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..
Schmancy Olympic Challenge: I am done!
Kristen - the challenge commissioner! - pointed out that the whole idea behind this challenge was to have fun. Lately - at least since I've been out of school - giggling is my primary goal when I'm making something (this could be good, it could be bad, whatever). So here is the TEAM LINUS bobsleigh.
Heading down a mountain! Even though bobsleds run in tracks!
This is wool and wool blend felt, a little peltex in the runners and the bottom of the sled, a bit of polyester stuffing, and lots and lots of thread! I stitched everything by hand, and mostly tried to match thread colors and stuff, but not very hard. Almost everything was improvised - I sketched to start with, but I didn't make any paper patterns. I did make a sample hamster out of acrylic felt, but it wasn't really a pattern. Just more of a.. go at it with scissors method. I just wanted to make sure it would work first, before I cut into my more expensive and much nicer wool felt 
The improvisational nature of the whole thing means that there are stitches EVERYWHERE. In my life I've always made little slapdash mockups before doing big projects, but I secretly love the little mockup way more than the large, polished project. While making this, I treated it like it was a mockup for a larger, nicer piece, but didn't really intend to make that larger nicer piece. I wanted to keep it in the LA DI DAAHhhhahahah world.
I think, anyway, that the embroidery is kind of nice. It's so tiny!
Hamsters without helmets:
I would have constructed the hamsters differently if I had done it over again. In this version, I sewed their bodies together in white felt before I even thought about how to make their markings. That was a mistake! I had to choose between some kind of stitchwork, or cutting patches of the color and trying to make them fit over the body. If I had sewed the markings and their faces on before construction, I think they might look a little bit nicer.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with this, because it was fun! And little felt animals have been my true love since I was twelve years old!
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