yet another Newsom bit
I was on the train back home from Philly, thinking about a big black spider hanging over a door, and sketched up an idea. It got a little serious later when I drew it on a watercolor block and broke out the ever so foul liquid frisket. This is still in progress - I'm going over everything with the Microns right now, and it's taking foreverrrrrr. The smoke monsters are showing up everywhere.
The spider is knitting.
I don't know how I feel about this overall, but I can't stop working on it so we'll see what happens.
the dress, the dress, the dress
My wedding dress is a Saison Blanche bridesmaid dress. I was all, "I want a me dress, but I don't want to have to make it - that's just too much pressure!" Instead, I thought I should get something that I liked, but could modify in some small way to make it truly me.
This is what it looks like to start. Cookie Monster is very excited.
up and away..
What It Is, part one.
I may have mentioned before how much I love Lynda Barry's recent book called What It Is. I purchased it a few months after its release in 2008, read the whole thing, and carried it around with me for a while. Now I am revisiting the instructional part with the intention of doing the exercises, instead of just thinking about it. So with the aid of a pad of paper bestowed upon me at a recent meeting, I am armed to engage.
The very first parts involved thinking about cars in your childhood, and having grown up on a car lot, making a list of ten was quite easy. From there you pick one, and move through some memory rendering, and so on. This is a seven-minute writing spree in the present tense about a trip in the Honeybee motorhome we took camping (click for big):
Rereading it a few days later made me feel sort of crazy.
Today I stopped at B&N for a silly purpose (and I know: little bookstores! but little bookstores might not have carried the silly thing I needed), and stopped in the cafe for a little while to sit and draw somewhere outside of my house. So I scrawled out the camper.
I haven't seen the thing - or even a picture of it - in several years (until I did a GIS). meeemmmorriiiieeeessss
Working on the Olympic Challenge
I've begun working on my entry in the Schmancy Olympic Challenge!
The first day, I started constructing the bobsleigh itself, and by time I went to bed, I had these parts:
Next, I added a little more structure to the bobsleigh, and I embroidered Linus' face onto another bit of felt. I used sewing thread so I could make fine lines. Then I stitched the face onto the front of the sled, and sewed the sled parts together.
Jears
Yesterday, I was hunting through various containers looking for some wool felt. In one container I found the shoe box of jears supplies! I made jears in 2008 because, well, it was funny.
The new - and final - season of Lost starts on Tuesday, so I decided to spend today making some jears. This is an old one I have up on etsy:
There are three types: plain, flashback wig, and flashforward beardwig. hee!
Schmancy Olympic Challenge
I signed up to participate in Schmancy's Olympic Challenge.. Like I needed to add more things to do to my plate! But it seemed like so much fun that I could not resist.
I'm on the bobsleigh team! Which means I just have to make something related to the bobsleigh event. Of course I think I am going to go in the vein of cats and hamsters, since that's what I've been doing the most of lately. So here are some bits from my sketchbook:
Linus bobsled populated by hamsters in goggles? Hmmmm.
toil, toil, toil
I've been slowly making it through my current longterm projects - a couple of little baby quilts and fifteen small modified umbrellas - and punctuating my time with needlefelting some ham ornaments.
I'm going away for the whole week of Thanksgiving, so I won't be able to use my machine or other things in my home studio. The umbrella project is a little more dire, so I got all the dyeing and machine sewing out of the way. Here's the stack.
They don't need to be perfect. They just have to work when I'm finished! The marked up muslin will be covered, so it doesn't matter what it looks like now.
The next step is to slide icky steel binding wire into the four channels on each umbrella, and then handstitch the wires down. At this point I've finished inserting all the wires, but the sewing part takes forrreeevvverrrr (as you may imagine!), so I will be taking them on my trip. I doubt I'll have much time to work on them, but anything at all would be helpful.
Thirty days
I am pretty guilty of blog/website neglect, so when someone on a board I read suggested a thirty day challenge for the month of September, I decided I would spend it making posts every day. (This, instead of something truly self-improving, such as "I'm going to exercise for thirty minutes every day!" which others have made their admirable goal! I know that I am lazy, so I shoot low..)
So now we're past the three week mark, and I've managed to keep up, which is super cool. Doing this has also been an impetus to keep my makin' stuff muscles flexed - although I had a few months' worth of images squirreled away in my subdirectories, they would not be enough to fill the whole thirty days. I've always used this space as a show-off-pictures kind of deal, not a GLURGH LISTEN WHAT I DID TODAY deal, but I'm not sure how long that separation will last (I am also a LiveJournal neglector extraordinaire). So maybe I'll just see how long I can keep this post streak going, even if it means getting a little wordy sometimes. (CAUTION: NOT A GREAT WRITER.)
Anyway, I woke up with a sore throat today which is NOT AWESOME, but here is the first day's progress on a felty project:
Body, legs, and a pink brain!
a spacey theme
l-r solid red, orange rocket print, blue w/ sproinky things (the brown in this will prolly nix it from the pile, though), red/white box print, yellow star print, solid turquoise, red/orange print, yellow rocket print, red squares print, blue space print, yellow hand dyed
a buggy theme
mixing prints, solids, and hand dyes
l-r: insects/magnifying glasses, hand dyed olives, snails/dots, flying insects, brown/metallic blue dots, direct-applied hand dyed goofy junk, mystery lime green, hand dyed brown (with fabulous multicolor undertones)