Unusual requests

You never know what kind of request you are going to get, when you are in the design field. Recently I've been commissioned to design coffee bags, particularly for Thirty-Thirty Coffee Company. This bear is for their bear claw coffee, if you've ever been to Thirty-Thirty, then you will get the joke. Also in conjunction with Dream Center Peoria, an inner city youth outreach company, I designed a logo and bag for the coffee that the kids roasted as part of an entrepreneurship program. Bags cost $13 and all proceeds go back to benefitting the programs.

Speaking of extra projects, I've been working with a local shop in town to design a line of jewelry, but more on that later!

The Mother of All Estate Sales

Growing up, I was obsessed with pirates and buried treasure, Pippi Longstocking, Peter Pan, and The Goonies were no doubt my roll models, and I'm sure my jewelry collecting mother had a lot to do with it as well. At 26, that pesky obsession has never really disappeared, it has simply taken on a different form. I now deal in vintage goods and jewelry in my shop and striking "gold" has a different meaning. My cousin will concur that many people give us strange looks for our unusual picks we define as treasure. Last weekend we happened upon the mother of all estate sales, the kind that come around every few years that are unbelievable. These people saved everything! 17 rooms chock full of "treasure"! My cousin and I shook with excitement and I began filling our arms with amazing bits of bric-a-brac that either we "had" to have or stuff that we knew others would take into their own collections. It was like something out of a dream, and no joke, I dream about estate sales-probably latent memories of all of the ones that my mom took me to as a toddler. All in all, I obtained a Polaroid camera with film still in box, a bag of antique baseballs, a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry, a fire popcorn popper, a clear dome umbrella, a plaid umbrella, a 1958 home design magazine, 7 vintage books, a Bakelite cake cutter, a Vietnam War ammo pouch, stackable German drinking glasses, a wind-up Pac-Man toy, and the "gold" a bag of vintage Halloween masks including original C-3PO and Chewbacca masks from 1977. One man's trash is this girl's treasure.

Now that's what I call a canvas

I wear many hats in my job and in life in general, which I love, as they stack higher and higher it can be a real balancing act and once in a while I have to shelf one or two. Today at work I finished up painting a canvas backdrop, I left the paint cans in the pic for scale, its 11ft tall after all. I can't wait to see my boss use it for photography and it's got me in the mood for painting again. I don't think people understand what it is to be an artist, to have a swarm of bees in the hive of one's mind from dawn until dusk and the only way to calm them down is give them a window to be set free and come to fruition. I will be posting many of my upcoming projects soon. In the mean time tell me what are your favorite hobbies? 

A welcome to wanderers of the web...

Lady Popeko is a place where I may take the illustrious liberties of expressing my artistic and design related tastes and endeavors as I try to navigate this glorious God-spun web which we all inhabit. I hope you enjoy! I will attempt to post often, I promise. For now enjoy this Miss Peregrine portrait that I constructed during my free time after work, when I was most likely supposed to be doing something else. If you have not read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, I highly suggest you read it before some Hollywood studio ruins it for the imagination.

With love and peace,
Nicole Blackburn
Graphic Designer + Illustrator
www.nicoleblackburn.wix.com/main
coleblk.etsy.com