Month: January 2010

This weekend my big project has been to do all my California sales tax stuffs and also take photos for the book, so I took about ten bazillion (okay, more like 800) the past two nights and have been editing them as I go. My goals for 2010 were to get better at knitting and to learn how to sew on a sewing machine. But I need to make my two other goals: actually learn about photography and my camera, and actually learn how to photoshop properly!!! I basically just wing everything and make it up as I go, but I’m starting to get really sensitive about how shoddy my work is, so I need to work on those skills when I have more time! For now, since a lot of you probably don’t follow me on Twitter or see my TwitPics, I’ll dump some Photobooth pics on you. Every now and again while I’m working, I’ll take a random snap or two on the webcam! Please note, these are all usually taken well past 4am, 5am, or even 6am! Yes, Bibi does help with work by simply oozing cuteness and wrinkles. And she does have a tiny booboo on her forehead. When I take her to my parents’ house to run around in the yard, she likes to dart in and out of the bushes and doesn’t care if it rips up her head!! We joke about needing to get her a special outdoor helmet…. Okay, this is when I was showing Candace my teeth because she didn’t think they were crooked. The she said this look was bad-ass cuz it looked like the Avatar angry face. AHAAHHHAHHA. Okay, my goal for the book photos was to wear a different outfit for every item I had to shoot, and have that outfit actually coordinate or look okay with that item. It was kinda hard, and I just ended up snapping photos of several items with each outfit. I thought a long time about what to shoot my Bomb Pop scarf in….and ultimately I decided to try to evoke summertime and popsicles by wearing a bathing suit. I NEVER WEAR A BATHING SUIT. I don’t like the sun and I don’t intend to hang out in it. Plus I have become really big-thighed and I am embarrassed to show anything above my shins in public. Sooo, I also put on shorts. Bathing suit with cut-out sides + shorts = MUFFIN TOP CITY!!!!! I swear, the actual photos don’t look this scary, but I was really scared of my own self at the time. This was probably at like 5:30 in the morning after having already shoot a couple hundred other photos. Ummm ok, Hairy took this next one with his phone. I LOVE this dress, and it looks totally fine when it’s on me, but I can’t for the life of me get it off myself. It’s like it suctions on like a second skin or something. I ran upstairs […]

So, I’ve been shooting photos for my book of crochet patterns. They are due on Monday! There are clothes and scarves and accesories all over the place right now!!!! I’m still not sure which pictures I’ll use, but I thought I would share just one, mostly because of the clothes. Scarf: me Dress: Dainty June Headband: Num Num Kawaii Posting this photo has brought up a problem again I’ve had for a long time. Ever since I got my MacBook Pro, my photos always look less vibrant when I email them to other people or post them to Flickr. I never had this problem before when I edited photos on PCs. I have brought this problem up before, but there haven’t been any real solutions yet. It kind of bums me out, because I edit my photos nice and vibrant on my computer, only to have them muted when I send them out or post them, which makes me pretty sure that they would be muted then in my book! Booo!!!! I’ve futzed with the color profiles before, but it doesn’t really seem to help. If anybody has any new thoughts on this mater, I’m all ears! OK, just kidding. Lady GoodForYou let me know that Firefox is known for muting your photo colors, so when I opened up my Flickr page in Safari, it looked fine!! Derrr!!!!!!!

Oh yeah! I kept forgetting to tell you! When Hairy and I were down in L.A. to see the Pee Wee Herman show, we had a quick bite with Michelle and True Mee (of Bubblepunch), and they let us know that some of the items from the Hello Kitty Fashions are NOW available TO PURCHASE AT THE JAPAN LA WEBSITE! Go check everything out! Everything is one of a kind!!!! I have no idea where any of my items are…..but, there’s still lots of awesome stuff to look at! Go go! (Skirt made by Marissa is available for sale, but I’m posting this pic so you can see the whole outfit. I made the scarf, mitts, purse, and the giant brooch on the shirt which also has red sequins suspenders. I think Marissa and I had a “more is more” philosophy with this one!! We had never seen the whole outfit put together until the night of the fashion show!) Some other cool stuff available on the site:

I was looking on Etsy for a bracelet that was 100% conversation hearts (no beads, other weird charms or jewels) but I couldn’t find any, so I asked my talented friend Teiva from Faeriesmak if she could make me one so I could buy it off her! I love it! It’s perfect!!! I love even the tiny imperfections in the red letters and the realistic texture she got on the candies!!! LOVE IT!!! I promise to take better pics of it when I set up my lights. I have ONE extra and I can’t decide whether to sell it on Etsy or include it in a cute blog givewaway. What are your thoughts on Valentine’s Day? I have never been a big fan of it. I LOVE the AESTHETICS of it, but I don’t want to feel obligated to buy a ton of stuff for my S.O. or feel extra romantic or whatever just because it’s a certain day on the calendar and you are “supposed” to. Hairy and I end up getting each other rando presents throughout the year or going to the movies or dinner or fun road trips, so I always think Valentine’s Day is just a funny day to hit Red Lobster or something and people watch!! But then it’s so crowded everywhere that now I just don’t want to go anywhere on ANY holiday!!!! (insert story about St. Patty’s Day debacle.) Anyway, since I have been so super busy, I don’t know if I’ll have time to do a Valentine’s day update in my Etsy shop, but I’ll try. Every day, something new comes up that I need to complete, so it’s really hard to plan!!!! Cross your fingers!

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Photo on 2010-01-25 at 17.34, originally uploaded by TWiNKiE CHAN. I was looking on Etsy for a bracelet that was 100% conversation hearts (no beads, other weird charms or jewels) but I couldn’t find any, so I asked my talented friend Teiva from Faeriesmak if she could make me one so I could buy it off her! I love it! It’s perfect!!! I love even the tiny imperfections in the red letters and the realistic texture she got on the candies!!! LOVE IT!!! I promise to take better pics of it when I set up my lights. I have ONE extra and I can’t decide whether to sell it on Etsy or include it in a cute blog givewaway. What are your thoughts on Valentine’s Day? I have never been a big fan of it. I LOVE the AESTHETICS of it, but I don’t want to feel obligated to buy a ton of stuff for my S.O. or feel extra romantic or whatever just because it’s a certain day on the calendar. Hairy and I end up getting each other rando presents throughout the year, so I always think Valentine’s Day is a funny day to hit Red Lobster or something!! HAHA but then it’s so crowded everywhere that now I just don’t want to go anywhere on ANY holiday!!!! (insert story about St. Patty’s Day debacle.) Anyway, since I have been so super busy, I don’t know if I’ll have time to do a Valentine’s day update in my Etsy shop, but I’ll try. Every day, something new comes up that I need to complete, so it’s really hard to plan!!!! Cross your fingers!

We rarely trek down to San Jose, but this afternoon, we met up with Shrinkle, Kevin, and Tess to eat at BOILING CRAB. I love eating with my hands!!! First, let’s talk about this guy. He was standing outside the restaurant so I snuck a creepy photo of him through the window (and the fisherman netting that was decorating the window). Please note the Star Trek Shirt and the full-on side ponytail. Hairy said that anyone could wear that shirt, but this guy knew how to STYLE it. Shrinkle said that if I posted this pic, someone reading my blog would be all like, “UH THAT’S MY DAD!!!!” My thought is: what’s wrong with that? We are totally celebrating your dad!!!! Me and Hairy await the feast. Amy and Tess being gangsta. We ended up ordering 2 crabs, 3 lbs of crawfish, 3lbs of shrimp, corn, potatoes, fried catfish, fried calamari, and oysters! (Did I leave anything out!?) I leaned forward in that pic so Amy’s head wouldn’t seem like the biggest. This pic inspires me to go to Boiling Crab every Valentine’s day in a fancy dress. After parting ways, Hairy and I walked back to our car and saw this sign hanging in another restaurant!!! And then I went and got a frozen yogurt (original tart, strawberries, Cap’n Crunch, and granola). Yes, I’m a huge fattie and now I’m eating Moose Munch popcorn….

Bye, San Francisco!!!!!!! The first thing I did when I arrived at the Cypress, CA Courtyard Marriott was order room service. It was like the oiliest food I’d ever eaten. Way to make fish and veggies unhealthy, dudes!!!!!! I proceeded to work on some new mitts. I haven’t quite figured out this pair yet……. still futzing. Bacon and Egg mitt in progress: I didn’t want to take the toothpaste from home and leave Hairy stinky-mouthed, so I thought there would be some in the hotel room when I got there. WRONG!!!! I trudged downstairs to the front desk and scored all this bounty!!!! I went to bed around 3am, chatting and working on tshirt graphics, and then woke up at 7am to be picked up for my photoshoot. Sans makeup. I never leave the house without makeup. This was very humbling. Glasses didn’t really help. Fast forward, we drive to Huntington Beach for the studio shoot. I get my hairz and makeup did. This was the 2nd makeup look. I don’t usually do colored eyeshadow………. I feel kinda like an angry samurai. I took this pic after the shoot while working on stuff on my computer at the studio. I am hoping it reads more subtly in the photos!!!! I’m just not a huge makeup person, so it’s hard for me to tell if I look bad in it, or if I’m just not used to it. Fast forward to 16 hours after my makeup was applied and I’m finally back home and need to take a shower. I felt really scary wearing this look all day. After the shoot, we had lunch with the photog and his assistants, and then my manager/partner and I sat down at the studio with our laptops to pow wow about graphics for tees. We did this for lik3 3-4 hrs. Then he took me to LAX where I sat for 3 hours because my flight home was delayed. The lady sitting next to me in the airport was like, “You’re Harajuku!!!!!” Hide me!!!!!!!!!

Untitled from Twinkie Chan on Vimeo.

I’ve been writing a lot of copy for various things lately: boxes, tags, other neat surprises. While digging around my old files, I found this gem!!!! There actually is a Twinkie Chan-ifesto, but this isn’t it. Apparently I started to brainstorm about my manifesto by creating a long list of likes and dislikes. I think I got bored of this exercise and stopped typing out the dislikes :P. I didn’t even end up using very much of this list for the actual Chan-ifesto. It was still funny, though! To me, at least!

So Manda and Hairy have bdays one day apart. I sorta feel bad cuz I feel like their special days get melded together, but at least we all like each other’s presence, so it works out okay! For Manda’s Bday we went to our favorite, bro-y, Palo Alto spots: Miyake and Blue Chalk. Miyake is a sushi bar where the highlights are not the food, but the fog machine, disco lights, and drunk 20somethings standing on chairs while chanting about and downing SAKE BOMBS!  Let’s just say that this evening has led to MANY a good story. It is so incriminating, that all infos remain top secret. All I will write here as a placemarker for our memories is: A loooong time ago Manda once requested that I make her a scarf, so I finally made good on that request for her bday present: a rainbow cupcake scarf!! Some of the colors, like red and orange, look the same in this photo, but rest assured, there were 8 different colors of cupcakes in this thing! Manda has ALWAYS loved rainbows, for as far as I can remember. If I had online access to her giant photo collection from college, I would have showed you the rainbow painted on her face and her giant favorite blue plaid overalls! For Hairy’s bday, we had dinner at Farmer Brown whose tag line is “farm-fresh soul food.” You always win with beverages served in mason jars. I got an Arnold Palmer! Instead of bread, they serve you little jalapeno corn bread muffins. They were warm and yummy! Due to the dark lighting conditions, we didn’t really get any other pics except of this hot sauce: Manda and I got fried chicken with mac n cheese and southern greens, and Hairy got a pulled pork sandwich with housemade potato chips as well as two sides: brussel sprouts and cheezy grits! We also shared some sweet potato steak fries. Yum yum! Since we are giant pigs, we also got dessert: one red velvet cake and one meyer lemon cheesecake, and some french press coffee. Holy. Wow. To end this entry on a high note, my prezzie to Hairy was a 6 month-membership to the Cheese of the Month club. I used to ban cheese from my house because I love it so much and will eat it till I am a thousand pounds, so I have no excuse for the evil I have introduced into our household. I promise to blog about our monthly cheese delivery (3 kinds of cheese each month!!!!). I kinda want to put the happy cheese on a tshirt!

Last night Hairy and I went to see Youth in Revolt, the latest movie with Michael Cera. It’s based on a book by CD Payne that I’d started to read like 7 or 8 years ago but never finished. I remember thinking the voice was HYSTERICAL, but working in publishing means you never have time to read :). I passed it along to Hairy once I found out they were turning it into a movie, so at least one of us has read the whole thing! There are some funny one-liners in the movie. You should see it if you’re up for a movie with snappy dialogue, but no explosions or love ballads by Celine Dion. Hairy had asked me to hold his hot dog for a sec, and then I realized I was holding a hot dog and a popcorn and I felt like a big piggie, so of course, I demanded a photo! Then I gave Hairy his hot dog back and made him pose with his hot dog, Sweet Tarts, AND the chocolate bar he brought in! HAHA. I used to NEVER buy food at the movies, until I met Hairy. Now we’re just gross and disgusting. Also he turned 35 today. Hee hee heeeeee. I’ll show you what I got him and Manda for their bdays tomorrow!

Hooooo boy! Someone recently twittered, “What a difference a day makes.” So true so true! Ups. Downs. Coming back arounds. Life is a whirlwind! I’ve also been collaborating on new logos, new packaging, now I need to make new samples. Crazy crazy crazy. Last night I went out with some ladies. Most of our ladies had to wake up early to go to work so nobody wanted to go out. Michelle had to get up early, but she was still rarin’ to go. She said we were the dreamers of dreams. I said we were the silliers of silly. She said we are the go-ers of 84. We got a later start than we hoped since I’d been down on the peninsula with Manda, but we finally made it out. Didn’t go to bed until like 4am and then had to get up at 8:00am to greet the dude who came to fix our gas fireplace. Sweet!! Now it can be roasty toasty up in here!! I will be crocheting up a storm for the next 10 days. Time for lots of bandaids and under-eye bags. In the meantime, here’s a Fun Stuff Round Up. Click on the pics to go to the sites! xo I kinda really want this pink coat: I wanna rock this dress so hard! Of all the posses to be in, this ain’t a bad one: I know what you’re thinking. This is scary. SO SCARY IT’S AWESOME. There’s something about this nighty. I dunno!

When we went to William Sonoma to pick up Dutch Baby mix for my family’s white elephant gift exchange, Hairy also picked up a bag of this Dutch Country Soft Pretzel Mix. There’s also a gluten-free version. They were really PUFFY!!! And a little bit sweet, but very very tasty. Thumbs up, A+! In less edible news, I had to make some more pink pastry weepuls, so I decided to also finally try to put “sprinkles” on some sunglasses!! I’ve been wanting to do this for a long while but never got around to it. I have been bored of my regular glasses for a while, and thought I might experiment with beads. Since I have a little photoshoot coming up in L.A. next week, I decided to have a go at the glasses. I wish I could find beads that really actually super duper looked like sprinkles (more like opaque, rainbow bugle beads), but I haven’t had much luck yet! But I think that for the shoot, they will be ok, if we decide to use them! I’ve been thinking of some fun little things to try out for Valentine’s Day. I probably won’t have a big V-Day update on Etsy because I have so much side-stuff going on (like the sales people at my publisher ordered a lot of scarves!), but I hope to squeak out a heart or two! I have been feeling like a huge fatty lately and Hairy and I finally got around to going to the exercise room in our building the other night….and the treadmill is BROKEN!! IS IT A SIGN!!?!? No, probably not. It was just kinda funny. Funny in the “oh that really sucks!” way…. Anyhoozits, I am off to start a bacon and eggs scarf! xo,

We ate dinner at Dessert Republic and then discovered it was 11:30pm. We had no plan. I think me and Manda were ok with going home, but Hairy was hell-bent on at least finding a dive bar in which to ring in the new year. As is tradition when the three of us are together on NYE, Manda, Hairy, and I ended being not inside any venue when the clock struck midnight. We were still walking the streets after parking the car. Oh well! Then we went into Butter for an after NYE drink. I didn’t even get the right drink. We watched a lot of hizzos dance on the bar top in very short skirts. On the way out, we hit up Crepes A Go Go. While waiting in line, this random girl walked up to us, said hello, and said, “My friend is not an asshole.” What? She proceeded to explain that she overheard Manda and I calling her man-friend an asshole because he stepped in front of us in line. In reality, Manda and I had no idea about her man-friend, and were talking about something completely different, and I don’t even remember saying the word asshole. She CONTINUED TO INSIST that we called her friend an asshole, and that he wasn’t. It was SO BIZARRE. I was so confused and incredulous. I kept trying to explain that we had no clue about her whatever her friend was doing. Finally she smiled and said, “It doesn’t matter. Happy new year,” in a super passive-aggressive and bitchy way, and then Manda told her her eyeshadow was pretty. And then we spent the next half hour trying to think of what would have been a better reaction. I suggested barfing on her. Or suddenly speaking in broken English. Or calling her an asshole. I asked Hairy what George Constanza’s well-thought-out come-back was from Seinfeld. Apparently it was something like, “Th Jerk-store called and they want YOU back!” Anyway, dirty ho’s and people-who-butt-into-your-conversation-to-start-random-crap are a nice way to start the year! 😛