Made on the Left winter market

I will be having a stall at the Made on the Left winter market on Sunday! There will be lots of local designers, live music, live art, activities, winter wonderland themed installations and more!

Festival of creativity!

I hate summer. Mainly the heat. The hot hot hot heat. The burning, boiling brutal heat. But there’s one thing about summer that I look forward to every year - festival season! January and February are the months for Perth Fringe Festival and Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF), and I love it! There’s always so much on and such strange and usual, interesting, different, fun and exciting events. It’s non-stop!

For one weekend during PIAF it’s the Perth Writers Festival and this year there were two special crafty guests - Pip Lincolne, the crafting queen, and Beci Orpin, an illustrator, designer and author. I booked in for a Creativity Shake Up workshop with Pip (which was unfortunately on at the same time as Beci’s workshop - I wanted to do both!!) and joined a bunch of creative ladies to hear about Pip’s path to creativity. I was pleasantly surprised to find Davina from Fluid Ink Letterpress and Nicole from House of Nicnax were also there and enjoyed hanging out with them for the morning.

In the first part of the workshop, Pip the crafting queen gave us some exercises to evaluate our own creativity and expectations and tips on the importance of making time to be creative. She gets up at 5:30(!) every morning so she can get things done before the busyness of the day takes over. I don’t think I could manage that as I’m more of a night owl but I can definitely see the benefit to it. I might even try getting up a bit earlier and see how it works...

After a short break, it was time to get creatively crafty with pompoms and ponies! My pony magically turned into a unicorn. It would have been a pegasus but time was not on its side! By the end of our hands-on making frenzy, the tables were covered in bits of wool, glitter, beads, felt cuttings and threads - it already felt more creative! But it was time to go home… I did enjoy creating something with my hands which I haven’t done for a few months so thanks to Pip for bringing some creative fairy dust and sprinkling it over Perth!

Pip was back again in the afternoon for a panel discussion called “The Creatives” with her crafty friend, Beci Orpin. They both lead very creative lives and have become quite well known for it. I really like Beci’s illustration style. In fact, I had a patch designed by her on my bag that day! Pip and Beci both make a living out of being creative so I was interested to hear what they would say about it. They both thought it was important to prioritise time for creativity and leave “empty” time for ideas to come. Their number one advice was to ‘be nice and work hard” and, after meeting them both, it’s something which they both seem to follow which made me admire them even more.

I really enjoyed my creativity focussed day. It’s not every day you get told to just think and explore and come home with a unicorn. I hope there are lots more days like that.

Tall Rabbit's 2015

Another year has gone past and like every year, it seems to have been really quick! There have been new and exciting adventures in 2015 for Tall Rabbit, the biggest which was travelling to Sydney to exhibit at Oz Comic-Con! I also joined Instagram (follow me @tallrabbitgram) and loved it!  I did more pop-up shops with Montage Collective and markets with Made on the Left and designed new products. Not as many as I'd hoped but that just means I have even more planned for 2016! Thank you for supporting me and I hope to meet lots more of you in 2016! Long live Tall Rabbit! :)

Tickle the alpacas!

Tickle the Imagination magazine is a great publication that comes out of Western Australia and is devoted to creativity, in particular handmade, craft and design. The latest issue, number 20, had a feature on llamas and alpacas which included my alpaca necklaces! It also has lots of other interesting and creative things inside and I recommend checking it out! 

Made on the Left winter market

For the past few months, I've been madly working away to help organise and prepare for the Made on the Left market, which was on Sunday. For the first time it was held at the Perth Concert Hall and it turned out to be a pretty good venue, with lots of natural light. It was filled with over 70 local designers, lots of customers and four local music acts. Unfortunately, I was running around doing organisational things so much that I didn't get to spend much time at my stall or to get any photos! Luckily, I had a very capable helper to serve my customers and Louise Simonette was there to take photos. Thanks guys!  

Superpowered Supanova

It was another busy year at Supanova with the crowds going wild for Nathan Fillion! But my highlight was when my favourite superhero, Wonder Woman, and her pal Batgirl came to check out my stall. Maybe some of their superpowers rubbed off onto my things!

Uppercase lowdown

One of my favourite magazines is Uppercase from Canada and I was very excited to find out that the creator/designer/editor, Janine Vangool was coming to the Perth Writers Festival! She was on a few panels speaking about magazines with people from Dumbo Feather, Kinfolk, Smith Journal and Alphabet Family Journal. I was impressed to hear how she can produce a whole magazine by herself every few months and still have time to spend with her family and to sleep! After the talks, I got to meet her and she is a very nice lady :) She even wrote a lovely message in my copy of the latest Uppercase. Such a happy fangirl moment!

Postcards from the past (and the Giants)

I've been featuring postcards a lot lately so it's on theme to mention the postcards I got from the Giants' farewell performance. The Giants arrived in Perth with a matching amount of hype and took over the city for three days. I went along on the Saturday and Sunday and it was mayhem! I did get to see the Giants up close on Saturday and from a distance on Sunday when they left via the Swan River. 

Part of the procession involved postcards shooting from cannons which I collected a few of. From what I can gather, they were reproductions of old postcards from war times and some were from the Postcards from Home project. This project involved people writing messages to Anzac soldiers who inspired them. There are some great images of Perth in the early 1900s with trams and horse drawn carts and wide streets (some buildings are still recognisable!). There were also reproductions of postcards sent home by the soldiers showing places they'd been such as Egypt and France and also one showing a burial on the battlefield. The postcards were linked to the Giants' story by a young girl in Albany who sent morse code messages to soldiers as they sailed away to war. Her story was featured in a giant book read to the Girl Giant who then got the idea to send morse code messages to the Diver Giant at the bottom of the sea by blowing bubbles into the ocean with a didgeridoo. At  least, I think this is what happened!

Tall Rabbit in the mail!

I recently found out about postcrossing where you send and receive postcards to/from random people around the world. I thought that sounded like fun so I signed up and got my first 5 addresses. Yay! I was particularly excited to get my first recipient in Germany because I'm a bit obsessed with Deutschland. I decided to adapt some of my designs to postcards and here's my first batch - they will be going to Germany, Russia, Belarus, Japan and USA. Tall Rabbit's going around the world!

Made on the Left Christmas market

Last weekend was probably my biggest achievement of the year so far - the Made on the Left Christmas markets! It was over two days in Forrest Place, Perth. I am on the volunteer committee and help organise it and boy is it a lot of work! From our first meeting with the City of Perth in August, we started planning and organising and working working working! There's so much that goes on behind the scenes that I never knew about before I joined Made on the Left. Sometimes it was overwhelming and stressful but it all worked out in the end. Phew! I'm so proud to be part of the Perth creative community, with so much talent on offer! Thank you to everyone who supports it by coming to the Made on the Left markets and everyone who helped out to make sure it all went well. We did it!

Markets, markets, markets

It's heading towards the busy season and I have a few markets coming up...

Something Different in Leederville
Friday 7th November 5 - 9, Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th November 10 - 4.
Leederville Arena (corner of Newcastle and Oxford St, Leederville)
I will have a small space on Saturday and Sunday at this pop-up event for Etsy sellers.

Made on the Left
Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd November
10 am - 4pm both days
Forrest Place, Perth
Tall Rabbit will be here on Saturday and as part of the Montage Collective stall on Sunday.

Fremantle Bazaar
Friday 6th December 5 - 10pm, Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th December 9 - 5.
Fremantle Arts Centre
Tall Rabbit will be at the Montage Collective stall with Anna Hadwin Crochet, Little Mo and Friends, Eeva Margita, Major Mitchell, neddynibbles and osier.


So you'll have plenty of chances to get your hands on some Tall Rabbit goodies in the lead up to Christmas! 

A day at the Show

It's show time! Perth Royal Show time! This year it featured food, puppies, bunnies, cool alpacas, fluffy chickens, psychedelic chickens, doughnuts and also robots, diving pigs, baby animals, cheese toasties, sausage on a stick, more animals, prize winning cakes, Tron horses and fireworks! What a day!

Dino invasion!

Eeek! Has Perth been invaded by dinosaurs?!!
Don't worry, it's just the museum ... and there is a fence to keep us safe. Phew!

Two arts, please!

It's festival season again! And, as usual, there is a great visual arts program to go with the Perth International Arts Festival, starting with Paramodelic-Graffiti by Paramodel and The Tenth Sentiment by Ryota Kuwakubo, both at John Curtin Gallery.

Paramodel is two Japanese artists, Yasuhiko Hayashi and Yusuke Nakano, who create large-scale art installations and travel around the world to install them. Their latest work is their largest yet and uses blue toy train tracks, foam mountains, paper, sand, toy animals and model construction equipment. Despite these simple components, the patterns and worlds they create are quite complex. Each installation is designed specifically for its location. The artists use computer programs to help map out the intricate paths of the train tracks, with areas of symmetry. Yasuhiko Hayashi, 2 assistants and a team of helpers worked for a month from 8am to 8pm every day to get the installation ready for opening night. They bring the "Plarail" train tracks from Japan and then try to get all other materials locally. They like to add a few local fauna, which is why you will find kangaroos, echidnas, wombats and cockatoos in the landscape.

From outside the gallery, you will see the blue train tracks 'escaping' the building. Stepping inside, you will see more tracks, travelling around the walls and ceiling with little cranes interspersed but when you enter the gallery, you will become immersed into a world of blue and white, with the walls, floor and ceiling engulfed in paramodelic graffiti!

The Tenth Sentiment will also engulf you as you walk into a dark room lit only by the headlight of a model train moving slowly along the track, alongside which are various objects casting changing shadows on the walls. As the different shadows loom out of the darkness, you are taken on a journey through space and time...

These exhibitions have to be experienced to fully appreciate the work so I recommend you get there before they close in April. There are plenty more interesting and unusual arts events coming up, such as an inflatable Stonehenge, and I'm looking forward to seeing them soon. Yay for festival season!

Night markets

Outdoor markets in the summer are not so fun. Hot, sweaty, melty and burny - urrghh! So what do you do? Have them at night time! Away from the burning glare of our overenthusiastic summer sun, under the glow of the soothing moon... yes, it's time for the creatures of the night to come out and play! And shop!

Montage Pop-up Shop #5

Time is nearly up for our latest Montage Pop-up Shop! Make sure you get into 224a William Street by Sunday 2nd September (Father's Day) to see all our wonderful goodies. There are even some manly Father's Day cards and gift ideas! We know what men like! Oh yeah!

Tall Rabbit Father's Day cards

Tall Rabbit stand at Montage Po-Up shop

Tall Rabbit at Supanova!

Some Tall Rabbit customers at Supanova including zombies, Pikachu & Ash and Rilakkuma!

I had a great time at Supanova with lots of superbly costumed attendees. One zombie couldn't stop herself from tasting a Tall Rabbit item and Pikachu freaked out at the cuteness of it all! It was a fun weekend and I hope to do it again next year!

Supa badges!

I've done three new badge sets which will be making their debut at Supanova on the weekend! One set is dedicated to a Supanova special guest, Yvonne Craig, who played Batgirl in the 1960's Batman TV show and Marta the green slave girl from Star Trek. Another set is dedicated to the Lolrus and his bucket. And the other set is dedicated to the No No No Cat. Unfortunately the Lolrus and the No No No Cat were not invited to Supanova. If they were, I'd be camped outside their hotels waiting to catch a glimpse of them! I think the Lolrus would want the presidential suite and the No No No Cat would probably reject all the rooms offered and end up in a kitty carrier on the balcony. Poor No No No Cat.

The Madness!

There's a lot going on in Perth at the moment, in fact there's almost too much! It could quite possibly blow your little minds and give you a severe case of the Madness! 
To start with, the Fringe Festival has the number one spot to hang out with its awesome Fringe World  - a magical oasis of coolness in the middle of the city at the Old Treasury (and the place to spot Barry Morgan after his World of Organ shows). You will also find roving carny folk (beware!), lots of astro turf and palette seating and even a tank with mermaids! And I haven't even mentioned all the shows you can go to or the Spiegeltent!
The Perth International Arts Festival burst into town on Saturday night with Place des Anges. There were feathers raining down on the city of Perth, crazy French performers, Les Studios de Cirque, zooming down wires from the tops of buildings and a giant inflatable angel flying down St George's Terrace!
On the other side of town there is the more 'grown-up' Festival Gardens (also making use of plenty of astro turf) with pretty lanterns and bars made out of huge pipes from the C.Y. O'Connor pipeline! 
Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa has been getting around town too, leaving his mark in Stirling Gardens with Air/Air, his giant pink and green triangular constructions made out of plastic baskets and he's also filled up Gallery Central with wriggly balloons for his exhibition Life/Life and you can also see his giant inflatable lotus at UWA.
I'm pooped just thinking about it! I guess I will have a case of the Madness for another few weeks at least! Yippee!


Image (clockwise from top left): Fringe World, mermaids, Air/Air, Place des Anges, Life/Life and PIAF Festival Gardens

Semi-Permanent Perth 2011 - A design conference with beer!

It's not at many conferences that you can enjoy an alcoholic beverage* whilst listening to the speakers but this typifies the relaxed atmosphere of Semi-Permanent Perth - where speakers present with a hangover (remarkably well, considering!) and our books don't quite make it on time (I finally got mine 2 months later!).


I'm not sure why Semi-Permanent extends its conference tour to Perth but I'm glad they do. I can only assume it's more of a franchise with Semi Permanent lending the name and a few speakers and Artrage/Bakery doing the the rest. I've been to the conference in Sydney and it's a slick 2 day affair to an audience of hundreds, unlike the Perth event! It's nice to be able to see speakers in a more intimate setting though and helps Perth feel not so forgotten by the eastern states. I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to go to a design conference in my own city for once. Yay, no airfares!


We had a rather dapper MC with a self-proclaimed "pleasing baritone" (who was that guy?) and after a few technical issues, the conference was underway.

The first speakers were Sonja and John from Nude Design Studio, based in Perth. They have been producing their minimal contemporary designs for about 3 years and had some valuable tips about alternatives to using stock photos and some legal 'advice'. They seemed disappointed that in their first year, they barely made $28000 but when I found out they did this while travelling the world and working on a mini laptop, I was impressed!

For Sydneysiders, Morten & Daniel of Supervixen seemed awfully nice! And they actually got through their presentation in the allocated time, which they said was a first. Well done! They both started out in motion graphics by learning on the go and believe that mistakes don't have to be failures, they are just another part of learning. I was quite excited to find out they developed the cute food characters on the Wrigley's ad! I love that doughnut! :)

Next came Gemma O'Brien, an ebullient & passionate type enthusiast. She shares her love of type through her blog which amazingly enabled her to be invited to speak at a design conference in Berlin as a 2nd year design student - wow! She just loves type!

Ken Taylor, a Perth-born, Melbourne-based illustrator was the 4th speaker. I've seen him speak before but he is such a talented illustrator, I'm not complaining! He shared a glimpse of his working technique which is always interesting to see.

Lastly, Brendan Savage from Fuel VFX told us about how he was 'living the dream' getting to work on big movies including a lot of Marvel Comics movies and a prequel to the 'Aliens' movies. Although it was potentially financially very risky with the company not being paid for their work they did for pitches, even though they could spend weeks on it. But without doing a pitch, they would never get the job.


Overall, it was an interesting day, surprisingly not as well attended as last year's conference (maybe due to their lack of a 'big name' international presenter). Thanks to all the speakers and organisers and I look forward to next year's conference! 


* They did wait til 12:30 to open the bar...


P.S. It is a few months since the conference but I have been so busy, I've only just had a chance to post this!