October 2012

I love october, it's like a magical month where all the good things happen together. Lots of celebrations and lots of chance to eat good food xD

Moonstone at Mt. Faber. Great Japanese BBQ food, great ambience and scenery. It will be perfect if you like to drink sake because they have a good collection there.

Hatched at Holland Village. A very yummy breakfast.

Frog porridge at Bukit Timah. They have a branch in Chinatown as well. It one of our favorite place for a rewarding supper because it opens til late, 3am.

Pitch Stop in my school. First time visit the Innovation Centre after studying here for almost 3 years :/ Heard about them before but did know(believe) their food is actually really this good. Haha.

Zen Japanese Cuisine, ala carte buffet. A bit pricey but the food is really nice! I wished I had a bigger stomach so that I can try everything on the menu!

The little cat which kept looking at us while we were eating.. lol. 

I don't understand why do we like to take pictures of food. I find it rather meaningless but still I love taking pictures of food, especially good food. Perhaps because once you eat it you will not see the same thing again. My professor in History of Photography calls this 'CSRM-Constant Self Recording Mode' we are all very obsessed with recording our lives with images as taking pictures is so easy nowadays.

hmm. For me I'm just lazy to write and I'm not really good in writing :/, so I love taking pictures. Haha.

Beautiful Houses

I am now in the mode of an escapist. I have been sitting in front of my computer since 7pm and I have tons of work for me to do but I'm not doing anything about it >.<

When this is not the reality I want to face I tend to escape to somewhere I want to be, even it's not physically.. so I went to dig up some photos I took when I was in LA. I miss the life there, probably because it was during my holidays as well, no work, no deadline.

Looking at these pictures gives me hope.. the hope that life will always get better :)

Linocut

Linocut is probably the easiest and most "do-able at home" kind of printmaking technique, it's just like making a stamp by carving a huge piece of fat eraser.

This is a linocut piece done for my printmaking elective. The most difficult part for this assignment was you have to print it by hand, which means you cannot use the press. Also, you have to produce 5 exact same editions with accuracy of 99.7%. So basically I printed no less than 30 copies and each copy took me about 30min to print.. the tough part was really getting the whole image inked evenly.. no white spots and no extra ink, and because you can only check the result after you think you are done with the printing, you will only notice the flaws in the print after you spend 30min painstakingly rubbing the paper against the inked lino block.. well nevertheless.. I'm done with it! Yay! ^^

 On the right is my lino block and on the left is a failed print which I used to wrap my lino block.

Due to the repeated action of rubbing, my rubberish lino block is turning shinny, like a piece of metal. At this point it's also getting harder to ink as the lino block is not as soft as it used to be.

These are all you need for printing, probably I shall make some self-printed cards for Christmas this time :)

 So this was what I meant by 'only print by hand'. After you laid the paper onto your already inked lino block, you can only use a wooden spoon like this and slowly rub the paper against the lino block to get the ink transfer over.

This is actually an image of my bunny which is now under the care of my friend, and I was hoping I could give this lino print to her as a gift :)

Goodbye M.Zuiko 45mm F1.8

Such a beautiful lens, but I'm letting it go. Thanks for everything you have offered me, thanks for documenting all the early days handmades in US. Thank you :)

Baby Poodles

It was the baby poodles' birthday yesterday.. My heart really melted when little Mischa put back the babies to their mummy and the mummy poodle quickly went to lick the babies and then carried them really close to her :')

A Rainbow Birthday Party

Is it a dream to every little girl to have a rainbow birthday party? I am not too sure.. but I did hope to have one when I was young.. and even now..

So we prepared a very colourful rainbow themed birthday party for my boss's grand-daughter at the art studio. As usual preparing party was very taxing but at the same time we just felt happy to see bits and pieces of rainbow everywhere.

a princess castle seems like a must for a little princess's party

come in rainbow clothes!

and finally.. Happy Birthday Mischa.. God Bless!

The Bookbinding Workshop

Last Saturday was a super busy but fruitful day.

In the morning we had a bookbinding workshop for the visual communication juniors and I was one of the seniors teaching the accordion bind.

Bookbinding is a very tedious but therapeutic process and I think everyone should try to make and bind your own book at least once in a life time.. the level of satisfaction you get upon seeing the book is just too awesome. It doesn't have to be perfect, the important thing is you made it!

There are 5 very useful and do-able types of bookbinding which we thought will benefit our juniors..

Voted as the favourite type of binding by all the seniors, but this is tedious. 

Good for displaying things in series.

Simple and fast.

Looks professional and has the cooperate feel.

Also known as Japanese Bind.

Now you know the names, actually there are a lot of tutorials online teaching you how to do these, you just have to googles it.

It is highly advisable that you have all your materials ready before you bind a book. It's just like baking, you will hate it if you realise you do not have sugar after you finished mixing the butter and eggs. 

Thread for coptic and chinese bind, awl for creating the holes for sewing, bone folder for scoring and folding, white glue, ruler......

These are materials prepared for accordion bind, basically it's good to have all types of adhesives because different paper reacts differently to the adhesives. For hard cardboard it will be difficult to glue using the glue stick. For soft paper, white glue is going to make it warp. And if you do not have steady hands, spray-mount is not so advisable. The best of all is still double sided tape.. but some times if you have large area to glue it's going to cost you a lot.

Materials prepared for the year 2s to hands on..

Chinese bind (Japanese bind)

Machine cut

Other materials that you can add on to your book to make it all special.. the good thing about all handmade is you can do whatever you like!

For grommet binding.

Samples Astrid brought for us.. all hand-bound.

Nico giving instructions.. very capable organizer for the workshop..

cool year 2s

Professor Astride sharing tips ;)

A very nicely designed and useful hand-out for the workshop.

The workshop was a huge success.. hope the year 2s brought back with them what they want to learn.. book-binding is indeed tedious and time consuming but there's so much fun doing it.. it's those kind of work whereby once you started you never want to stop until you complete it. Haha.

This was the accordion bind I did for my photo imaging.. it's a good way to display  and keep the photos.

I have always wanted to do coptic bind but never knew exactly how.. and today I finally got to see how it's done! I'm going to coptic bind something one day.. maybe this week.. but I still don't know what to bind. Haha.

Anyway this is a super clear step-by-step bookbinding tutorial I found online.. try it!

Have fun in bookbinding!