What Happens When 200 DIY-sters Get In A Room

There was tons of stuff at Unique Los Angeles this weekend. (See slideshow for additional photos). Here are some notes I made while shopping:

1. Owls. Dude, they are everywhere. I mean, it's Barack Obama and owls, this season.

2. Downtown LA. It's the most awful place ever. Period. All those annoying one-way streets. Then I had a really tough time finding the California Market Center, where the Unique LA event was being held. Might be nice if the people who design our city, you know, label stuff in downtown.

3. Human Organs & Meat Plush. Two great plush artists were present. The girl who designs the I Heart Guts oeuvre, and the Sweet Meats person. Like all stuffed toys, these looked best en masse.

4. Portrait of a Cockroach as a Young Bug. So, I talked with this woman, Monster Kat, who is a bug artist. She did portraits of bugs (some live--like one madagascar hissing cockroach--and some dead) because she's "not so good with taking portraits of people." You cannot make this stuff up.

5. The Present Group. They do a pretty cool subscription art service. For $150 a year, you get four different pieces of art mailed to you. Like this one below where the guy collected bricks washed up on the seashore, took them home, glazed and fired them in a kiln. 

6. Cakemonkey. I went on preview night, and was planning on going back at the end of the evening to get some cake, but the evening ended before that could happen. Now I am sad. So sad.

7. "Foi Gras This, Motherf---er!" said the duck. Of all the items that amused me, and there were many, an angry duck fridge magnet by The Frantic Meerkat The Mincing Mockingbird (oops!) cracked me up the most. Other personal favorites included: the organic catnip fortune cookies. (And the woman who makes them is gorgeous!) The crazy guy from Coma and Cotton, who had put up signs that said "Coma and Cotton puts peyote in your daughter." The dastardly little notebooks at Eleven Eleven which demanded that I purchase them immediately despite an alarmingly large collection of little notebooks already extant in my house. And pretty much all the charming, teeny, tiny weekly planners at Cut + Paste. I mean, whose schedule, aside from Thumbelina's, truly fits onto a planner the size of a post-it-note?