...and I'm back!

So a very long time and no posts! The past few months I've been kept busy as I've taken on an HND in Sports Therapy and also doing a lot of training (at my martial arts club and kettlebell sport training). Birdcage Creative has still been around but I just haven't had much time to keep things up to date here, but term is over now so all systems go!

Although it's not the most business related news I wanted to take the opportunity to put up a wee update, and ask for your support in the process (skip to the end of the post for that one!)

June has been a hectic month so far for me, I promoted to black belt in Kuk Sool Won the first weekend of the month, which involved doing my last 3 hour testing with the Grandmaster's son and other high ranking black belts, receiving my promotion from the Grandmaster himself and taking part in a black belt demonstration afterwards - a long, but exciting, weekend!

Also this month the club I train at is hosting a two day training seminar ran by the top two kettlebell athletes in UK and Ireland, I can't wait! I've been doing more kettlebell sports training recently (see here for a bit more of an explanation) in preparation for upcoming competitions, first one is in a few weeks up in Aberdeen then in August the team is traveling to Kilkenny in Ireland for the Irish Kettlebell Sports Championships. The picture to the left was at the English Open Long Cycle Competition back in February.

To round off the month's events I'm taking part in a sponsored farmer's walk to raise finds for the gym I train at. A farmer's walk is an old strongman exercise for grip, back and leg strength that involves carrying weights in the hands over a distance. Sounds simple...but in this case we've set ourselves the ambitious target of carrying kettlebells for two miles. Considering my grip usually goes  over the distance of 10 meters in the gym this is going to be brutal!

If anyone would like to support me and sponsor this torture you can do it using the "Donate" button below. Thank you! And I promise the next post will be back to the usual Birdcage Creative!

Custom lampshade

I recently got commisioned to make a martial arts themed lampshade for a baby boy's bedroom. The boy's dad is the head martial arts instructor at Kuk Sool Won Glasgow and uses a sillhouette of a kick as part of his promotional material. I'd been asked to make some wall transfers for the room first with the child's name and the kick sillhouette and so I thought it'd be good to try to incorporate the same theme into the lampshade.

Folksy Friday - Martial Arts

Straight after listing my martial arts magnet set on Folksy I saw a great ninja note book (fiona t's below) that had just been listed too so I was inspired to make Martial Arts my theme for this week's Folksy Friday. Fiona does a number of different notebook designs, and they're on my wish list now!

Stuck with photography so here's some t-shirts!

Trying to sort out the photos to be able to list items for sale online is giving me a headache so I thought I'd distract myself (and post something contructive!) by putting up some of my commisioned t-shirt designs. These ones were done for a local martial arts school, a couple of one offs and the main club t-shirt. All were done with heat applied vinyl.






Unlike screen printing, which has high set-up costs, using vinyl means it's possible to do one-off designs and small runs which would just work out too expensive otherwise. Also you can get nice effects like metallics, glow in the darks, glitter, patterned, sparkles etc. The standard club t-shirt (left) is metallic gold on black.

One drawback to using vinyl is it's harder to do multicoloured designs as you can't do shades only blocks of colour. If you look at the Matador t-shirt (the first picture) you can see it's made up of three shades of red and a tan colour. (NB. This image actually shows a black as well but as the final design was applied on a black t-shirt the t-shirt itself was used for the background colour. This image is a mock-up).