We´ve moved!

Hi everyone!

Despite my recent rant concerning the use of wordpress, I have to say that I spoke too fast. I tamed it!

It´s still a work in progress, but this blog is now being merged with my portfolio site. So, head on over to airdesignstudio.com, browse around and subscribe to read my posts the moment they´re published.

It´s right here: www.airdesignstudio.com

See you there!

Uh oh...

These last few days I´ve been trying to give my portfolio website a revamp. It needed some updating, and since I was jumping into the wordpress pool to do it, I´d also change theme and refresh things a bit.

I think wordpress is a great platform, full of people who work for free or on a donation basis. It´s open coded and everything, and expandable ad infinitum.

But it just does not work for me. All my experiences with wordpress have been terribly complicated, even if the instructions provided (again, for free) are very detailed. To cut a long story short, I´ve made up my mind - though I grief for the loss of the look I really wanted for my portfolio - and am moving to blogger.

So, sometime in the near future, this blog will be effectively morphed into my portfolio site (something I wanted to do with my previous portfolio site, with no success).

I think wordpress is great - just not for me. And I´m very sorry for that.

Any comments or suggestions regarding portfolio sites and blogging platforms? Please let me know!

Sketchbook Project

Just sent out my sketchbook for Sketchbook Project. I had a lot of fun putting it together! My theme was "in five minutes...", so I decided to add "...or less" to it. It has many quick sketches, and then freehand embroidered drawings - which obviously took longer than 5 minutes to make, but time went so fast it felt like only a short while had passed.

I´ll post more pictures soon and you can find its flickr set here.

(Background is a wonderful "chita de Alcobaça" my mother in law gave me for Christmas.)

Happy 2011!

I had a wonderful holiday season, how about you? There were the typical colds and sore throats (too much of a temperature change, going from the tropics to the winter in Lisbon), but seeing friends and family was heartwarming and... plain good.

Now I´m back to Panama, to work, to my routine. I missed it too.

I´m finishing my sketchbook for the sketchbook project going on. Deadline is friday, so I´m giving it its final tweaks. Experimenting without restrictions has been fun. I´ll post some pictures when I send it off.

I´ll leave you with a poster I made for a conference, next week in Lisbon. It was my last project of 2010 and it was so much fun to do that I definitely hope that 2011 brings more work like this.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Happy Holidays!

2010 is close to its end and the holiday season is upon us. Handmade presents are wrapped (and photographed, but not posted due to potential spoiler danger), bags are packed with winter clothes and pojects are all finished.

I´m not even bringing my knitting - just a sketchbook- as there´s plenty of cooking, baking, wrapping, decorating, meeting friends, being with family... all that waiting for me there!

Happy Holidays everyone, and see you in 2011!

Life in Panama

The other day I was painting away on my balcony. There´s plenty of sea view (I can even see the entrance to the Canal) but there´s also this view:



And as latin as Panama is, everytime I step on the balcony (be it to water my plants or hang clothes to dry), I hear the men working there whistling and shouting comments. This may sound like I´m bragging, but hearing the comments you´d know that I´m not. Just not.

Anyway, so the other day I was painting and I start hearing this guy shouting and shouting, and repeating the same word over and over. Normally I just ignore it as white noise and concentrate on the waves, but this time it surfaced to conscience.

I pause. I look over.

There´s this guy, holding his protective yellow helmet on one hand, waving and shouting: "paint me! paint me!".

I wonder what he´d think if I asked him to model. In the nude.

Anyway, I finished my first canvas here in Panama:



(...and I really, really need to replace my camera. It will be 6 years old in February.)

Buenos Aires revisited

Going back to Buenos Aires felt a bit like going home. I needed to get a haircut, to visit my osteopath, buy some buttons (as if there were no buttons in Panama) and go to my favourite restaurants.





I didn´t visit one single museum - but I walked and walked, sat under the blooming jacarandas and took my sketchbook out to draw.



I had tea with friends, making up for a social life I still don´t have in Panama. I realized, those ties and friendships I created there were thicker and deeper than I had thought.

I saw Christmas decorations (this is end of November, already?) and felt cold, after six months of hot, humid weather. There was cold wind and sleeping with a blanket, hot sun and lots of blooming roses at the Rosedal de Palermo.



There was the girl in Osaka who recognized us and helped us with an off the menu request - she made me happier than she knows. As if it weren´t enough, I bought myself a good, solid portion of choc-salt cookies. And for once the lack of coins served my purpose: change was given in cookies. Oh, yum!



After five days of walking, feeling, experiencing a return to a city where I lived, where I was happy (and unhappy too), where I met so many new friends and met a new me, I came back to my new home in Panama. We´ll see where this ride takes us.



(Guess who came along?



Oh yeah.)

Just because it´s pretty

(photo taken back in October in Bocas del Toro, Panamá. Nice, nice place to visit, but remember to bring mosquito repellent.)

So many things

These have been very introspective times here in this studio of mine. I´ve been having loads of work (which I´m thankful for) and am, constantly, searching for more work, creating new projects and presenting new ideas to potential clients.

It´s been busy, busy, and I haven´t felt like posting much. Sorry.

One thing that has been on my mind is the (long overdue) portfolio website redo. Oh dear. I wonder if I´m alone in this, but just thinking about having to change it makes my heart shrink a bit. It´s not that I don´t think it needs to be updated - it´s just that working on something that I can´t control (because I don´t know enough when it comes to web design) and therefore takes me three times longer than it should makes want to jump off my 49th floor balcony. Ok, not so literally, but you get my drift.

Other than that, it´s still kind of weird not to have four seasons, but only two: it´s still pretty much rainy, terribly wet all the time. Not too hot, though, which is fine. It´s almost the end of the year and I don´t feel it around me. No yellow leaves on the floor (as during my northern hemisphere days) nor purple jacaranda trees (as in Buenos Aires), so sometimes I must check the calendar just to be sure. It´s November. It´s chestnut and fireplace time in Portugal.

Anyway, enough about this. Here´s some of the things I managed to do on my breaks from my design projects:



This is my third attempt at knitting a Christmas present for someone mysterious - can´t say that person´s name as he or she does not know he or she is a recipient of a knitted gift.

The first finished sweater was too small (but too cute to frog); the second one was rightly sized, but not well designed; therefore, frogged.

This is the third go. We´ll see how it goes.



We use cloth napkins at home and needed our stocks refilled, so I bought some native kuna design fabrics (100% cotton, unfortunately not organic) and sewed a pretty simple hemline on them. There´s a learning curve in sewing, people!

And I finally started painting again. This time, there´s no class, no studio, no model, just me, my brushes and the beautiful view from the balcony. We´ll see where that takes us.

What have you been up to lately?

Home. Finally.

After four and half months of "camping" under a roof, we are now officially at home, with our precious mattress and bed and pillows and bed sheets.

(Rented furniture smells, rented bed linen is polyester-made, rented dishes are ugly. I am grateful that there are companies specializing in temporary furniture rentals, but guys, let´s try to make it look like a home - albeit temporary - and not just a prison cell with smelly wood and baroque details.)

Yay!

(I talk about the adventure in the last issue of my e-zine. Check it out!)

Hello everyone! With all this World Cup craze I wonder if anyone is still reading blogs or just focusing on the basics and getting back to the cheering. I can speak for myself: Portugal plays tomorrow, so before I go buy some flags and wear put my flip-flops on I´ll leave you with a link to this wonderful presentation called "How to promote thyself" by creative team Tak. Difficult topic, cool instructions, point gets across. Thank you, Tak!

Dia de Portugal

Today, June 10th, is our national holiday. It is celebrated in Portugal with lots of speeches, free concerts and recognitions for lifetime achievements for people. Abroad, embassies and consulates usually arrange for some sort of celebration, but funnily enough there isn´t diplomatic representation here in Panamá. Not to worry, though, I can party on my own.

Funnily enough, we, the portuguese, aren´t usually very proud of our achievements as a nation and as a collective of people, but now that I live far away, the distance allows me to see that a country which celebrates its national holiday on a cultural date - the anniversary of the death of Luís Vaz de Camões, our most famous author - it´s got to be a very cool country.

Bom Dia de Portugal!

A sidenote: the flip-flops above are part of the "havaianas" special world cup collection, given to me by a dear friend. As the portuguese flags and scarves we own are stuck in a box somewhere between Buenos Aires and Panama City, I intend to wear them every single day to support my team! Força Portugal!

Azulejo inspired

Lots of things have been going on in the last couple of weeks, starting, of course, with our move to Panamá City, where we´re located right now.

All my art supplies are in boxes so I´m having fun with the limited choice I have right now: watercolours and watercolour pencils.

Sometime soon more regular posting will resume, but for now, I´ll go back to settling down and unpacking. Thanks for stopping by!

News

And that´s why I´ve been away from the blog. Lots of new adventures to come in a country where there is no Winter. Yay!

Let me take a deep breath

...and calm down a bit. I´ve been travelling a lot for the past couple of months. At the same time, I´ve been working a whole lot too. It´s good to be here, but it was good to be there, too.

Ravelympics?

Well, yesssssss... and although I do know that I´m way behind, I´m still very happy for having finished this project altogether. It was a challenge for me and one of my crafty goals for the year. I´m happy to have completed it in March, which leaves me nine whole months of new challenges ahead of me.

Pattern is my own and yarn used is industrial alpaca (discontinued) in white and pure wool, handpainted by me, for the contrast colour. I was very serious about destashing, but I guess that it takes more than a dress for a five-year-old to finish 200g of lace weight yarn... Destash mode goes on!

More photos here. Project on ravelry.

É amanhã | Tomorrow!

Amanhã é o grande dia da inauguração da Attraction Store, uma loja de artesanato urbano português no centro histórico do Porto (Rua Escura, nº 45). É a partir das 16h e quem lá for poderá encontrar postais meus e peças abbrigate*. Não faltem!

*

If you´re in or around Oporto tomorrow, please stop by the opening of Attraction Store, a project of a friend of mine. Some of my pieces will be available, as well as abbrigate* garments. Don´t miss it!

Oscar winner: "El secreto de sus ojos"

Totally unrelated: I´m not the craziest oscar fan but I´m so pleased to learn that "El secreto de sus ojos" won the award for best foreign picture. Do go see it if it comes to a cinema near you, it definitely deserves all the awards it wins!

Inspiration

I´ve been catching up on some TED Talks I regularly download and these are absolute no-miss:

Jamie Oliver´s take on obesity as a major public health problem and the fight against it;

Jaime Lerner´s insights on city design, mobility and sustainability, definitely a lesson worth receiving;

Stefan Sagmeister explaining the power of taking time off (I liked the example of Porto´s Casa da Música visual identity project, very interesting way of going beyond what is normal in graphic design);

and the surprising talk given by Dan Pink on the science of motivation.

They´re so inspiring that I think I really need to take a nap to absorb it all. (It´s too hot to work anyway.)

Toasting for another wonderful year

Yesterday was my birthday - I love it when it´s my birthday! I had a wonderful day pampering myself and having fish on every meal (sounds dreamy to me!). I toasted for all my blessings and for my dear friends and family members, and specially for those close to me who are battling against difficult diseases.

Life is good. Here´s to that!