, art class demonstrations, film screenings, music, kids activities and more. There's also the Hazelhurst Cafe for coffee and yummy food :) More details here. Have a great weekend x

&company

Hello! I’ve been wanting to let you all know about something that is worth knowing about and now seems a good time. My friends at &company are embarking on a journey to create a workshop for Sydney’s creative community and they need some support to make it happen. &company is a Sydney based design studio that works with emerging designers to bring new and inspired products to market. More recently they’ve been running an amazing range of short courses from their pop-up space up in The Rocks, from jewellery, ceramics, and wood work to animation and documentary making. You can see more about &company and the fabulous things they do here.

&company was started by the very inspiring Anna Lise De Lorenzo who I’m happy to say is also my friend and it is so amazing to see her vision for &company that we discussed many years ago over a couple of beers grow and develop into what it has become today. My first range of Big Toast greeting cards was launched with &company at The Finders Keepers design and art market in 2010 and I’ll always be grateful that Anna Lise gave me a bit of a push when I was procrastinating about it! It gave me a deadline to make it happen and that was the start of a new direction for me. So some of us need encouragement and belief, and some of us need space, tools, equipment and some old fashioned know-how to turn our ideas into reality, or to just dabble in something new and have some fun, and this is where &company’s workshop comes in. Their vision is to set up a fully equipped workshop that anyone can access and they’ve launched a crowd funding campaign through Pozible to make it happen. You can click here to see what it’s all about and how you can help.

Have a read and if you like the sound of it you can pledge your support. Then if you are near The Rocks you can stop by their pop-up shop and get your photo taken like this extremely dorky one of me!  

Photo by Meng Koach and top image by &company 

New frames and my favourite polar bear

Well who agrees that this year is going too fast? The last month is gone and another Sunday at Eveleigh Market approaches, that means only three markets left for the year, wow! Time to get my act together and stock up for Christmas. Having finally found a local supplier who could custom make my frames for me I was super excited to go and pick them up on Friday. They look great and I've been busy cutting mat board and getting all my illustrations framed for Sunday's market. My little polar bear friend in the frame above has always been one of my favourite characters. This illustration was inspired by a poem written by a friend of mine and is about a lonely bear that lives in a freezer. His story has a happy ending though as he escapes his cold confines to seek the company of some other bears, fellow tea drinking bears one presumes :)