I know my mum is reading this because she called me yesterday to let me know she had stumbled upon my blog. And that she was going to read it religiously from now on. So hi mum, just letting you know that the weather here is good, crisp autumn my favourite season. I’m sitting in the kitchen in a bathrobe eating breakfast, strawberry jam on toast and green tea.

I love this mug. It says ‘Good golly, it’s Robertson’s time!’ I have no idea what it means. Anyone care to explain? But this mug is super cute, I love golliwogs, reminds me of my favourite book, ‘The three golliwogs’.

Does anyone eat their toast in triangular slices or is it just me?

Showing off some lovely things from some perth illustrators at Unwrapped. I loved all of the beautiful handmade creations in every stall. But I was pressed for time to look around quickly and run back to my stall. My fiance was so nervous at being alone at a table filled with girly stationery. He actually pleaded with me, ‘come back quick ok?’

I bought some lovely art prints/cards from Niina Aoki, Ali J and Made of Awesome. I love them all and I’m pretty pleased as punch to keep a piece of their artwork.

Here is the sweet Niina, she makes these gorgeous buhni cushions. I have one that I use as a chair pillow! You know I love bunnies…or any animal really! So these are sweet ass!

How do experienced vendors do this all the time? We’re totally exhausted from our first market!

We just want to say thanks to all our friends who turned up to give us that moral support at Unwrapped market! It was super awesome! As first timers, we were so stoked with the positive response and experience from our customers! Thanks to all you crazy strangers who became our Little Mo fan clubbers! You totally made our day! We didn’t expect such great sales for our first range of paper goods.

The most asked questions of the day were:
1. Is Little Mo you?
2. Are you guys selling imported stuff from china?
3. You made these? As in designed everything? But they look really good!
4. Who designed this?

In future, I will put a sign up that says EVERYTHING is designed and illustrated by Helena Tay and professionally printed in Australia. Nothing is from China except my grandfather! Anyway attaching pictures of our stall and the real little mo. Check it out yo!

Will post pictures of the lovely handmade things I bought in my next post.

Running through the sprinklers on a late summer’s day.
Late night chat on the bed in pjs.
Old vintage books and helvetica fonts.
A trip to the post office.
Walking past the bakery. Bread ogling.
Freshly squeezed orange juice.
Falling leaves in the garden.
Back rubs.
Stirring marshmallows in hot chocolate until they go soft.
Morning hellos.
I love yous in sunset.

I think life has been pretty good lately. Like the little things you know?

Fiance and I, we have this habit of making little things for each other like mix tapes, handmade cards, comic strips..lunchbox letters…or anything for laughters. Recently we celebrated our 6 years anniversary so I thought I’d give him a unique gift you know.

So I asked the lovely Linz from FaerieMajikk to make me a custom artwork. I had seen her fantasy and erotica work before and thought they were really unique. So I said to her, ‘just make me sexy…I think the boy will love it.’ And I gave her the freedom to draw whatever she wanted.

The custom piece turned out to be a huge surprise for the both of us. When it arrived, we were giggling like school kids!! The boy took forever to open the package (either he was trying to savour the moment or Linz had it packaged so thoroughly…I think I heard the boy saying it was like opening one russian doll after another!) But lo and behold, the piece was so stunning in real life!

Because of my love for nature, Linz drew me in a very cute number amongst all the lovely trees! (May have to ask Franz to design an outfit like that for me too!) But we absolutely loved it! Everything about the artwork was truly unique and lovely. We have our very own helena faerie!

And that’s the beauty of art! Every artist has his or her own style. We could be drawing different themes, different styles, different mediums! I love that about art, I love observing and collecting art and I love supporting other independent artists. Linz, thank you so much…we’re so happy to have a piece of your work at our place!

If you’d like to have your very own custom fantasy artwork, visit Linz’s shop and get in touch with her!

Before you throw out your paper waste, you could actually turn them into something useful! You can make recycled paper bags out of old magazines, newspaper and brown kraft paper.

Since I had a lot of brown paper, discarded from various packaging, I decided to cut them out into paper bags for my upcoming market. Something to put my stationery in when I hand them over to my customers. Like a little treat bag you know.

I made a variety of sizes from small to larger bags. I used sticky tape or glue to gum the edges. Then I took out my rubber stamps and made a sweet print on all of my paper bags. I chose a tree print, because I love nature and recycling and my paper goods are all environmentally friendly too.

You can also use ribbons or sew buttons on to your paper bags! And it doesn’t matter if your paper bags are creased or dirty. They are handmade and recycled after all and those effects make them even more charming!

Sorry for the absence! We have been so busy. A lot of things up our sleeves the past few days. A lot more film shoots, some new media projects, and of course our preparation for the market at the end of this month.

We’re so excited to be chosen as a seller at Unwrapped on 29th March 09. If you’re a Perthian and live around the area, come down to Mends Street, South Perth from 1pm to 6pm. Buy and support handmade from other independent artists! Check out our stationery in person or come up and say hi! We’d love to meet you!

To prepare ourselves for the market we’ve been stocking up our inventory by doing some large printing runs. We’ve also been burning the midnight oil by making as many envelopes and writing sets as we can. As we speak the boy, is complaining about a large blister on his finger due to using the blade and bone folder too much! Every night our work table is filled like a giant paper ant hill.

I think we have about a hundred more sets to make! Ugh.

But in all the hectic-ness going around, we still found time to see a terrific gig at the Perth Arts Festival. We saw Mogwai! Those who know me well enough, will know that I’m the biggest Mogwai fan. They top my most favourite things in the whole wide world…ok maybe after Little Mo and Friends and the boy and mud cake…but you get what I mean. The band was so amazing…that throughout the performance I was constantly thanking God for letting me have the chance to see this awesome band! I think we both went home feeling pretty inspired by those lads. Oh what a night!

Hands up those who have a habit of making lists! I write so many lists…I have a list for each topic!

Grocery list
New products to work on
On going projects for clients
Daily reminders
Current favourite songs
Books that I want to read
Films that I want to watch
Even a list of quotes!

I have my notes stuck on my table and it’s quite a sorry state to look at. So I decided that if I was going to stick notes all around my table, I was going to illustrate some cute and happy ones that would brighten up my work space.

So here is my Grow strong and healthy notepads. Each notepad is filled with 40 pages of full colour illustrations of Little Mo working in her vegetable garden. I love them and I am really happy at how good they turned out! I hope you will enjoy them!

Tell me what’s on your list of things to do today?

One of our favourite travels during our time in Asia was Hong Kong. It was a melting pot of culture, smell, food and arts. My biggest regret was not visiting Chungking mansion. If you are a huge Wong Kar Wai fan like myself, you will know about his cult favourite, Chungking Express. So it really was a shame that I didn’t venture into this symbolic place that had inspired me so hugely into taking an interest in film and arts.

Most of the time, I felt like I was walking in a scene from a Wong Kar Wai film or a Haruki Murakami novel (much of his films were inspired by the author’s writings). I found myself thinking about similar themes in their stories; long dark night, girl and boy meets, a slow jazz number, bright neon lights flickering above, seagulls by the pier, a ferry ride, when dawn comes girl and boy parts.

If only it was that easy to write a novel!

But it really felt like I was walking in one. You’ll know my exact sentiments when you read or watch any of the two artists’ works.

For the second shoot, we shot inside the studio, in the green screen room. We had some scenes that needed special effects in them and so the green screen was helpful for keying out these shots. This is a continuation of the factory scene and so once again our beloved conveyor belt is lapping up the camera’s attention.

The device you see on the picture is called a jib. Sometimes you see sweeping shots in a movie scene; where the camera sweeps across the floor in slow or fast motion, or sweeps up and moves away. This is what the jib does. The jib can also be used to shoot top down shots or low angles. Here the boys are fastening the camera to the jib to shoot a top down shot of the conveyor belt. Jibs can vary in sizes, the more ambitious your shots, the bigger and grander the jib.

This scene took us the whole day to shoot, but was relatively easier than the first shoot. I’ll post again when we head down to do location shooting for our next shoot.