Monday, October 31, 2011

Refurbish

I am glad that I could managed to refurbish the cushion for this antique chair my self:) The cushion was so worn out, time to change for the new one...Now I kind of know how to do it..will more adventurous with used of fabric next time.




It doesn't take long to do it and very cost effective too:)

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Dolltopia Teddy Bunny





Available at: AAM Christmas Charity Bazaar - American Association of Malaysia at Royale Chulan Hotel, Jalan Conlay, 10am-2pm 9th November //// Super Stylish Shopping Weekend – Penang 19th November //// Ipoh Arts Festival - 26th November //// RM60 + Certificate of Adoption

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Hello there:)

              

New book cover in the making... available soon for upcoming American Bazaar

Applied Design class.
Top: Student jotting down keyword for Art Movement
Bottom: Ahh Dou work...:)
Another great session I had today, and the class progress pretty well. I am excited for more session to come.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Photo Album - Custom Order

I am taking my life way too easy lately... Some small jobs here and there in between... My third class at Dasein this Thursday and I love every second of it. Few interesting ongoing assignment ..and I learn a lot too. Refresh all knowledge I used to learn before and it seems so much easier to see the big picture from lecturer view and perspective:P
Hand bound photo album, a commission job from friend; still in the making:)
In the process to add on more of my craft stock from plushies to books for up coming Bazaar. Kid's workshop for Petronas gallery for November and December are almost finalise...I will announce the final date soon for anyone who interested to send your kid...I gonna teach card making & book binding on November and basic silkscreen printing for following December.

Due to some request, I am hoping to organise one LittleSyam book binding workshop on December too, will see if I can squeeze myself to do so,  stay tuned for this...

Looking forward to balik kampung this weekend..miss emak ketiak..Happy Deepavali to all hindu's friends, drive safe and have a good break ya :) ///xoxo//syam

Monday, October 24, 2011

Celebrate Every Single Beads of Life

I would like to introduce to all of you to my extremely talented jewelry designer friend; Gigi Gee. Knowing her personally for her expertise in polymer clay beads and following the style that she has developed during these 7 years what make me admire her even more. 

She had achieved a higher level and knowing her for constantly develop further and for never being satisfied at certain level and stick to the same feel & look.





 I am trill the fact that she produces unexpected beautiful outcome with full of surprises in every latest collection.


Enjoy an aesthetic on every beads, colours, texture, pattern..such an inspirational piece. What you see just small bit of her collection. Contact her directly at gilin68@gmail.com if you interested to purchase her collection. Like her here:)

Cheers//syam








Mmmmm Mmmmm


Friend of mine posted this images from Toronto, Canada airport just now. The cover for the publication looks familiar... yup that's MY illustration on the cover. Published by publisher from Taiwan for worldwide distribution. Proud of it? sure I am, but getting the phone call from friend that being annoyed that my name did not credited on it.

I had mixture feeling, being angry while I do not bother to check because I do not even get my copy but got to buy and get it myself. Being not credited as a designer was a sensitive issue here. Being appreciated is another issue. But it is not worth being angry because this becoming like a normal situation for me at this moment. I am numb.

Oh God..I hope this is just some blues that I need to pass through//syam


Friday, October 21, 2011

21 October 2011

Dear God, I thank you for these feet, these eyes, these hands; I pray that wherever I go I will be able to see you in the world around me, and to always see honestly; I pray that whatever I touch will remind me your eternal presence in all things....

photo courtesy: Ain

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Friday, October 14, 2011

have a good weekend:)


Small Little Thing That Make Me Happy:)

Busy week with small little thing that make me happy:) I had an interview and visit on Tuesday from a writer, Lee Kuen. I had fun teaching her kettle stitch and what a good idea having her to experience how to make book.

2 orders that make me smile and design plus finished artwork for a menu...going to be launch by end of month for Singapore & Malaysia... My first day at Dasein yesterday.. and I 've been talking a lot more than I can imagine....Get to know 21 students and I am sure we will have fun this whole semester.

YES my live kind of fill up with happy bird lately:)
Just a hint.. will post a real article & real menu soon..small little thing that make me grin from ear to ear.. I hope you have a great week too.

Take care//syam

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

RIP Steve Jobs




I still digesting that he was gone... man that inspired me a lot... life is pretty strange, you can 't have everything. 56th sounded young..but he was live this life fullest and that what matters...leave this strange world in his peak... you & your creativity will be missed deeply. Rest in Peace:(


'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs saysThis is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film,Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Terengganu Trip Day 2&3 >>>7-8 Oct 2011

What an honour to be invited by Asia Promote, an establish event company to facilite 30 participants conjunctions with Sultan Mizan Cup 2011 Corporate Social Responsibility Programme. I had a wonderful time getting to know this 30 participants, passing & sharing a skill which kind of challenging at the beginning because of the language barrier and I have no clue of what their background like but they've adapted the skill smoothly. An hour later everyone feel comfortable and clique very well too. I hope they had a great time as mine.
silkscreen class, student to prepare the background
the final outcome of silkscreen


BBQ dinner..a very prestige event organised by Asia Promote.
I am so facinated with the lighting and overall deco..very very nice set up. 
Me & Ita at BBQ Dinner. Love the overall look of deco & ambience:)
Concert billboard I've designed under Asia Promote for the Sultan Mizan Concert.
The billboard  located at one of the main street in KT

Book binding workshop - day 02


Showing off their silkscreen drawing
photo session 
I really hope the skill they had learnt could be utilise further and I am hoping to see and hear the progress from them. Some of them doesn't have any art background but skillfully as a tailor, and that helps them to catch the skill pretty fast especially book binding session.

It was quite sad to say goodbye to all of them: Hope to see you guys again:(
To Lina & Ita..you guy rocks.. TQ..mmmuuahhh:)


Terengganu Trip Day 01 - 6 Oct 2011

We had a wonderful time exploring Kuala Terengganu town. Went to Pasar payang and get to know this wonderful China town with full of character and vibrant in colour and culture....
full of character, rich of culture
I be able to see another side of Terengganu that I never know the existence of it. At one glance it looks like another china town can be found in Penang or Melaka, but then if you look closely, this is much better, with unexpected hidden view in small lane in between building.
friendly tukang jahit:)

beautiful challigraphy signage 
beautiful conventional signage, absolute nice font and graphic
the colour scheme is so wow 
beautiful soul; Ita & Lina
So spacious with detail and splash of vibrant colour. What a hidden treasure. Not too comercial what make it interesting:) It make me feel that I am at different era...

I love the background especially:)

Sunday, October 09, 2011

Kak long, Lina, Gigi and me going to participate in 25th Annual Christmas Charity Bazaar slated to take place 9 November, 10am to 2pm at The Royale Chulan Kuala Lumpur again this coming November.



Check us out:) at:
The Royale Chulan Kuala Lumpur, Taming Sari Grand Ballroom
5, Jalan Conlay, 50450 Kuala Lumpur



Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Time Flies

My white Daffodil produced the flower again, two branch in a go. My mom gave me this plant 7 years ago, and I am waiting for the flower to come out only once in every 3 or 4 months...Last flower was in June. To look at it make me so happy and it reminded me of my beloved mom....I felt so comfort just by looking at it...rindu makkkk:(



I am glad the communication collateral job was finally over...Work in such speed does happened a lot in previous job... but I never imagine it gonna be happened now but to have a good client was essential and hard to resist. Another submission of exciting proposal tomorrow too and I am off to Terengganu from Thursday to Sunday. 


This time not for holiday but for my LittleSyam art and craft workshop for Sultan Mizan Cup. Act as course presenter with assistance of Lina & Eita. Starting with simple silkscreen course on the first day follows by book binding workshop on the second day. Targeted single mother and housewives in rural areas, which the first batch of 30 participants are from Persatuan wanita Kg Mangkok, Setiu and from the Batu Rakit community.


The objective of the workshop is to enhance the skills of this women, to empower them and hopefully could help to boost cottage industries in Terengganu. (source from WF, APV)


Another interesting journey and will share photos with you soon. All materials will be transported to Terengganu Wednesday morning..and I am ready to catch the flight early morning Thursday...yeaaayy.



More job waiting when I am coming back to KL but gonna have fun and spending my quality time in Terengganu. Squeezing myself with a BIG help from Lina doing the menu proposal for an exciting restaurant. If things went through, I'll be busy executing the finishing before their new menu launching by midst Oct. 


Not forgetting my first day teaching at Dasein Thursday next week.. I am formulating my own method to make my class exciting. Gonna make my magic wand work...Larry I miss you:( 


Alhamdullillah for all the great day:)

Saturday, October 01, 2011

Hello there:)

Busy busy day...with many graphic job need to complete before Terengganu trip 6,7 & 8. I am basically working non stop. Many interesting things happen lately but I am out of words here due to work, work & work. Gonna have long break and enjoying my day teaching and planning from November onwards.

Happy Owl
Will participate in few expat bazaar by then, and looking forward for something big that could happen next year...I am excited:)

Top: Trista & me
Bottom: Molly and her beautiful creation
& Auntie, the oldest student I had so far, and she's so good
Top: Demo time
Bottom: Birgit & me
Cliff, Eleena, Junn & Alice
Top: Beautiful creation by R•A•W (Lina)
Bottom: Yuzz & Liza
Top: Junn, Pek Mun in action
Bottom: Pek Mun & Molly
Enjoy the rest photo taken mixture Lina's camera & mine during KLDW. I still couldn't get over it yet..
Enjoying my last moment, while students do the finishing for their book.
Top: Pei Chee & me
Bottom: Tuck Loong, Mike, Gigi, Sweii, Suweii, Izura, Lorna, Teck Yew, Lina & me.
Thanks to all that came to give a never ending support, I make new friends, old buddy that came, my dearest students from previous workshop, your appreciation and support for my effort and creation does mean a lot to me. To all participant of my book binding corner; Yuzz, Liza, Sim, CY, Chin Ven, Eelena, Cliff, Alice, Junn, Brigit, Molly, Mun, Trista & Untie, keeps the skill and passion going.


Exhibitor buddies, the bonding built during KLDW was awesome, may we cross again somewhere in our journey of life....And to Lina, my partner that sharing this living passion space, how can I manage without you. muaaaaahhh love//syam