Spring is almost here, and some new designs for my Etsy shop are on their way. In the meantime, here are some recent press mentions.

The SF clock is featured on Apartment Therapy’s Hometown Pride: 5 Creative Finds to Celebrate Your City & State!

The Kitty Ring was featured in Etsy’s Cat Lady Chic newsletter. And the Paris Clock is in the J’Adore Paris Etsy Newsletter.

The Rainy Day clock has been featured in a lovely spread in Sweet Paul Magazine:

… And a thanks to the many other bloggers who picked up my products this spring!

My city skyline clocks were inspired by international time displays. Most international time displays with multiple clocks use the same clock but with a text label indicating the city the time corresponds to. I decided to innovate on this concept by integrating the city into the clock itself. I now carry the following cities: Paris, Tokyo, New York, London, Sydney, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Seattle.

Here’s how they look, all on the wall, together:

Individual clocks: Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin, Seattle

I’m always designing new cities. If you have a recommendation for a city, let me know in the comments along with some famous landmarks from that city that you’d want to see in the clock.

Much has happened since the last entry, which was posted almost half a year ago. For 2012 I’m going to be restarting this blog with more regular updates about my projects, and maybe some observations about my personal life, too. I’ll be bringing some new topics to the table, such as my adventures in self employment and life in San Francisco.

So, the updates. In October I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco and fell madly in love with the city. It’s been almost three months and the honeymoon isn’t over yet. I don’t think it will ever be. In November/December I braved a super busy but successful holiday season on Iluxo … and recently exceeded 1000 sales.

In the past few years I converted my entire wardrobe to consist almost exclusively of dresses. I sometimes wear jeans to go hiking, but otherwise I only wear pants when a random mood strikes me or if it’s really too cold. The too-cold situation hasn’t happened here in SF yet. My new (amazing) life has inspired a sudden urge to own a few dresses that are a little out of the box, or shall we say, crazy. I’ve had my eyes peeled for a dress with a huge non repeating pattern of a galaxy, unicorn, kitten, rainbows, etc. etc. on it. Basically I want a dress that looks like the internet threw up on it. Photographic prints have been a fashion trend in recent seasons but I have such specific desires that I haven’t been able to find what I want.

My yet unrealized plan is to design/make the print myself with stock photos, have it printed by Spoonflower, and then sew it into the dress. I’m still weighing the feasibility of this. One concern is being able to find stock photography with a high enough resolution for the large details of the print. The other problem is the fact that I can’t do test swatches of the print, so I’ll have to buy a minimum of a yard from Spoonflower each time the print fails.

To fill the void, though, I’ve kept my eyes peeled for the other crazy dresses I want to have in my life. Enter the Hippie dress, aka LSDress, which I found at Buffalo Exchange. Here I am wearing it in my room. Photographs compliments of my very patient roommate Sandra.

As you can see, it’s an Amish hippie wedding dress that looks a bit like the cover of Disraeli Gears.

The options:

1. Leave it as-is. I’m trying to work myself up to lounging around at Dolores Park in it. Can I dodge the inevitable stares that I will get from people if I wear it in public? I’d like to be the kind of person who wouldn’t care. I’d like to know the kind of people who wouldn’t. If you’d walk around with me wearing this in public, you’re my new best friend. But this isn’t Harajuku …

2. You can’t really tell in the photos, but the bust is actually fitted very well. I could hem it to the knee or slightly below the knee. This will slightly offset the crazy, but I’m ambivalent about this option because I feel like it’s all or nothing.

3. Cut off the puffy sleeves and hem it super short. This looks the most likely. But I might feel like I was butchering it.

4. Use it as a hippie costume. A sad fate.

I’m getting varying responses. Some people like it. Others think I’m committing a fashion crime (which is kind of the point). I just want it to be rocking the right kind of crazy.

So, internet, what is the right kind of crazy? What should I do? What would you do?

Lately, iluxo, my line of jewelry and home decor, has really taken off. I conceptualized iluxo in the summer of 2010 with the idea that I could make Treasure Lockets (box-shaped bamboo “lockets” that hang around the neck and can open and close), but I didn’t really start taking the project seriously until April.

The quick success of my shop made me think about an integral part of every product: Packaging. Before this, I was shipping in 4″x4″ square kraft cardboard boxes. While these served their purpose, I noticed two of my customers left positive feedback saying the product was packaged “carefully.” While their feedback about the product itself was more glowing, “carefully” wasn’t exactly the word I wanted to push forward with for the future of my brand.

I started mailing my product in bubble mailers with a sturdy cardboard jewelry box inside (the kind department stores use). To decorate the boxes I wanted something that would be memorable and would convince the customer to keep the box as a useful, and beautiful item in her home. I decided to stamp the top of the boxes with sealing wax for a sophisticated and pretty effect.

Two hundred jewelry boxes, on my bedroom floor …

There wasn’t a lot of information out there about mass-scale sealing wax operations. Most people doing this are preparing for weddings. Here’s some information for you if you’re planning to use sealing wax for wedding invitations, sealing wax for your business, etc:

1. The absolute fastest way to work with sealing wax is with a glue gun.
2. Faux sealing wax is stronger (strong enough to withstand the wear of outside of an envelope during mailing, though mine are in the inside), and a fraction of the price of real sealing wax.
3. Faux sealing wax is stickier than regular sealing wax. You’ll need frequently apply a seal non-stick.

Here’s my setup.

1. Low temperature glue gun
2. Seal
3. Faux Sealing Wax
4. Sealing wax non-stick

(I’d rather not advertise a specific place to buy these, but if you search the names of any of these products in a search engine you’ll find plenty of places selling them. You can also email me at iluxodesign [!at] gmail.com if you want to know where I got mine.)

Application was easy though not fast. It took me about two hours to complete two hundred boxes. It would’ve been faster if I had more than one seal, as much of the time spent is waiting for the sealing wax to cool down enough to pull off without breaking. I started with a couple of different colors and used them in the same glue gun. If you use different colors in one glue gun, the colors will mix into each other, and not just in the beginning. Half of each stick (except for the first one) will be a blend of the color before it. Because of that you should use a separate glue gun per color. Cleaning a glue gun between colors is hard, but you can use some clear hot glue in between colors to reset it. You might even want to use different colors if you like a swirled color.

Some advice if your seal sticks: once in a while, when you pull on your seal, it will pull on the still warm sealing wax, making the pattern of your seal break or deform. It’s a good idea to lift the seal gently, and if you feel excessive resistance, to stop. Push the seal back down and wait for the wax to cool longer. If you do end up breaking the seal, you can simply pour more sealing wax on top and stamp again.

Pictured is a mix of bronze and purple:

I got an owl stamp as a starter because everyone likes owls, and this one was cute. But I plan to eventually design a custom seal that relates to my brand. The seal I got was was 3/4″ round and I was able to make 200 seals with six sticks of faux wax. That’s about 33-34 seals per stick, however, I did not use a large amount of sealing wax per seal.

I was also interested in brand name retention with my new packaging. So I got a custom stamp kit with rearrangeable letters and stamped the inside of every box with my shop name, shop URL, and “♥ Mariko” in it.

Let me know in the comments if you have questions about sealing wax.

Iluxo has been doing very well the past few months. One of the treasure lockets was featured in Bird Talk Magazine July 2011! And I actually ran out of the first 100 business cards I made. The old business cards were pretty but didn’t do much for the shop. I made them before I had a clear view of the products I’d design.

Unfortunately when I headed over to the paper store I found out that Envelopments, the card stock brand I use, discontinued about half their colors, including the periwinkle with metallic blue of the old business cards. I chose a cool blue cardstock with a nice iridescence in its place.

This time the design includes one of my products (the kitty ring), the phrase “home decor, jewelry, design,” and uses a more readable font. I died a little bit from the cuteness when I realized they fit perfectly in my little square dish.

The fact that they’re half sized this time makes them multi use. A hole punched through the corner of a card makes it a nice size for a tag, and it can also be used as a hair pin set tag. I double-sided-taped one to the back of a clock that sold and it was the perfect size for a label. I’m still going to have full sized cards to give to people I meet.

The banner also got a redesign, and I’m working on a separate website for iluxo.