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Yes, Nick and I are back and you can expect a solid week of swooning over Melbourne stuff. But first… the trams. I never thought I’d be so enamored of a public transportation system but after a week of catching several trams daily my love is for sure. We even went to the Hawthorn Tram Depot on our first day in town – mostly because Nick is an avid rail fan, but after seeing the beauty in the old lettering and typography on these finely crafted machines I was won over.

Check out all the photos I took at the museum on flickr.

In the collage I did up the top you’ll see a card featuring one of the destination blinds from the old trams, designed and printed by Poulier + Poulier Design; a handmade tram pillow by Mrs Beckinsale featured in this month’s frankie magazine; and a diecast toy tram by Traffic Toys.

Trilogy was listed as one of i love typography’s favourite fonts of 2009, and with 103 variants it has incredible flexibility. This sample demonstrates some of that fancy flexibility!

Shannon Fricke is one of my favourite stylists. I love the way she uses colour and pattern!

This cute cardboard bedroom suite was posted on Tumblr, but with no attribution I can’t find the creator of this and move into their house

I think what I really like about this photo is the brogues. I really want to buy some but I can’t find any in a wide fitting! The lovely photo is by nicole ☆ lynn.

Because Yoko is the best. Even Nick, a massive Beatles fan, admitted that he likes her more and more.

Aurora Robson’s studio is full of these magical air born clumps of recycled bottles. Totally inspiring! More photos at C-MONSTER.net.

I keep forgetting to do the My Place and Yours theme! This week’s is My Collection, set by Fox’s Lane.

I have collections of a few little things: pens, pencils, doilies but nothing big. They’re all useful things too. The biggest collection I have is buttons… just random buttons. Pearl buttons, shirt buttons, spare buttons, leather buttons… none of them are especially pretty, they all found their way to me in rather boring ways too. It’s just really handy to have a lot of buttons, you never know when you can use one.

Do you like my heavily abused work table?! I always spill my ink.

Today is my husband’s 30th birthday – he storms into his third decade on earth with panache!

My sister celebrated her birthday on November 3, or Melbourne Cup day. She was rather sozzled

⇒ I am obsessed with the illustrations of Ernst Haeckel!

⇒ Early Vogue cover illustrations are so fancy, so wonderful! Check out a whole heap here.

⇒ The hair styling for this I-D shoot, by Paolo Roversi, is gorgeous. See more here at foto_decadent.

⇒ This ornamental typeface called Cadence is inspiring. It makes me want to try designing one too!

⇒ Monif C’s new collection, modeled by Fluvia Lucerda, is making strides towards supreme fancitude. This is the “Lola Colorblock Swoop Dress“.

⇒ A stunning dessert table styled by Lewis Miller for brides.com.

⇒ Isn’t the light just gorgeous in this shot? Harold Lloyd has a few lovely flower shots in his flickr stream.

⇒ I found this via Polka Dot Rabbit… I wish I knew where those tights were from!

Today is my sister’s birthday! I made her a head piece out of a remnant of sky blue satin and drew her this card. Sometimes I think it’d be a lot easier if I just bought presents from the shops!

Happy birthday Manda.

Annnnd I wanted to leave a photo of her dog, Stanley. He is adorable but such a troublemaker!

I bought some books from Book Depository the other week and two of them were typography related, Mike Perry’s Hand Job and The Handy Book of Artistic Printing. I really relish these books because I don’t often by them for myself, and I’d been eying them for a while! As a result, all I can think about is lettering and typography right now and I wanted to share with you my favourite lettering and typography artists.

Daren Newman

Allison Carmichael

Adam Hayes

Marian Bantjes

Ray Fenwick

Chris Piascik

Deanne Cheuk

Adam Garcia

I’ve just opened up a shop on ArtFire.com to sell my original art works. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but I kept putting it off because I have assumed that no one will want to buy anything! I don’t want to believe that any longer! Prove me wrong and bolster my self esteem

I have listed eight pieces right now, but I have another three framed pieces to add as well as a bunch of drawings. All of these pieces are just taking up room in my office and I’d love to see them adopted by people who will hang them up and love them.

The other reason why I am motivated to sell my originals is because I want to start working in different media and experimenting with new things but I simply can’t afford it. If you adopt one of my drawings or paintings, you will be encouraging and prolonging my career as an artist and patronising me – in a good way, hahaha!

Go forth! Purchase some of my original art and fancy up your walls.

So for a while I’ve been yearning to do calligraphy. I have a couple of books already, but I was confused as to what sort of pen I should buy first. Also, money was an issue, ha. When I found a bit of extra money in my PayPal account I decided to have a look around JetPens (my favourite pen store!) because I needed to stock up on Pilot Hi-Tec-C pens. I came across the Pilot Parallel Pen and was intrigued… after some intense googling I decided that these were to be the pens I would start with! Lots of people rave about these pens and say that they are excellent for both beginners and professionals, however the most crucial factor in my purchase was cost – they are an awesome buy at US$11 each!

I had been anxiously awaiting my package from JetPens for over a week, and today I went down to check the mail and saw one of those yellow missed delivery slips just sitting on the top of the letterbox for the whole unit complex. Peering at the name on the slip, I nearly cried when I saw it was for me! The delivery person had mis-read the unit number on the address, and attempted delivery two days ago to the wrong unit. Boo! I’m glad that the residents of the other unit put the slip out for me to claim, even if there was a risk of it flying away. I’d been getting anxious!

6.0mm Pilot Parallel Pen – for this review I used the black ink

3.8mm Pilot Parallel Pen – using the red ink

The Parallel Pen is so named because the ink flows through two parallel plates. I’m not sure how other calligraphy pens work, but this is genius to me! The ink flows SO quickly and smoothly, I was quite surprised. Though one (small) continued annoyance is that I have to hold the pen at precisely the right angle in order to get a decent looking line without any gaps. I am a total noob, so hopefully this gets better as I get better!

The other thing is that the Pilot ink doesn’t work very well with plain old cartridge paper – as you can see here, there’s feathering and bleeding all over the place.

When I moved to a scrap of Arches Aquarelle paper, the result was much prettier. I just have to make sure I get my angles right! You can turn the pen and write with a corner of the nib for a very fine line, something I was quite chuffed to learn! Just make sure you’re using a sturdy paper because it ploughed through the cartridge paper when I tried it!

Another delightful thing about this pen is the Pilot mixable ink! I bought a packet of a bunch of colours, and I’m looking forward to trying them out when my penmanship improves To mix the colours you just press the nibs of two pens (filled with different coloured ink) together for a few seconds, and then write! You can see that even after most of the black has been wicked out, it still hangs around. I’d suggest cleaning the nib as soon as possible to avoid muddied ink colours. I bought some Noodler’s Bulletproof ink based on a few glowing recommendations, but I think I might end up using that on my drawings mostly!

I’m pretty pleased with my purchase… now’s the fun part – improving my hard core calligraphy skills. I’m fairly convinced that Pilot are my favourite pen makers right now!

You know those gorgeous images you find of vintaged flowers, betraying some kind of longing on the part of not just the creator, but whoever posted it? Well, I took some photos in my friend’s garden, and after having a fiddle in Photoshop they reminded me so much of this sort of image, as well as the image below, that I decided to apply my sardonic wit to the photos I took. The only problem was, that I had wanted to use an uppercase sans serif vs script like the creator of the image below had done, but I couldn’t remember who had done it, let alone where on the internet I’d seen it!

field by f-letter

I decided to forge ahead and have a play, regardless. It wasn’t until just half an hour ago, many hours after I posted the finished images on flickr and tumblr, that I finally struck upon the images that f-letter created, and I was stunned at how similarly I had picked the typefaces. I think I have a great memory for lines and shapes, but not much else

This month has been crazy busy: I’m setting up a business with a friend as well as trying to keep on top of all my commissions and personal art work. It’s definitely wonderful being wanted!