The Lucky Winners & My Latest Obsession

To save on paper and for ease, I opted to use a random number generator today to make the draws for my September blog giveaway. The luck of the draw was the number each person got assigned - I tried to make it as fair as possible - so congrats to the 3 winners.

They are:

• Little Miss Mel - Prize Pack #1
• GraphXGrrl - Prize Pack #2
and
• Monique - Prize Pack #3

Thanks to everyone who left a comment or bought something from my shop. I'll definitely take some of the suggestions for new products to heart.

This month's giveaway will be announced in 2 weeks and will be a sampling of my latest designs, so I hope you'll come back and check it out.

Meanwhile, I'm a little preoccupied with my stack of books on home decorating these days... and that's not even all the books I have out from the library currently.

Can you say "obsessed"? Just a little? Thank goodness for libraries, otherwise I'd be broke buying books.

Recent Work

After a fairly lengthy hiatus from doing portrait commissions, I picked up my paintbrushes again this past month and here's the result:

I was also contacted recently by the president of the Cat Welfare Society in Singapore and asked to produce a design for one of their t-shirts, pro bono, to help raise funds for the cat caregivers. As she liked my Love Cats image, we decided to go with that, with a little addition to the heart. I believe the final design will be available on a black tee, so the kitty and letters will be in white, but here's a peek at how the design looks right now.

Other than that, been up to my old tricks of rearranging stuff around our place, packing etsy orders, picking up a few shifts at the design firm I work at from time to time and working on a few new illustrations, both personal and commissioned.

I will hopefully have some photos to share of my "walk-in closet" and revamped studio soon. Both still need some finishing touches and furniture/accessory additions to complete them. They're getting there though.

And tomorrow is the last day to enter my September giveaway. Winners will be announced on Thursday!

Hello Weekend!

Matt emailed me this image that he came across yesterday morning. I thought it was too cute not to share and it sets a light-hearted tone for the last weekend of the summer.

This week was semi-productive, but I never seem to get as much done as I would like. Things usually end up taking way longer than I estimate them to take.

My belly is definitely expanding quite easily these days. Sitting on my ass coupled with not leaving the house for a few days certainly helps its growth. All I can say is, thank goodness for drawstring pants.


Here's a peek at what I was working on for most of the latter part of this week.


I'd been toying with an owl and pussycat idea for some time now and it finally occurred to me to make a pattern out of the animal pair. Each critter will also be made into individual screens too and I'm excited to print them onto scarves, totes and other textiles.

I'm loving the new clever kitty, as I like to think of "her".

The owl took a bit more trial and error until I was finally satisfied with "him". Getting him to look as cute as the kitty was tricky, but I think they look good together now.
Another nice online surprise I got yesterday morning was discovering that one of my items is currently in an etsy gift guide. I think that's the first time I've been featured in one, that I've known of anyways.

Hope everyone else had a great week and has a happy weekend! Bye for now.

September Giveaway

It's the 15th of September, which means a new giveaway is here! As promised, this month there will be 3 lucky winners, which means there are 3 different prizes.

The first prize pack includes a pirate kitty tote, a clever kitty moleskine journal - a new item to be introduced to the shop soon! - and your choice of bookmark. There are 6 different designs available. Total value = $35 US.


The second prize pack is for 2 of my prints - Thinking Capcat and The Bubblegum Gang. Total value = $30 US.


And last but not least, the third prize is for a set of Nine Lives magnets. Total value = $15 US.


Ways to enter: Visit my shop and come back here either telling me what your favourite item is or suggest something new that you would like to see me offer.

As usual, any purchases made in my shop from now until the end of the month will also get your name entered in the draw.

And my Happy Customers are automatically entered every month. To become one, simply send me a photo of you and your purchase and I can add it to the gallery or join my group on flickr.

For bonus entries: Become a follower of my blog (follow button to the left) and/or on twitter, then come back here and leave a comment letting me know that you did so. All my current blog followers are automatically entered. I have too many unknown twitter followers, so unfortunately you need to comment on this post to b entered.

If anyone has trouble leaving a comment, you can also email me: blog@cathypeng.com. I have found that in certain web browsers, I've been unable to comment.

Winners will be announced on the 1st of October!

Have fun and Happy Giveaway!

In with the New and Out with the Old

Several new apparel items are in the shop and there are a ton of tees on sale with more to be added soon!

Here are just a few:

clever kitty briefs

fancy kitty tee

lucky kitty tee

Remember, this month's giveaway will be announced tomorrow. Any purchases made between the 15th and 30th of this month will earn you an entry into the draw. And of course, commenting on my blog will do so too. That's all for now. Until tomorrow!

Making Room for Baby & Shop Stuff

That's a bit of what I've been up to recently. Since we live in a loft, the open concept requires a bit more planning for a baby and we've been racking our brains on how to divide up the space. Right now we only have these curtains as a room divider.
I am leaning towards enclosing our bedroom to keep the cats out - where baby will sleep for the first year, most likely - but whatever we put up has to still let light in, be relatively lightweight but sturdy, be easy to install and affordable! Yeah, wishful thinking. Matt wants to build shoji screen sliding doors himself - I took out the book below from the library for him - but without a proper workshop and tools, I'm wondering how easy this diy project will be. Those of course would be ideal (except who knows how they would hold up with the cats loving to scratch wood?). We've got less than 4 months to come up with a solution.

{Oh yeah, we found out it's going to be a girl!

I've kind of just been savouring the news and telling a handful of people so far. We'll see if the results hold up, since I've already had my share of surprises with the pregnancy so far}

We've been making room for our new addition in there over the past several months and finally acquired a lovely new dresser for all of us on our last trip to Ikea.


Most of my clothes have made their way onto the other side of our bedroom and I am badly wanting to finish my walk-in closet plan for them, since it is kind of a sight for sore eyes at the moment.

The Stolmen system from Ikea is what I have in mind for our personal clothing and also for my shop stock, as it works well in places with high ceilings. So I'm on craigslist daily searching for that and numerous other Ikea pieces at reasonable prices.


And speaking of making room for baby, unintentionally, this past week we had to throw out almost everything we had stored in our building's basement storage locker, due to our own and someone else's ignorance. Apparently every time it rains - and this summer has been a wet one for sure - the basement in our building tends to flood. We only found this out recently. Well, combine that with someone not speaking up about a broken pipe in her storage locker and our choice to store stuff in cardboard boxes, and you get damaged goods. Plus, since we didn't try to salvage things right away, mold started accumulating and for our safety and our baby's safety, we - well, Matt mostly because I shouldn't be moving heavy things right now - had to toss out everything that we thought had been contaminated and wasn't utterly important.

That included all of his childhood mementos, albums, artwork and his most prized toy, a stuffed rabbit - his mom had gathered it all to give to him when she and his dad moved out east several years back. For me, I had to let go of a box full of old journals and sketchbooks, which had me a bit ill at ease. I don't want to imagine someone else reading those or going through my personal things. But oh well, if that stuff had meant such a great deal to us, we probably wouldn't have put them down in storage. That's what I've tried to tell myself.

As well as rearranging stuff in our home, I tried out the new rearrange shop feature on etsy the other day and colour coded all my items. I don't know why, but I tend to do that with things. My clothes are like that and when I had my own section for clothing in stores, I would do that. Our bookshelves are like that too.

Right now, red is on the first page. I will change that up probably every so often. At least you can still change the view to select "most recently listed".


Other than that, I've been pretty busy screen printing for others and getting together my own Fall stock to send out to various shops. This is one of the images I printed, which is also one of my favourite new ones available through Oddbird Designs.


I'm also working on a new design featuring an owl - yes, not just a puttytat! - and will hopefully have it ready to unveil and print in a week or so. And I've got a new custom portrait keeping me busy too, which I'll post about another day. So all in all, pretty busy and happy for it.

This month's giveaway will be another good one, with 3 different winners chosen, so be sure to check back on the 15th!

And the Winner is...

I made the draw for the August blog giveaway earlier this afternoon. And the lucky winner is Sarah! Thanks to all who entered last month. It started out a bit slow, but in the end there were 60-some entries. I loved hearing about your favourite summer movies and will have to check out the ones I haven't yet seen.

Remember, giveaways are on a monthly basis and a guaranteed way to enter is simply by becoming one of my blog followers or by joining my Happy Customers gallery on flickr!

The latest items to hit the shop are pictured below:

moustache kitty on pink & brown

moustache kitty on teal & brown

Moustache Kitty undies!
These have been in the works for some time but I only got around to printing them this past weekend.

And here's a sneak peek of what else will be added to the shop very soon. Still some finishing touches needed to make these all the more special. Check back in a week or two.