I’ve managed a little bit of balance between the many pies recently. Here are some completed projects, some more in the offing and some musings.

Every sized pom-pom under the sun

I have a pom-pom maker for every size from 10mm to 115mm. I’m aiming to make the perfect pom-pom, i.e. perfect sphere, which means finding the perfect yarn and then perfecting the technique. All I need to do now is think of what to do with the pom-poms I make!

Square beaded wraps

My stash of beads is almost infinite, so I’ve made about 15 different designs for wrap bracelets, mainly featuring miyuki square beads—love the square! I’m aiming to get some colour-blocking, some ombre, some fibonacci and some cloud patterns happening but not quite there yet.

Artist Rose in Sim-Land

I have a new best friend in the Sims 3 Wonderland—Rose, and she is an artist and dancer. Rose is modelled on a very good friend and I’m interested to see how the nuances of her artistic practice differ from my own Sim.

I’ve been creating some patterns and textures to use in her house so that she can be inspired by her surroundings. Stay tuned to see what Rose gets up to …

Designers should read

Thanks to Austin Kleon for the following excerpt from writings by designer Tibor Kalman:

Visual literacy isn’t enough. Designers have to read everything.

Kalman said that “an enormous amount of graphic design is made by people who look at pictures but don’t know how to think about them.”

I started asking job candidates, “What have you read in the last year?” Because I suddenly began to realize that the difference between a good and a bad designer is how much did they know about everything else—biology, history. Because graphic design is just a means of communication, a language, and what you choose to communicate, and how and why on a particular project, that is all the interesting stuff.

Yep, reading and exploring and discovering more and more is important to this pie-maniac! Thanks for the inspiration, Austin and Tibor …