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stripey, patchy. clouds? no. tote bags!

I used the Quilted Garden Tote tutorial from Sew, Mama, Sew! to make this stripey, patchy tote for my mom.

Time travel is lonely

..unless you do it slowly, and move through it unidirectionally, with companions.



A simple improvised/freehanded stuffie for Bill's nephew Jack, from when we visited in May.

A list of unread books on the nightstand

The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb
Craft, Inc. - Turn Your Creative Hobby Into a Business, Mateo Ilasco
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (reread)
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Lewis Hyde
Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut
Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad
The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
(Read all the poems and a couple of the stories last October, haven't moved on since)
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen (no zombies)
the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis (crammed into one volume in reading order; technically a reread but I was very young and don't remember much)
Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan
Master of Reality, John Darnielle (33 1/3)
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
To Have and to Hold: an Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, Philipp Blom
The Pirates! in an Adventure with Napoleon, Gideon Defoe
Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
The Science of Harry Potter, Roger Highfield
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, Stephen Asma


I don't know what to read next.

Little silly sketches

hares with cactus legs


pinecone antlers


a pigeon in pajamas

A beastly thing..

My friend Aaron asked me to make something for his girlfriend's birthday. He asked her to pick an animal off the Annelids CD list, but she couldn't decide and picked five.

Sooo what happened? Oh, this.



15x15", direct application of fiber reactive dye on canvas, lots and lots of freemotion embroidery!


the original idea sketch.. and how it looked after I painted on the dye.

Some sketchbook pages.

A local bookstore was selling a 12x12 sketchbook filled with awesome paper (possibly meant for scrapbooking?) for FIVE DOLLARS. It's the hugest I've ever had, and I keep compartmentalizing the pages to make smaller areas - I put boxes around everything and fill in extra space with repetitive drawing, and then go back later to color it in with watercolors, colored pencil, ink, etc. Here are a few pages.








(The grids on each page are the rubrics I use to keep track of how many answers I get right on Jeopardy!)

OH HEY, HI. hi. yes. this.

Two CD cases



Laser snail!



Luna moth!

Toaster

I love toasters, especially the iconic shiny chrome ones. I've drawn lots of them over the years (just looked at a bunch of terrible Photoshop-modified drawings from like 2002, ack). They're one of my fallback "I CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING TO DO!!!" things.

So this guy now exists:


I am most proud of the plug - embroidery thread twisted to make the cord, knotted to make the plug, and sewing thread knotted up to make the prongs.



other details

Sink or swim sheep

My friend Amanda and I traded notes every day for at least half of high school. She was a grade ahead of me and I guess we became friends toward the end of my freshman year. We wrote a lot of stories and made up sort of fantastical adventures (that mostly involved invading Canada and taking a boat to Europe). One of the inside jokes that came out of that was sink or swim sheep. I'm not exactly sure about the premise anymore, but I was thinking about it the other day. I am terrible at staying in touch with everyone I miss, so I made her this sheep in a life preserver and went to visit her.