O is for Owl and Oh My, October's nearly Over!

O is for Owl Print available in my shop.

Time flies when you're having fun and napping entirely too much.  That's what I spent most of September and October doing.  With a little work fit in here and there.  

I'll blame it on the little one in my ever growing belly :)

We are expecting a new addition to our family next spring and this time around has had me wiped out for the past few months.  As I head into the second trimester,  I'm already feeling like my energy is returning (knock on wood), as I would normally be napping instead of blogging during Whitney's nap.  Of course, it seems like Miss Whitney is not into taking her nap today.  Murphy's Law, right?

A long post wasn't meant to be today.  Until next time!

October Giveaway

Just a quick post today to announce this month's giveaway.

(Click on image to enlarge it)

Prizes: an owl and pussycat screen printed scarf (only one end is printed) and a set of six owl and pussycat buttons. Total value is $31 in honour of Halloween!

Ways to enter: Leave a comment saying what you're going to be/do this Halloween. If you're not dressing up, then perhaps share one of your favourite past costumes.

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

And all my Happy Customers and current blog followers are automatically entered every month.

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.

Winners will be announced on November 1st!

It's almost dinner time, so toodles for now.

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.

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!