It's become an annual tradition, this making (and selling) of the holiday cards. It started out humbly in 1999, when I decided to make my own Christmas cards, scanning in a painting and doing some photoshop stuff to it, and printing them out painstakingly on my little Canon 4200 inkjet printer. I hand-made these puppies until about 2003, I think, when I finally decided to start getting them professionally printed, and sell the overstock to make back my printing costs. That's worked out pretty well, but I hated dealing with inventory and fulfillment (shipping the orders). So this year I decided to make the cards available on my Cafepress store, which means it's totally hands-off for me. I just upload my art--the printing, ordering and shipping is all done by Cafepress.
Wow, can't believe this weekend's the Beverly Hills art show already! I've been busily preparing the past few weeks, and I think I'm ready! It's my first time at this show and I hope it goes well. It's a really big and well-known show so there should be good traffic, anyway :) If any of you are in the area, come by the Beverly Gardens Park on Santa Monica (between Rodeo and Rexford). You can get more info at my art site: http://steph-han.com/news.htm
What else...I've just been crazy busy at work lately, but I'm finally taking Monday off, yay! Catch up on all my tv shows, play some katamari, lounge around with the cat... The new "date night" I've instituted with the hubby's been working out well--last Friday we went up to Pasadena to catch a friend's art show at the Armory then saw Lars and the Real Girl after dinner at Tani--a less-than impressive Korean-owned japanese restaurant on Colorado Blvd.
Oh, I did buy some items of note lately that I'm excited about, and hope they get to me soon! An awesome interchangeable knitting needle set that is like buttah (got to test drive them at the knitting group last week), and a pair of plastic "clog"-like shoes that I spotted on a fellow knitter. Below are photos:
There have been quite a few shows this fall season that have caught my eye, and now that I have a DVR, I've been able to record and watch them at a later time. So the new shows I've been checking out are (in order of favoriteness): Pushing Daisies, Chuck, Reaper, and Bionic Woman. I'm thinking of taking BW out of the recording rotation--I don't think it's very good. I also checked out Journeyman but wasn't impressed, so it got axed from the DVR schedule after the first episode. I've never watched so much network TV before, but these are really fun shows. And of course I'm still watching Heroes and will watch LOST when that comes back...sometime. Anyhoo, aside from its winning whimsy, the major appeal of Pushing Daisies is this guy:
How cute is this boy? His name's Lee Pace and I guess he'd been in some
other minor shows and stuff. Well, I think he's just adorably cute and
very good in the show.
My sis, her boyfriend and I went to the 12th annual Tofu Festival in downtown LA yesterday. We were planning on getting there right around 1pm, but unfortunately, we picked the wrong way to go--a lot of streets were blocked off--so we didn't end up getting there til like nearly 2! I felt really bad because I'd told Mary and Janice I'd be there around 1 and I got there so late we didin't really get a chance to hang out as long as I would've liked. I saw Janice for like 10 seconds (sorry Janice!). But we made it and we were HUNGRY! While I was waiting for my sis to park I met up with Mary and we headed straight for the okonomiyaki stand. The line was long but it moved pretty fast, and soon I was vacuuming up a nice fat pancake filled with veggies and tofu. Overall, the food experience was good, but some stands were way better than others. So my sis went to one thai booth and I went to another, and the differences in the taste, portions and price were pretty remarkable. For $9 she got a little plate of pad thai, chicken skewer and tofu sticks--I guess like $3 per item. Mine were $3 per item also, but I got much bigger portions of my pad thai and garlic tofu, and they tasted better, I thought. We tried a sweet potato pie with tofu creme, which would've been OK had I not found a big old long hair in it! Ew. It was so hot out we were drinking liquids like mad. There was one booth selling refreshing barley tea for $1 and we ended up getting like 2 of those, not to mention a pina colada smoothie (very very yummy), strawberry lemonda, and green tea shaved ice. They had this scrip system for the food that was kind of a pain in the ass. You have to buy scrip tickets to pay for your food with, and at one stand the prices that were printed on the program were wrong, so I was short two tickets. I would've had to go all the way back to the scrip booth to buy more tix if my sis didn't have extras. I don't know why they do that--why can't they just use regular money? You could use regular money to buy non-food items, though. Speaking of which, they had really cute t-shirts this year so I bought a t for myself, a tofuzilla shirt for Curtis, and a cute little baby onesie for my friend's newborn. And there were lots of other booths selling really cute merchandise. The highlight of the day, though, was my sis' bf participating and winning his round at the tofu eating contest! He made it to the finals, but barely missed out on the 3rd place. That was a lot of fun, but kinda painful to watch. All in all, we ate and drank a lot and had a good time hanging out with each other. Janice and Mary told me about a shoujo manga exhibit or something but we didn't get around to checking that out. Too full of food and drink!
Afterwards, we went to a bday party for one of my sis' bf's ex coworkers and ate and drank some more! And then bounced around on their trampoline. It was a lot of fun but I was exhausted!
I uploaded my latest batch of runs from my nano to the nike site and
learned that I've logged in 115 miles so far! They even gave me a 100
mile badge, aw. I love this thing--now I feel motivated to add more
miles to my stats. I guess that's really all you can ask from your
workout gizmo--to keep you motivated!
After the Anime Expo weekend, this is me:
I'm sure a lot of you already got the email, but I'm doing my own version of the media blitz: http://www.cafepress.com/shw_arts
Now I can finally offer my artwork on a variety of gift/specialty items, like greeting cards, tote bags, mugs, etc. They have so many items on that site, it's crazy! I definitely want to do t-shirts and mouse pads too, but enough for tonight--I'm tired! It was busy at work and then I came home to spend all evening on the computer; my shoulder's all sore, bleah.
I'm now moving on to making a simple sunglass case, and I'm practicing my stripes--looking pretty good so far. Kind of screwed up on a row or two--still not too good at repairing mistakes, but getting better. Tonight's another Stitch n Beach meeting; my friend The Other Steph will be there so i'm looking forward to seeing her.
Lil C passed his driver's test on Friday!!!!! You guys have NO idea how excited I am about this. That means Curtis and I are finally free from being lil kid chauffeurs!! Judging by my response, it's becoming ever more clear that it was right for me to make the decision not to have kids. I mean, I like Lil C a lot, but I really can't wait for him to move out--god knows when that'll happen. But now I'm one step closer to total freedom!
So, I've decided to take up knitting. Weird, I know, but I was kind of
inspired by some friends I have who are great knitters and I think it'd
be a fun hobby. I'd heard about a knitters' group in Long Beach called
Stitch n Beach (a takeoff on the the famous group in LA called Stitch n
Bitch), and I joined their yahoo newsgroup today. Much to my surprise,
turns out an acquaintance of mine is also a member! After getting some
noob advice, I stopped in at a Michaels to get some gear. I got a
little beginner's kit thingy with some needles and some other doodads,
and a couple of balls of yarn. Figure I can get started with that, and
I ordered the book "Stitch n Bitch" at the recommendation of my
knitting friend. After I kind of get up to speed on the basics I figure
I can go to these group meetings. I'm kind of excited; I think it'll be
really fun 
Be prepared for miles and miles of scarves!
My sister and I got to spend a lot of quality time together on Sunday.
I spent Sat nite at her place, and the plan was to spend all day Sunday
together, which we did. We went for a little morning walk, and stopped
at a bagel place for some breakfast, then it was off to downtown LA, to
have lunch at Pete's Cafe (on the corner of Main and 4th), a place with
great (if somewhat pricey) food. I've been there several times and have
never been disappointed. Then we walked over to the Red Dot gallery
where some of my paintings were--I wanted to show my sis, and then we
headed over to Lil Tokyo for the Cherry Blossom Festival. We had a good
time--they had vendor booths, performances, and of course, food stalls!
Got to have to authentic fresh off the pan takoyaki--ummmm... Pretty
funny though how they also had stalls serving Mexican food, wraps, and
philly cheese steaks. Oh well, it's all good! And speaking of good, I
finally got to try Pinkberry yogurt! I totally wasn't expecting it to
live up to the hype, but it was really really good! It was like creamy
sorbet, but very very light cream. It's really refreshing--a great
balance of tart and sweet. If you like really sweet and/or creamy rich
stuff, this isn't for you. I got the plain and susie got the green
tea--we both agreed that plain was better. I didn't get any toppings or
anything, because I really wanted to taste the yogurt, and man, am I
glad there isn't one near my work or house because I'd probably be
stopping by every day 
But they are cropping up everywhere, apparently! Then afterwards we saw
"Blades of Glory," which was really fun--exactly what I expected, a
very silly comedy with some good belly laughs. *Sigh* then it was time
to go home. My sister and I hadn't spent time together like that in a
long while, so it was awesome. Really gotta make more of an effort to
get together more often!
