Welcome myself to Polyvore

Easy by amandagrey featuring scoop neck tops

Ahah! I found another fun and exciting thing to share. I have just registered in Polyvore today! Thanks to my friend Bless who is already into it a long time ago. She's actually starting her own design blog and that excites me. She will be sharing her Polyvore works, and will also design her own templates soon, and these will be for free. So once the site is up, I will let you guys know about it. Well, the works of an amateur I have shown above is just a 2-minute set. Next time I will be more patient in doing my sets. That is why I called my first one -Easy. You know I really like an outgoing kinda easy touch to my fashion statement most of the time because I'm a mommy who is most of the time busy and on the go so, I don't want to make my wardrobe complicated. I kinda played around some more with one I called Come with me, Girl Power and City girl. It is fun, so fun.

Busy with blocks

If there is any other thing Andre's busy with aside from sketching - it's building blocks -even his Jenga blocks are not being used for what it's meant for coz he likes to build things - a lot! He's got some nice, sometimes unbelievable, creations. I have no idea how he came up with these things in his mind because whenever he does them - he doesn't have any object in front of him to imitate. It must be there already in his mind - the picture of the objects he's building. The one above is a pirate ship. And owing to his addiction of Harry Potter, the train below is his version of the Hogwarts Express. This one below is, according to him, the Empire State Building inspired by Percy Jackson. Not bad huh?
This one below is an earlier version of pirate ship, because he liked Peter Pan.
And last but not the least - here's Andre's Ron Weasley's house in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince.

Sean's Phineas and Ferb

From Sean's sketches

After featuring Andre's works, it's only fair I do the same with his older brother's artworks. Here is Sean's rare sketch of one of his favorites - Phineas and Ferb. It's a pity I wasn't able to document his drawings before. He also had lots of sketches like Andre. But more than sketching, Sean is more into building things out of Lego. Check out that post about Sean, the lego artist. He has created cute Wall-e, and Optimus and Jetfire together, Devastator, and Demolishor from his most favorite movie Transformers. There are also T-rex, spinosaurus, and various vehicles on this post. We're so glad and proud of both Andre and Sean, they're really talented.

Learning botanical illustration

My fondness of nature's elegant beauty comes out once more. I've searched the net high and low to learn how to draw botanics. I'm deeply infatuated with botanical sketches nowadays. The more vintage the sketches are, the lovelier they look. As you may know already, those who have been following my posts, I take a lot of inspiration from my favorite - Amy Merrick and her blog. But deeply loving nature is innate to me, it is not an overnight thing, I remember having my own garden in our humble home back in the province when I was still in grade school, I took community beautification as my girl scout project in high school, I would have preferred to study Forestry  in college but my dad talked me out of it coz women foresters, he said, would only get deployed in the office and not on field, I felt elated when I got in UP Los Banos because of its vast, naturally beautiful campus. And Botany was my favorite in Biology class. There's something in me that tells me - maybe I used to be a botanist, or a florist, or maybe a lady-gardener in my past life.(Above photo from here, below was taken from here)


Botanical illustration is what I've been wanting to learn for a long time. Here, I found a great tutorial blog for botanical drawing -Val Webb's The Illustrated Garden. Check out her site, there are video illustrations, clear ones unlike the others, on how to draw flowers. I tried to follow her step by step instruction on drawing a petunia. I came up with the drawing in pencil below,pardon coz it's quite messy. But it's way better I guess than the 2-dimensional drawings I first did (far below). The pencil is what I'm going to study first, the watercolors can follow later. I thought at first it's not difficult because the flower looks so simple. But it's not. You've got to be very careful with angle, shading can be tricky. It's not easy to achieve the 3-dimensional view of the flower.


If like me, you want to get serious with drawing, these are the other online tutorial links I recommend because the instructions come with pictures, just great for newbies:
O Sweet Nature - for watercolor tutorial
Art Graphica - for colored pencils

I heart stamps

I'm very pleased to share here in my blog my dear friend's stamp collection - a two-generation family collection that she's been keeping for years now. Her collection includes stamps that date back from the 70s and 80s. Among those she has, I like the Australia and USA stamps the most because they're so colorful. Others bring back a lot of memories - like the one she has on the Girl Scouts of the Philippines (I was and will always remain a Girl Scout), and those from the Middle East where my folks used to work as contract workers. Collecting stamps was quite a common hobby back then, it is a great way to preserve and commemorate important events, things and people. Sadly, because we rarely write letters nowadays, this hobby has become almost obsolete. I'm glad every time I see collections such as these - they look so nostalgic, vintage, real, tangible.

I remember being a Girl Scout back in my grade school and high school. I was even a Chief Girl Scout Medalist - the Chief Girl Scout Medal is the highest award given to any girl scout in the country. It is awarded by the Chief Girl Scout herself (usually the First Lady) to a girl scout who has done valuable service to her community and duly endorsed by her Council. I remember there were procedures in choosing the awardees, I was already in my first year in college when I was awarded the medal. During my time, it was Fist Lady Ming Ramos who awarded me the medal along with other Medalists. Neat!


This one above bears the early Filipino writing- Alibata for the International Conference of the Red Cross 1981 (I believe the writing says Krus na Pula). It's a pity we did not preserve the native alphabet. Meanwhile, the stamps of Australia below show those of typical natural endowments of the land down under. Next to these are some vintage-looking Australian stamps (Christmas Island, Tennis, John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, Sandy Beach, and more).



These US stamps look really vintage. There's one that shows the Conestoga Wagon, the Yosemite, and manned moon rover. And last but not the least, "ang bayan kong Pilipinas" and some stamps from the middle east. So thankful to the owner for letting me exploit her precious collection.

Pen that

Nothing beats the original - the nostalgic, personal, and artistic elements of writing a letter. 

I'm currently digging and hoping to put into order my old stuffs when I saw these classic and dreamy envelops made of used onion skin. 'Bought them from Tokyo ages ago, at The National Art Center Tokyo which happens to be our neighbor back then (I was studying then at GRIPS Tokyo, just fronting the Arts Center).

'Pity how I never got to use them. I guess I've used only one, when I wrote a letter to my beloved husband. I've kept it all these years. They just so nice to look at aren't they?

These days, we're content with emails and instant messages, text messages in our mobile phones, video calls, chats. They define what  modern communication is. They are a must in our day to day life. Our attention span in general has shortened through time. Perhaps, writing a letter in a paper using a pen looks so medieval already, it's time-consuming, inefficient, even ridiculous.  Why waste time in writing and delivering your mail at the post when you can tell your message to the person whom you want to get in touch with in just a blink of an eye? Sadly, writing letters doesn't appeal anymore. I shouldn't be happier in keeping my cutesy special envelops, I should be using them instead to say hello to special people to make them feel even more special...Perhaps I will..one of these days.

An Apple a Day

I'm just so amazed and speechless whenever I visit my most favorite blog - An Apple a Day. Every post is memorable, every image captivating. I'm more of a visual person, so outstanding images can easily attract me. This is the very same reason why I put images to every post I make. I love photographing, I'm still learning, I like blogging a lot. It's an outlet and a venue for experimentation. 

The setting of An Apple a Day is New York, sometimes, it's the author's home in New Hampshire- but wherever she is - be it in a enviable travel to Europe or just around New York, her photos are just so amazing. 

The author is a floral designer and a crafter, apart from blogger of course. She's been featured in magazines. I take lots of inspiration from her and her blog. It's just so dreamy. Take a look - you'll understand what I am saying!

What is white balance?

I've been using my camera for quite a long time now. I know I should've taken those classes my friend suggested to me a long time ago. I really need to learn photography, not only for blogging but also for family photography purposes, but my hands are so full with many other things. The other day, I was making "kutingting" my camera and wanted to play with white balance. So I pointed at a white flower in my little garden, and ceteris paribus, I changed the white balance setting in 6 six different types - direct sunlight, fluorescent,  incandescent, shade, flash, and cloudy. Oh and well, it was not a sunny day so that explains the general "sad" look of the photos.

Let me share what I've rummaged so far from the internet about white balance:
Auto - camera makes best guess
Incandescent - for indoors, cools down the colors in photos, generates a bluish color
Fluorescent - will warm the cool effect of fluorescent lighting
Direct sunlight - fairly normal setting
Cloudy - warms up more than direct sunlight setting does (turns out more yellowish)
Shade - generally bluer than in direct sunlight, warm things up just little
Flash - also warm up your shots
An introduction to White Balance, I recommend these sites:
Digital Photography School
Pixiq (thumbs up!)

A nice bargain

It was a real nice bargain. It costed me only 2,400 pesos, around USD50 in an automotive supply/repair shop in Bangkal, Makati. My friends took me there, it was really so nice of them to. There were other equally nice bikes to choose from. There were pink, yellow, blue colored ones. But I especially liked this one because it's relatively newer, sleeker, and more versatile in color.
We did not waste much time. I bought it and here it is now. I am enjoying it, it's so speedy, easy to pedal, and with accessories still intact (light and lock). A great bargain - great value for money. The nearest store of second-hand Japanese bicycles here in Bacoor put the price of such at around 6,000 pesos.  I heard there were also several stores in Magallanes, Makati selling low priced bikes -but this one would still be around 3,500 pesos. Lucky me!

Favorite Sewing Blog

I'm a bit obsessed these days, I found this really nice sewing blog called  flossieteacakes. I felt like I wanna start a career on sewing already, to make nice, fancy things like what Florence, the blog author, is doing, really charming.

Her blog has lots of sewing tutorials, for bags, home accessories, and many others. I just fell in love with the colors, how she played with them to create such fun fun objects. I felt like sewing and making new things out of dreamy fabrics was my passion in my past life. 

It is amazing how simple make-up bags like the ones above can be so pretty and charming because of the print of the fabric used. I also love her ideas for laptop cover and mobile phone cases. Check out her blog flossieteacakes.blogspot.com and see for yourself. (Photos of the make up bags courtesy of Flossieteacakes).

Meet the Lego artist

If I'm not mistaken, this the first time I am going to introduce my lego artist - Sean, my eldest son. He's 10 but he started creating those lego transformers and other characters  back when he was only 6 years old. One of my favorites that he created is the Optimus-Jetfire union. The simple Wall-e he did was also cute. The liger (combination of lion and tiger) was really awesome. He still continues to amaze me and his dad until now. We're so proud of him, he did it all without any pattern, just pure imagination.
I'm sharing again some of his most recent works. One is a land rover, a mammoth, and his version of Demolishor from the movie Transformers. There were others before but sadly I was not able to photograph them.

Boredom buster: Paint!