From all of us at Hearts and Laserbeams, cheers to all of you and best wishes for the happiest of holidays. May your Christmas be full of friends, family and fun!

We’ll be driving down to old town Mesilla in New Mexico to enjoy some cider at Josephina’s and show Phil the 20 bazillion lumenarios lit up for the holidays – what do you have planned?

Celebrate Cyber Monday with a purchase of one of our designs currently available on Delias.com! Steph Calvert of Hearts and Laserbeams created the hand-drawn scripty love illustration seen on the teal colorway of the Molly tee for CDC Apparel, and now it can be yours – on sale!

This design features a hand-drawn font, illustrated with a scattering of little patterny elements here and there inside the script. Love!

A couple of months ago, I saw Fab.com had a discount on subscriptions to HOW Magazine. I’m not sure why I never got this graphic design mag before – oh wait I just glanced at one and the cover price is like $10.95. That explains it.

So this week, I received HOW Magazine’s November 2011 Design Business Annual. And I’m flipping through it nonchalantly as Josh and I are waiting for dinner to cook, and I get to page 100. It’s an article about Etsy, how they operate as a company, and what their home office is like. They had a lovely photo of one area of the office on that first page of the article, and my jaw dropped.

Did you see it? Let’s take a closer look:

I am totally taking up a square centimeter of space in a major graphic design magazine. OH. EM. GEE!!

A couple of years ago, Etsy was moving their digs to a new corporate office. They contacted a handful of artists to create signs for various areas and conference rooms at the new office. Each artist received a name that was one part food and one part band name to work with. I was super excited to have been picked to paint two signs. My assignments? Soy Division and Oreo Speedwagon:

These were super fun pieces to work on, and I’m honored to have a place on the walls at Etsy. I’m stoked Fab had that subscription discount, too, because if they hadn’t I totally would have missed this!

Three cheers to eagle eye’d Aaryn Nutter for spotting one of my designs on the Urban Outfitters website! I created this t-shirt for CDC Apparel last year and am super jazzed it got printed.

Click here to buy one for the guy in your life!
(Photo from the Urban Outfitters website.)

If you’ve kept up with us on Twitter, you know we had a massive gardening day last week. It left us with tons of fresh produce strewn across the table on our back porch, and a day full of food preservation. We froze food, we dehydrated, we canned. And we were STILL left with three large zucchini! Two of those were made into Bread and Butter Zucchini Pickles over the weekend, which meant we still had one large zucchini to do something with.

Last night I threw together a last minute casserole I immediately dubbed ZUCCHINI BOAT and it rocked our world! Super easy to make – get out a large casserole dish, put 2 cups rice and 1 can chicken broth in the bottom of it. (Vegetarian? Just use veggie broth or water!) Slice a zucchini in half lengthwise, and scoop out the seeds. Drizzle it with olive oil, and fill the hollowed out portion with whatever you like! We used half a bag of mixed freezer veggies and some leftover ricotta cheese from lasagna last week. Top it with a buttload of cheese, cover with foil, and send it to the oven at 350 degrees for an hour! Then remove the foil and let it cook 10 more minutes so the cheese gets super awesome melty.

It’s ZUCCHINI BOAT. Alert the people! What else do you guys like to do with leftover zucchini?

Life is so busy, Josh and I don’t get many opportunities to collaborate on artwork. So when we came up with comedy gold for his brother Chris’ birthday, we jumped at the chance to make photoshop magic happen.

We had all been out to Savannah at the end of April, and while there our friend Jenn dubbed him Sailor Beary. The nickname embraces Chris’ love of good rum and his undying respect for Bear Grylls (who may or may not sleep in a hotel. I’m just sayin). When Jenn gives you a nickname, it’s not something to be taken lightly. It’s a sign of making it in this world.

The artwork took a little longer to complete than we originally had hoped, and Chris got his bday present way late, but he loved it. Without further ado, I give you Josh and I’s collaboration on Sailor Beary:

I like that wordpress on my phone has been on strike for weeks in terms of uploading photos, and in frustration I try to upload this doodle and it worked. Figures. Happy weekend, everyone!

Sketch I did of our son Phil’s moneybag costume for Halloween

Here’s a little sneak peek of style guide stuff I’m working on this week – check out some fun apple characters!