Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Started drawing again

A quick update for those who are interested in what happened at the embassy...

It's a good thing I read Mumsy Bumsy's comment about printing out all the emails before going to the embassy, because when I got there and explained my business, Mr Bangla Bastard (who is actually a Malay dude) repeated the same thing to me as he did on the phone. Oh boy, do I know his voice really well now.

So I dug into my hat of tricks and pulled out the printouts of the emails. Mr Bangla-Malay read them in silence, then told me to pass him my police report and also to let him take these emails with him to check with Mr Jamal.

In the end, everything worked out, thankfully. Mr Bangla-Malay turned out to be a nice, talkative dude, albeit still having a sort of Melayu manner (more social than work-minded, but that's fine since I don't work with him) even though he's lived in NL for over 30 years.

My translation only cost € 35 (phew!) and although Schrobbenmaster and I waited all morning, Mr Jamal could only work on my report in the afternoon because he had a particularly difficult case to handle before ours. So we were advised to go home and wait for the post to deliver my translation.

It came 2 days later (yay!). So now I'm all set to get the remainder of my life back.

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On another note, although I hated having Schrobbenmaster away from me most of the month of October for the festival, it was a good time for me to start looking into myself again and explore what I like. I decided to start drawing again. It's been awesome therapy and it's great to see a style emerging.


I'm planning to make a recipe book for the kitchen here. A homemade one with blank pages to fill in. Right now we're just using a plastic folder with ugly black and white printouts from Textedit (Notepad for you Windows dinosaurs). I just need to find a lovely, cute, LARGE kitchen hook to hang the recipe book on. (Big hint for my Christmas wish list, anyone?).


Maybe I'll make my own Christmas cards this year. Or if I'm lazy again, Christmas tags like last year.

I have more sketches in my sketchbook at home, but I'm not sure what I wanna do with them. Whether to show them to anyone or just keep them as exercises in expression. Schrobbenmaster calls it my Tree Book, cuz I only draw trees in it :S

Btw, I started a new page on Tumblr to collect designs I find inspiring. Visit it here: goodputty.tumblr.com

6 comments:

elleLee said...

I love the drawings. So very cute :D
Making a recipe book sounds so nice, homey, motherly, cosey. Do it!

elleLee said...

Oh and you should check out http://mymilktoof.blogspot.com if you haven't already. Very cute stuff as well.

Melissa Chan said...

You should do prints of your drawings! They would make nice gift cards, I reckon.

shoobaba said...

Mel:
I usually draw my tags by hand cuz I don't use enough to actually make prints. Do you know any service I can do short print runs for an affordable price?

elle:
Yes I've seen the site, it's cute!
You should submit some of your special recipes for my book :D

Melissa Chan said...

How short of print runs are you looking at? It depends on your specs I suppose, I can give you a supplier's contact whom I have used before for one or two small projects, they MIGHT be willing to do short runs. Have you checked Rotterdam / Amsterdam?

shoobaba said...

no idea really, i don't mind leaving it up to the minimum amount that the printer specifies, cuz i can always keep the tags for years to come. i guess i'm thinking of 1000 as a reasonable number.

over here, the printing is really expensive and you don't get the special finishes for an affordable price :( it's sometimes even cheaper to just print in MY and then post it over, believe it or not!