Crystal Madrilejos

Design & Creative

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Our Kitchen on Design*Sponge!

Super!

I’ve mentioned the website Design*Sponge before, but just in case you didn’t read that post here’s a general rundown. It’s an amazing website/blog/design reference/good read run by Grace Bonney. This is the about, straight from her site:

“design*sponge is a daily website dedicated to home and product design run by Brooklyn-based writer, Grace Bonney. Launched in August of 2004, Design*Sponge features store and product reviews, sale and contest announcements, new designer profiles, trend forecasting and store/studio tours. In addition, Design*Sponge features a unique section dedicated to covering student design, national and international design shows. The site is updated constantly throughout the day (with an average of 6-10 posts a day), and attracts a core group of devoted readers. Design*Sponge currently has over 20,000 daily readers.”

I’ve been a devoted reader for a couple years now. This site was one of the original sites I started visiting on the regular (what i like to call “the rounds,”) and was also one of my main inspirations for starting a blog before I had even really grasped the enormity of the blogosphere.

About a month ago, Grace did a post asking for advice on her kitchen. I was a little late, but I sent her an email anyway with links to our kitchen because we had a similar color scheme, a bright green being the main highlight. She got back to me and I was more than ecstatic when she asked if she could share it with her readers. You can see the real post here. It’s totally rad to be included among all the amazing things Grace posts about. Thanks Grace!

I had mentioned this before, but i’ll mention again that I’m planning on posting pictures of the ongoing project that is our apartment.

Fondly,
Crystal

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Ghost in the Machine

If any of you subscribers out there happened to receive an email today about an old yes, have some. post, I apologize. I admit, I subscribe to my own blog (just to make sure the subscription service is working!) and was quite surprised to find a yes, have some. email in my inbox today considering I hadn’t posted today. For a second, I thought maybe the other elusive half of yes, have some. had finally come out of his shell. Alas, it was only feedburner acting all crazy-like. So again, I apologize for getting you all excited about the possiblity of new etsy stuff? the new toby line? any other various projects? hmm? well, hopefully all these things will be coming to your inbox soon for real!

Fondly, Crystal

Oh! also, I forgot that I was going to post the design for the Cheese on Bread t-shirts. I love love love it! So, here it is:

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Summer Daze

Summer is in full effect. Today is a scorcher with a predicted high of 90 degrees! Holy hell! The heat has forced me to wear the flip flops today, which i’m not a huge fan of. My feet aren’t super duper busted, but I still don’t like to look at them if I can help it. With the onset of summer comes the onset of the not-wanting-to-do-anything-but-lounge-and-be-outside-whenever possible mindset, and not-in-front-of-the-computer-if-I-can-help-it mode. I’m not going to outright say this is the reason for not posting in so long, but I may allude to that.

Anyway, Etsy stuff is selling. A little slower than I had expected, but a few items have gone since we last updated. The nested bowls were sold to a very lovely lady in Texas. She said they were very special to her and she was so happy when she received them. As for our own stuff, Andrew made another duffel. After much cursing and sweating, I made a little lined zipper pouch.

One Mandor is done, but i’m not really happy with him. His arms came out too skinny and he looks generally, rough! I sewed most of that one on the machine, but it’s really hard to control when you’re working with such small pieces. I don’t know why I was avoiding hand sewing like the plague, but the one i’m workin on now has been mostly hand sewn. Now i’m also realizing that I probably should be using different material. Back to square one, dang.

Andrew started making these bracelet thingies too. I’ll post pictures when I get a chance.

Fondly,
Crystal

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Cheese on Bread

The past few weeks I’ve been working with the band Cheese on Bread to design their European Tour posters and t-shirts. It’s been a lot of fun because they pretty much gave me free reign over the poster. I’m happy with the end result, and more importantly, so is the band. The poster design came first and the t-shirt sort of followed it’s lead. The band already had an idea of what they wanted the t-shirt to say, so that part was pretty easy. The design of the poster was inspired by the name of band’s new album, “The Search of Colonel Mustard”. My first instinct was, of course, Clue™. The well known board game and movie. It seemed pretty obvious, but I didn’t want to just blatantly rip off the classic movie poster or do something that was overly Clue-esque. So instead, I just tried to get the same feeling and make it cute and poppy. Here are the English and German versions. They are pretty much exactly the same except for the text:




The t-shirt design has yet to be finalized. Once that gets the green light I’ll post it as well.

Fondly,
Crystal

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Etsy Update

Finally! All the new goods have been posted to our Etsy shop. Check them out. There are a lot of great things that I wish we could keep, unfortunately our apartment is about 2 feet by 2 feet. So the next best thing is knowing that someone else is putting them to good use.

As for the Toby Goodshank line. Dang, it’s taking long. But here is a sneak peek of one of the bags that will be sold in the Toby Goodshank line, if you weren’t already stoked enough:

the fabric pattern was designed and drawn by Toby and we silkscreened the fabric. also, the bag itself was designed and sewn here at yes, have some. I know I keep saying this, but keep your eyes out for these. I promise, the wait will be well worth it.

Fondly,
Crystal

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While I’m Waiting

It’s Wednesday night around 11:00pm and I am, unfortunately, still at the office. I’m extremely tired and waiting and waiting and waiting, as per usual. I decided i’d just share this little gem that never ceases to amaze me. The other weekend, we photographed items for our Etsy shop. We have a small apartment and the only suitable place, with enough space and lighting, is our kitchen table. However, it’s bright green and to fix this we place two pieces of matte board on the table. One flat and one up against the wall as a backdrop. Most of our stuff thus far has been small enough that this set-up works fine. But this last round we had to photograph a shawl that was pretty big when laid out. I figured, get some stuff around the edges and i’ll just Photoshop it out. No problem, right? Wrong. I work on a computer all day and I like to think that my Photoshop skills are not too shabby. However, I set out to fix this:

I won’t even show you the mess I made of it. I was, of course, at work when I was doing this. Working in publishing, naturally we have an in-house retoucher so I hit him up for advice. I sent the image to him over IM and asked him how it would be easiest. I shit you not, literally 10 minutes later he sends me this:

Voila! as they say in France. Jeez.

Fondly,
Crystal

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Too many to know!

Yeah, yeah no new items on Etsy yet. I’m well aware. I am forever busy as of late. No excuses, I know. I have the pictures but they just need to be retouched and resized which takes many a minute because my retouching skills range from bad to average… well, they aren’t that bad.
This week and weekend were full of too many things to know! Work has my head spinning. OJ All Day was a success. So many great bands and so much fun all around.

Other projects in the works. Andrew has been plugging away on the Toby line. He made a duffel bag but ended up having to take it apart because it seriously looked like a wiener duffle. He accidentally sewed it in the wrong direction. Two screens are all set up for Toby prints. I have still to make any more headway on the dolls. As you can see by this:

I’m now in the process of working on tour posters and t-shirts for the band Cheese on Bread. The deadline for those is coming, so wish me luck!

Fondly,
Crystal

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Update

We finally took pictures this weekend of the stuff we got in Ohio; as well as the other stuff we’d been planning on photographing for the past few weeks. There should be a massive update to our Etsy shop sometime this week with lots of vintage stuff, not so much handmade stuff.

Our stuff has been slow going mainly because of my work schedule and us being away. But another huge factor was the fact that our apartment looked like a war zone and our work area was buried. Right before we left for Ohio, we were in the middle of moving all our craft stuff into a new storage cabinet that we bought from Build It Green (everyone should check this place out and volunteer if you can!) and we finally finished organizing it this weekend. Too much stuff and so little space.

Alas, all was not lost to cleaning this weekend! Andrew made a couple duffel bags and I’m pretty much done with two doll prototypes and I started a final of one of them last night. We’re waiting to post for sale any of the Toby Goodshank stuff until it’s all done, but we may give you a peek at what we’ve been working on so you can get excited for when they do finally go on sale. We have yet to set a final, final date of release until we can get our schedules under control.

I know I talk a lot about our apartment. Mainly because I spend most of my time there (other than in the office) and both Andrew and I are pretty specific about what makes us feel at home and comfortable. In order for me to be productive I need good lighting; Andrew needs everything to have a place. So I thought I’d share the evolution of our apartment a la Sneak Peek over at the Design*Sponge blog. If you’ve never read her blog I highly recommend it.

Fondly,
Crystal

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Back to it.

We’re back from Ohio and back to work. We’re both feeling a bit under the weather after this trip. Too many sick babies and too many long hours in the car. On a good note,we stocked up on some stuff for yes, have some. and hopefully we’ll get pictures of those up this weekend.

Our apartment is officially trashed. We left last week in the middle of an overhaul and we came back with bags and bags of things to add to the mess. Both of us have been too tired and too busy to even try. Literally, every surface is covered in…things!!! It’ll feel nice to get things in order. Hopefully, with some order will come productivity. We wanted to have the Toby Goodshank line done by the end of the month. Yikes.

We’ll post pictures of new stuff once we clear a space in our place to take photos.

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bah!

Okay, so this weekend wasn’t as productive as we’d hoped. I did make headway on the dolls and Andrew has started making a new bag. It’s not a duffel, it’s more of a hand bag type thing. It’s really neat, in my opinion, and I’d love to post pictures but I don’t think Andrew likes to post pictures of his things before they are done. I’m going to try to break him of that habit because I think that people like to see the process of how things come together. (Or at least, I do!)

As for the things i’m working one, one prototype is pretty much done, but I’m still on the fence about it. Making dolls is really hard when I know nothing about how to make dolls or patterns. Another one is in the works, but I’m also not sure how I feel about it yet. I’m feeling discouraged and I hate that! Maybe I’ll be motivated when we pick out fabric this week.

We didn’t silkscreen anything this weekend or take any pictures of items to post on Etsy, like I’d hoped. Today we leave for Ohio, so nothing will get done this weekend either. At one point yesterday, Andrew said “There weren’t enough hours in today.” and that’s how I’m starting to feel about all our projects! I think we just need one solid weekend and we’ll be good. Just as long as we don’t get distracted by the nice weather. At least we can work with the windows open!

Enjoy your week/weekend! We’ll be back next week.

Fondly,
Crystal

oh P.S. I have a meeting next week with Dan Fishback to talk about ideas for T-shirt designs for Cheese on Bread! Super Duper!