Even in a tiny caveman family, communication is the key to success.
More animations starring these guys are coming soon!
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Hello Kitty Re-Ment Winners
I guess no one can resist miniature Hello Kitty-themed groceries, because we got 219 comments on Friday’s giveaway post! (You all made me seriously hungry with your descriptions of favorite things from the grocery store.)
Because there were so many funny and enthusiastic comments, I’ve decided to give away TWO blind boxes instead of just one!
And just so we can all further enjoy the cuteness contained in these boxes, I’m opening another one right now…
Gah, the cuteness is almost too much.
OK, now for the randomly selected winners…
Comment #155, by Myha:
My favorite thing at the grocery store is probably the bulk candy section… hehehe. I have a wee bit of a sweet tooth!
And comment #125, by Stephanie:
My favorite thing in a grocery store would have to be the bakery, specifically the cake section.. teehee! 8)
Congratulations to our winners! I’ll be in touch via email to get your addresses.
Thanks again to everyone who shared their supermarket cravings!
Hello Kitty Re-Ment Giveaway!
Update: The winners have been randomly selected!
I just got the cutest gift in the mail from a special person in Japan. It’s so cute, in fact, that I don’t have words. So I will show a sequence of photos instead.
If you’re not in love, you have no soul. I mean, itty-bitty nutritional information!
Now, this is just too awesome not to share, so I’m going to give away one of these boxes to a commenter. Leave a comment to this post telling us about your favorite thing to get at the grocery store. (Just one comment per person please.) I’ll randomly select a winner on Monday!
Mochimochi Land PSA: Back up your Files!
Almost every day, I hear from someone who is going through a crisis: their hard drive crashed, and they’ve lost all of their PDF knitting patterns!
Sometimes these knitters are hesitant to request new download links for patterns that they had bought from my shop, but I’m happy to help out—it takes almost no time and effort on my part to look up the purchases and reactivate the links. But I’m sure missing Mochimochi Land patterns are the least of their troubles, what with the precious photos, emails, and other data that we all trust our computers with. Since we’ve heard this sad story again and again over the past few years, Error and I decided to do a little public service announcement today:
Back up your computer right now! And do it regularly.
It may seem like a pain, but it’s not like the pain of losing everything. I know from experience: a few years back, my hard drive crashed and I lost entire patterns that I was in the process of designing, along with lots of photos and music. I had backed up my computer, but not within the previous six months or so. The one bright spot was a nice customer service person at iTunes who didn’t ask questions when I requested the music I’d bought from them. It’s that experience that makes me eager to help out my own customers in crisis.
As I’m typing up this blog post, right this minute, I’m backing up my computer to an external hard drive. I suggest you do it too!
This has been a public service announcement from Mochimochi Land.
On the Set with Tiny Cavemen
We’re having a “wintry mix” day in NYC, so I thought it was the perfect day for shooting some new animations! I’ve chosen the cavemen as my stars for the first animations of 2013. Here’s the little set I’ve made for them.
I kind of love how slapdash I get to be with the edges of the set, since no one will see that part in the finished animation. I’m also enjoying knitting rocks for the background—I just knit a sphere and then make random tight stitches in it to form big dents.
So caveman animations are coming soon, if all goes well today!
Rescheduled Pictoplasma NYC Talk Feb 8
In November I was scheduled to give a talk at the Pictoplasma NYC character art festival, then Hurricane Sandy hit the weekend before and the whole festival had to be postponed while the city recovered from the damage. Now the city is back up and running, the festival is back on, the talk is now happening February 8th!
My talk will be an overview of my journey into Mochimochi Land, and what it means to create character designs in the form of knitting patterns that others can recreate as their own.
The talk is open to people who have registered for the festival, but at the same time I’ll have some new knitted characters on display for everyone to see at a Pictoplasma group show at Cappellini in Soho. I can’t reveal what they are here… they’re just too top-secret!
Cardiologist Luvbot
FatalsAttraction on Flickr gave her Luvbot a very important job: mending broken hearts!
Can I get an awwww from everyone? (There’s no way you’re not awwwwing at that!)
Share your photos of Mochimochi knits in the Mochimochi Friends Flickr group! They’ll be featured in our gallery, and they might show up on the blog too!
Inspiration: Alexander Calder
My new year’s resolution this year was a fun one: go to more museums and galleries. It’s embarrassing that I’ve now lived in New York for seven years and there are so many famous museums I’ve still never visited! So a couple of weeks ago I came through on my resolution and went to the Whitney Museum for the first time. I loved it! It’s a nice size (five not-so-big floors), the building is cool (all thick concrete), and it wasn’t crowded at all on a Wednesday afternoon.
I started with their American Legends show, which features artwork from big names of the first half of the 20th Century. I haven’t studied much art history, so while some of it was very familiar or vaguely familiar, most of it was new to me. Paintings dominated, of course, but my favorite pieces were by Alexander Calder. If the name isn’t familiar to you, then certainly his work is.
Calder basically invented the hanging mobile, and his perfectly balanced pieces of orbiting shapes are iconic. I loved the delicate engineering of his mobiles and balancing sculptures, but my favorite pieces on exhibit were his kinetic circus toys.
When living in Paris in the 1920s, Calder created a cast of human and animal figures made of wire and scraps of other simple materials. Each of these toys could perform a trick of motion when manipulated by hand: a lion tamer snapped a whip, a dog walked around on its hind legs. Calder held entire mini circus performances in which he would get down on the floor and manipulate his modernist toys for audiences adults and children. (Back in New York, fans could book Calder’s circus through the Junior League at Saks Fifth Avenue.)
I love the humor and intimate interaction involved in these seemingly crude pieces.
The toys are works of art on their own, but they are meant to be moved by hand and experienced as a live performance. The Whitney has a film of Calder performing his circus in 1955, but I have a feeling that the poor quality doesn’t do the circus justice, and seeing it in person in the ’20s must have been a vastly different experience.
In the 1930s Calder moved on to focus on his wire sculptures and abstract pieces. But his playful, interactive circus strikes me as his richest artistic experiment.