bitch, please.

Posted on May 8, 2013 by landofnams

here you are. you need this sign for your home office. or if you’re really a morning person, your bedside table.

haute tech series 2: make zen your machinery

Posted on May 1, 2013 by landofnams

backgrounds3 This week I made a pretty computer background for your tech. Click through on the above image>right click >use as desktop background. This is what’s on my comp this week!

**Welcome to haute tech, wherein I fool around with CS5 to produce pretty illustrations to for your tech

but first, coffee {free print downloads}

Posted on July 17, 2012 by landofnams

In an attempt to bring some cohesion and NOT TOTAL UGLINESS to the ‘coffee station’ in our kitchen I created a few different variations of this coffee print. I think I am going to use the black one, it matches our retro black and white checkered floor. P gets up before me (in my old life I was a math teacher and got up at the crack of dawn) and makes coffee and brings it to me in bed(!). I’m sure he’ll notice the Gill Sans Ultra Bold evvvery morning.

Download, away! (private, non commercial use only, thanks!).

india love (free print downloads)

Posted on July 4, 2012 by landofnams

I’m in a bit of a hurry so I won’t wax poetic about why I love India, the country of my birth and heritage, but I’ll quickly tell you a little bit about the prints. The top one is the first line of a beautiful old patriotic song about India. (I remember it from the Indian school I went to on Saturdays, so it wasn’t a total wash Mom and Dad). The second is obviously a map of India with a heart on Calcutta (now Kolkata, but I don’t call it that) where I was born. The third is a picture of the Rajdhani Express -if you’ve ever talked to me about India you’ll know my favorite thing to do is get a first class ac ticket and ride around India by train, (something that I’ve yet to do with P). The last is a map of all the Indian railways, again with a heart on Calcutta…when we visited India growing up, we always ended up taking the Rajdhani from New Delhi to Calcutta, either to visit cousins there or in Jamshedpur (a small city a few hours outside of Cal). Those are some of my favorite memories.

Here and here are the maps so you can add your own heart.

And remember, these are for private non-commercial use only, dhanyawad.

These are also a part of where my where we’ve lived series.

Phew, I’m exhausted by making these and it’s ceasing to be fun so I think Madison and Boston are going to have to wait until next week.

Happy Independence day to all you Americans!

johannesburg love (free print downloads)

Posted on July 3, 2012 by landofnams

Here are my Jozi prints, from my places we have lived series. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy life in Joburg. The top is obviously a map of Johannesburg in South Africa, the second one is all the stops of the Gautrain (for those font lovers), and the last two started as photos of iconic Johannesburg landmarks -the Hillbrow and Sentech towers, and ended up like this. We have some lovely friends who are sadly leaving to go back to the UK (such is the expat cycle) and I am planning on framing and giving one to them.

Print, share and use. For private, non-commercial use only, thank you.

I hope you like my new minimalist blog banner too, designed by Victoria at Vmac & Cheese.

berlin love (free print downloads).

Posted on June 28, 2012 by landofnams

For today’s installation of my print project, I’m honoring Berlin. It was the first time in P’s and my relationship that we got to live in the same city (let alone the same country). We lived there for two years and travelled all over Europe together using it as our base, and the only tragedy about that is I wasn’t into photography then. Jetting off to Istanbul or Cote d’Azure or Santorini, or even Cairo -a new place, often two, every month was part of the beauty of living there. Loads of our friends visited us there also, so we have many lovely memories with them. When my sister studied abroad in Copenhagen for 6 months we got to see her monthly, and that’s more than I’ve gotten to see her in a long time.

P moved there first for a Fulbright fellowship and after saying he’d be back in 10 months (famous last words), good career opportunities presented themselves and eventually I moved there to teach Math at an international school (hi T!) so we could be together. Berlin, the city of too cool for school hipsters (you think Williamsburg is bad?), artists and “artists”, parties like you’ve never seen, cheap rents (like huge, 15 foot ceiling 120 sq mtr apartments for 1,000 euros cheap), bombed out buildings, an incredible public transport system, and of course the Flachspüler.

I put a heart on Yorckstrasse, the stop of the aforementioned incredible apartment. Not everyone lives at Yorck so here and here are the two maps without a heart (you could add one in any simple program, even Word). I’m most proud of this series so far, it took me forever to remove the backgrounds and get U-bahn system/bear/skyline to be the only thing that’s left (I’m a photoshop novice).

For private, non-commercial use only, danke schoen.

1. & 2. Berlin’s metro map, 3. The Berlin coat of arms, and 4. The Berlin skyline.

Also this is for our Berlin friends who made the best photo-booth that ever was:

new york love (free print downloads)

Posted on June 27, 2012 by landofnams

In my continuing series of print downloads this week representing all the places we’ve called home, today’s location is New York City. I lived there for three years after college, teaching math for an Americorps program, earning a masters at night and hanging out with some of my besties Kathryn, Bo, Preston and Amanee. P and I also conducted our two year trans-Atlantic long distance relationship from here (he was in Berlin), that took perseverance and dedication and makes our current relationship easy as pie.

Most of our friends live there and when we move back to the States that’s where we are headed. It’s a city that when you live there you feel like there’s no other city in the world worth living in. Living in other places you realize that there definitely are other places to live, amazing, mind blowing places…but yea, New York is still the best.

NY means a lot of things to me (like uh-maaazing restaurants and willingly paid extortionate rents), bust mostly it represents the incredible friends I made there. One ritual we had was that for anything from a birthday to when someone had a really bad day (Bo once got her iPhone stolen by a student) to grad school acceptances (Bo, K and A finished up this spring at Harvard,Yale and Stanford, smarties!): we would buy a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cake and bottle of Absolut vodka for that person, then we’d all help them consume it, usually after going out to some yummy restaurant.

B, K and I have a (not-so) secret future plan to all live in the same building and start a fantasy business (you can see we’ve put so much thought into this) and try and push any future children into marrying each other, who will then make incredible multi-racial babies.

**Click on any of the pics for the full size jpeg, (for private use only!). The last one has a heart on my subway stop, if you email me and ask nicely I could be convinced to move the heart to your subway stop. I hope you enjoy!

minnesota love (free print downloads)

Posted on June 26, 2012 by landofnams

{minnesota nice}

Living in South Africa (or anywhere that’s not your original home) you inevitably end up explaining where you’re from several times over. For P there’s a straightforward answer- he’s from Minnesota. He was born there, his paternal great grandfather even founded a city there, and his entire extended family is scattered between Minnesota and Wisconsin. For me it’s not SO simple, I can never bring myself to say that I’m only ‘from’ one place. While I spent 12 years of my young and formative years there I will never only be from Minnesota. I was born in India, my parents grew up in India, my extended family lives scattered across the globe, and I’ve lived in lots of cities that have made an equal or bigger impression on me.

That’s why this week I’m working on a series of illustrations in Photoshop to print out and frame for a gallery wall in our living room. It will be different places that we’ve called home (both together and seperately) . For us that’s: Calcutta, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Madison, Boston, New York City, Berlin and finally Johannesburg. Stay tuned over this week and next for some free art downloads I’m making to represent each place.

I’m checking Minneapolis/St. Paul and their suburbs off the list first with 5 illustrations of Minnesota. Feel free to save, print, and use these images in your own home or on your macbook/iPad/iPhone backgrounds.

**These are small versions, if you would like the full size jpeg please click on any of the pics. for private use only, these images are NOT licensed for commercial use. Thank you.

Land of Nams: living in Johannesburg, exploring the world, documenting the things I love

{minnesota: simple}

{simple, inverted}

{favorite famous minnesotans}

{favorite famous minnesotans, inverted}

DIY: Saffron Infused Gin, and label download

Posted on June 14, 2012 by landofnams

In a continuation of this week’s bar theme: Gabriel Boudier’s Saffron Gin is all the rage right now. It’s very pretty and it tastes delicious, but you can infuse your own too. (Warning, this is not as sweet as Boudier’s gin, but simply saffron infused gin):

You’ll need:

gin

a packet of saffron (they come in tiny packets because it’s is a relatively expensive and strong herb)

a mason jar

a coffee filter

a funnel

a bottle for your finished gin (or you can put it back in the original)

a label (optional, duh)

First disinfect your mason jar by boiling it in a pot of water for a few minutes. While that is going on, if you are using a bottle that’s not your original gin bottle, measure out how much gin you’re going to infuse. After the mason jar has cooled off and dried, pour the saffron on the bottom and the gin in on top of the saffron, put the lid on and shake it up. Store in a cool, dark cupboard for 3-4 days, shaking it at least twice a day. Print out your label and affix to the new bottle with either glue or transparent tape (do this before there’s gin in the bottle, it’s easier). When the gin is done, put your coffee filter into a funnel and pour the infused gin through it into it’s final storing place (this is obviously to strain out the saffron threads). Voila! You have a yummy, lovely bottle of gin. Next week I’ll show you a yummy cocktail to drink using your saffron infused gin.

Unfortunately WP won’t let me upload Photoshop files. SO, below I have a generic jpeg for saffron infused gin (the aqua gin color compliments the mustard color of the saffron gin) as well as a jpeg for just the border. Click on the border download, then right click (or command click if you’re a Mac like me) on the picture and choose ‘Save Image As….’ to download the picture. Open it in Word and make your own label with your own fonts and your own colors and size. Tada!

land of nams

all things beautiful: fashion, food, interiors, travel & more

Tag Archives: downloads