I’ve done all my holiday shopping this season online sitting on my bum sipping hot cocoa and it’s glorious. I want to extend that level of comfort to you with a KaleidoPress Black Friday promo.

Get your friends and family a limited gift this year. Just enter promo code: BLACKPRESS at checkout in the KaleidoPress shop here. Offer ends Friday, Nov 25th at Midnight.

xo

.:> Los Angeles, CA, October 1, 2011 – PONY, the classic athletic footwear brand, teams up once again with the Keep A Breast Foundation for the “Check Your Self” Collection to raise breast cancer awareness and prevention among young women. “Check Your Self” is a creative collaboration that brings together some of Keep A Breast’s top artists to customize PONY’s shoes. $3 from the sale of each shoe from PONY’s new line of vegan styles will be donated toward the organization.

“PONY is a globally influenced brand and that is why we were drawn to Keep A Breast because of their position as a leader in raising breast cancer awareness among youth on a similar worldwide scale,” says Tess Passero, Marketing Director of PONY. “We are so excited to partner with KAB again this year in their active role in raising awareness through art, music, fashion and sport.”

This year’s collection is designed by renowned artist and Keep A Breast supporter Laurie Shipley and will retail from $45.00 to $55.00. It will be available starting October 1st for Breast Cancer Awareness Month on PONY and Keep A Breast’s websites, as well as other select retailers to be announced. The low-profile vegan designs are perfect sneakers for style and symbolize a youth-based sensibility that epitomizes the personality of the Keep A Breast Foundation. Taking inspiration from nature, Native American and old-world sailor imagery, Shipley’s designs incorporate KAB’s message of taking a stand to make the world a better, healthier place for future generations. The PONY Check Your Self Collection helps spread the word about breast cancer prevention, early detection, and the importance of living a healthy toxic-free lifestyle with the incidence of breast cancer being increasingly linked to toxic chemicals in our environment, water and food supply.

“As Keep A Breast transitions into a green foundation, we are so excited to be working with PONY on these vegan styles that embody the Keep A Breast girl,” says Keep A Breast co-founder Shaney Jo Darden. “We are thrilled to broaden our important message to young women through this unique and important collaboration with PONY. Raising nearly 20,000 dollars with last year’s collaboration, we are so excited to grow with PONY and are tremendously grateful for their support and generosity.” <:.

My shoe collaboration with PONY and KEEP A BREAST released a month or two ago, have you checked it out yet? I wanted to post a little bit about the process in coming up with the final theme of the shoes.

I had been supporting Keep A Breast and their efforts for a few years when Shaney Jo Darden (KAB co-Founder) and Erica Leite (KAB Youth Outreach Director) contacted me about designing Keep A Breasts newest shoe collab, ‘Check Your Self” with Pony. After a delighted “Yes, I’d love to!” and a few emails and phone conversations later, we promptly set to work coming up with the theme and look of the shoes. The initial design process happened very quickly over the course of a month or two in the Fall of 2009.

As I mentioned in an interview with PONY here, I wanted a classic balance between clean bold lines and intricate illustration to create unique shoes that would appeal to a wide audience. I was inspired by Native American imagery and combined that with a Nautical theme so you’ll see anchors and arrows, shark teeth, a feather symbolizing a dream catcher and a Herringbone pattern that is both reminiscent of Native American weaving and symbolic of water. The shoes carry different shades of blue with a pop of gold and red. I think blue is going to be a prominent color this season so it came together perfectly with the theme.

It was all a pleasant process, Keep A Breast being very supportive of my ideas. And it was important to both of us to create vegan shoes.

I had come up with a variety of colors for 6 or 7 styles of women’s sneakers, in the end three were chosen for production in the collaboration. Here are a couple samples of prototypes we were working on that didn’t make the final cut:

Working with Shaney, Erica and Tess from PONY we had secured the three low profile styles that would become the Fall 2011 PONY x KEEP A BREAST “Check Your Self” shoe collab:

This was such a fun project! You can pick up the shoes online through Pony, Keep A Breast or my website.

xo

At the bottom of the basement steps you could turn to the left to enter a large room that my parents used as an office (hello Commodore 64) and my brother, sister and I shared as a play schoolroom, complete with a desk and chalkboard and a wardrobe full of books. The wall closest to the stairway had a wallpapered nature scene of a path surrounding a lake in Autumn. Our little schoolroom led into another much larger room with a wood burning stove and piano. My sister and I along with our friends would use this room as the in house set to our music videos of ourselves lip synching to Madonna. We also housed the occasional fashion show and one haunted house. The small bathroom off this large “production” room is where we played Bloody Mary in the dark freaking ourselves out into oblivion.

Lots of space in those two rooms to make a cool temporary bedroom. But no, for my bedroom I was lured to the laundry room off the right side of the basement. There was a freezer sometimes stocked with popsicles; pro…but the the washer and dryer made terrifying noises through the night. It also attracted spiders; con. The tie breaker for my 8ish year old design mind was the huge built in shelves with hinged doors along the far end wall. These doors were my focal point and are what I designed my room around.

I cleared off the bottom two shelves. The top I piled in blankets to soften the compressed wood surface and added a small lamp for a bit of night reading. (Doubled as a light source for keeping an eye out for spiders.) On the bottom shelf I put clothes, books and toys. I brought down a few posters and my rocking chair and moved in a rug to give it a homey feel. This was my dream bedroom….for a few nights until I could no longer suffer through the spiders and the hard wooden “bed” and moved into another area of the house.

That may seem like a long story to introduce you to the fact that I recently gave one of my family member’s a new bedroom while they were out of town, but that’s just how I do things. So, as my family were on vacation out at sea for 7 days I went to work turning a cluttered dark room into a clean fresh relaxing space to come home to. I love giving people little surprises like this and it was much appreciated by its receiver.

Total money spent was less than $100 and other than the hours put into this project, I had some great stuff to work with.

*I’ve purposefully left out the name of the bedroom’s owner as not to embarrass them with shots of there previous mangled hoarded mess of a room!

So much hard work, but really fun to do for someone. In one last related note, my son who will be 13 in December has been so inspired by the chefs on The Cooking Channel and Food Network that he’s been so into cooking lately, making breakfast, lunch and dinner for me. Even washing the dishes! I wonder if this new interest of his will carry on until he’s grown….

xo

I received my samples last week and I can’t wait to sew with these fabrics! Check them out here.

xo

Haven’t posted much lately, partially because most of my current work won’t release for some time. Here’s a little sneak peek at an upcoming project!

xo