Sketchbooks

I was just thinking about the sketchbooks I keep.

For the past decade, I've really favored plain black spiralbound hardcovers with cream drawing paper. I love them. The best is the Strathmore Field Drawing book. I usually stick to the 9x12 or 7x10 size.

When I crack open a fresh one, I first do the following:
1. Take a full-page Avery label and affix it to the inside covers. (Two for the 9x12, one cut in half for the 7x10). That is where the table of contents will live.
2. Write my contact information and some kind of threat for nonreturn on the back label.
3. Decorate the cover. If I don't designate one side over the other, I will repeatedly open it the wrong way and get all angry. This usually involves stickers.
4. Number as many of the pages as I can before I get bored (will continue as I fill it up).

Occasionally I deviate. Sometimes a hardbound book, one with stuff on the cover already, yadda yadda.

Anyway here are two of my favorite recent covers:






The book I am currently using already had a purdy cover. An impulse buy at B&N - chatting birdies! - but I kind of regret it now. The book is nice enough, but I really miss the spirals.. Being able to fold the book entirely around and have it stay open is key! I tend to flip back and forth a lot, and I fear that perforated pages will break off and fall out. Earlier this summer I started taping in all these old papers and things I'd been saving, and I ended up having to rip out a lot of pages at the back so the book would even close (spirals have a little more give). I do like the ribbon bookmark. This thing has way too many pages for me to finish it by the end of the year, and I kind of just want it over with. Clearly I need to get cracking on some drawing to get it out of my bag and onto my shelf.

The next little thing..

Bigfoot/sasquatchy dude!



He looks a bit happier than I meant for him to be, but meh.

There probably won't be any little things posted again in the next couple of weeks. Alice has come to absolute-crazy-make-stuff-crunchtime so I will be spending my time on that. Performances begin on the 29th, so there is not much time left! *sews furiously*

Little things, day two

I made a second angler, it's just a little bigger than the first one. They are friends. (Each is around 1x2")



I've been watching too much MonsterQuest on the History Channel, so here's a generic lake monster. Or, for you more dinosaurily-inclined folks, a plesiosaur or elasmosaur. She should be the first in a series of cryptids.



Whee!

Little things

Teeny needlefelted anglerfish!



About an inch wide.



TEEEEEETH

Oh, it has been done

The bag has been finished.



(In the interest of full disclosure, it was NOT finished when this picture was taken; however the addition of the lining did not change its outward appearance!)

It's so heavy now that it's done, too! We did a bit of a test run today and used it as a fourth shopping bag on our grocery trip today. Being that the bottom didn't fall off when it was full, I think it's going to last a while. Huzzah.

So far-

Lately, I've been doing work on pieces for Wandering Alice. My day job has been busy and we've had social things to do too. So my for-me and for-etsy making has been a bit stalled. Unfortunate!

I've been working on the Amy Butler Weekender Travel Bag. It's going a bit slowly. I made the main side panels last week, and last night did the outside top part with the zipper. When I got to putting the pockets onto the top part, I made them upside down! Fool. Sooo.. I stopped there, and have to recut those pieces before I can move on.
Pattern sewing is not really my strength, but this bag will probably turn out all right.

Here's a shot of the finished sides. Woohoo for first-time piping!

GIGANTIC. Really. Huge.


I've also been working on going through stacks of paper and ephemera I've collected over the years. Instructional stuff and usable bits of stuff have been catalogued into manila envelopes, binders, and folders. The rest is newspaper clippings, printouts, and pictures which I've started taping into my current sketchbook.
I was doing some of that last week while watching Akira. Then I got sidetracked and drew a coelacanth.



Haha, living fossil!

Laser gun

I was watching Star Trek TNG on Monday night, and I decided to sew a little laser gun.



lasers go BEW BEW BEW!!!

Clutch

Our friends John and Gosia were getting married last month. I was wearing a dress that has an awesome mod print in shades of olive and mustard over off-white, but I had no appropriately sized purse to go with it. So, a few hours before the wedding, I threw together a little zippered clutch. Again, not perfect, but it fit my wallet, camera, phone, etc. It'll work well as a pencil case aside from that :)

Lamb skulls, updated

I didn't think I was going to go in this direction with the lamb skulls, but I ended up squishing them onto a quilt.

The background fabric is green stuff from my last post. Binding didn't seem appropriate to finish the edges (and I am lazy), so I used two layers of overcast stitching instead. Finished size is 15x19.5". Cotton duck and muslin, cotton/poly thread, fabric marker, and graphite, poly batting.
There are a number of errors, certainly (I wasn't really going for perfect!) - but I still like it. I am sending it to someone (I think), and I hope he likes it too.

I was a bit too excited about finishing it to wait for it to dry completely after steaming it. You'll notice some dampness in the pictures :)





I kind of love making giant-applique-image-in-the-center-of-a-quilt things.

Dye Experiments

I had to take a day off work Monday for a meeting, but ended up with a whole free afternoon. My recent Dharma order - bolt of muslin! chemicals! more dyes! - was gnawing at me, so I made a trip to the hardware store - buckets! stirrers! tarp! - organized my new dye cabinet, and got cracking in the basement on some simple experiments. Each is two yards by 48" (or was it 45"?)

First up, two shades of black and one shade of blue created this grey beastie:






Second, two different greens combined with one black:






And finally, grey on grey.




Forgive my blurriness (I was standing on a twirly desk chair) and Alfie's intrusions. She loves to help. Speaking of which, here's a video.



(If I was using the floor as a pin table, she'd come over to investigate, and then pull out the ball-topped pins. I finally bought a box of the bent safety pins, thinking it'd deter her.. Little did I know she'd just try to make off with the entire box. Terrible!)

The King of Carrot Flowers, Parts Two and Three

In progress.. Should have been done a month ago, but I only managed to eke out some drawings then. I was busy making Jears!

"..the dogs dissolve and drain away"





Same linen as Part One. Using grey thread here, with black in the bobbin. I'm going to use a slightly darker grey thread on top for definition in a few spots. Also, I'm planning to use other colors in the bobbin to see what it does to the thread tails on the right.

Conjoined lamb skulls

Machine embroidery on cotton duck.



The back looks particularly evil, with the thread tails:


Since these pictures were taken, I added a little more black around the outside parts. It still needs to be blocked, but I think I'm done for now, until I figure out how to mount it.

The King of Carrot Flowers, Part 1

This year, I decided to use the Neutral Milk Hotel record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as a starting point for some work. I was thinking about the Journal Quilt Project and how I'd like to try something similar. My start has been a little.. unsure, I guess.

There are eleven songs on the album, and I will focus on one song per month as my image/narrative resource. I'm not trying to totally decode the songwriter's [Jeff Mangum is his name] original intentions, or even really follow what I know he meant (via interviews and other research). This record means a lot of different things and takes me to a lot of different places mentally. It is crooked landscapes, half-smiles, stale bread, worry, ache, beautiful magic.. I have a huge mental list of things I associate here. It is impossible to explain. I put it on in my car and I can't take the CD out for the next three weeks. If I make it to my destination while the last song is on, I have to wait until it is over before I can get out.

Anyway. For everything it means to me, like I said, not a great start.
I only managed to eke out a handful of drawings, and most were very cartoony/prototypical. So. engh. (Some are here.)

One I did like was this:



So I redid it with my machine on some linen I dyed grey.



Details:




It's very similar in style to my Pop Shirt project (which remains woefully unfinished and in limbo, and Evan is going to hit me) - it's the same fabric (dyed different colors), black embroidery (this is machine, pop shirt was by hand).. It makes me want to revisit that plan and just take a big piece of fabric and cover it with drawings. I loooooove doing this type of thing..


Things learned:
-Feet are hard to stitch.
-Figure out a better way to stabilize.
-Spend less time thinking and more time just DOING.

I don't really know what to do with it now. January's over, and I am going to follow my rules and move on. If I do something I really like for the next month and finish early, maybe I'll revisit. Maybe it'll wait til December. Just a little drawing..

Diversion: SPARKLEHAMSTER.

Last year I got some Angelina Fibers and was doing some tests re using them with molds. The other day I came across a small pile of cut-off bits and scraps, and immediately had to iron them all together into one big sheet. Then I sewed a little hamster on it.



Since then I cut it into a little rectangle. Bill asked me to just satin stitch up the edges and give it to him so he can hang it somewhere. Hahaha.

A second bag.

I made the second version of the pleatness bag. It features corduroy with the metric system print and two different cottons I dyed in green and orange.



The fabrics here are much stronger than the ones I used in the other bag. I also added interfacing to the liner pieces for even more strength. It has been keeping its shape well. The original tutorial gives no seam allowances and skips over some other measurements that would have been helpful, so I just kind of went with what I had. It also never mentions any kind of trimming or anything.. I dunno. This time at least the top fit together.. it's STILL not entirely correct, but it's leagues ahead of the other one, since that one ended up not even closing! Oh, and I did a WAY better job of pleating this time.





I really wanted to make the liner out of all the same green cotton, but I just didn't have a big enough piece. I'd picked up the orange to do the pockets, but it ended up also being the bottom and the short sides. I like my pen holder! Dozens of pens and markers are always floating around my bags.. It was great when I was carrying a backpack, but now it just makes me look crazy. Haha.

There are still some things I need to fix, but overall I am pretty happy with this bag and have used it most of this week.

Cube rooms

Last week I got all productive in the middle of the night, on Sunday night/Monday morning when I had to go to work, and then I couldn't sleep until 5am.. But that's another story. I worked on a number of things.

One thing I did start to finish was make a prototype fabric room. It's a prototype because I was just kind of winging it and didn't measure well to make the parts match, and did all the edges with overlocking. (OK I never got to do this before with my old machine, and find it fun. Some people might consider this cheating, and that's fine.. haha.)



The floor and ceiling are yellow muslin I dyed an eternity ago (the only other time I can remember using it was as a pat of butter on my toast halloween costume in 2005), the walls are two prints I picked up during The Great "Oh My God We're Graduating" Studio Cleanout and Exchange of 2007. The outside is some cotton I dyed a few months ago with random amounts of like nine different blues.

Some things to consider, should further production occur:
1. Creating groups of these units
2. How to fill them? Will the scale need to change to make filling them a little easier? Felted furniture, animals, people?
3. Embellishment of the outside: using decorative stitching for like.. adding flowers along the ground, maybe making a shingled roof section

So far the only thing that's been inside it is Dosa (our Russian dwarf hamster). It was adorrrrrable.

Crossing things off my list

I made a list of things I think I should accomplish this year.. Sort of a "stuff to make and do" list, rather than resolutions. And it's not all ART ART ART stuff, there are some simpler things that, while the projects themselves aren't ART ART ART, they will just be more experience/skillbuilding that could help in the future.

One of those things was to make a new purse. I've been using this mustard yellow fake leather thing from H&M for a while now - two years maybe? - and it is starting to come apart, as $16 sweatshop-constructed accessories are wont to do. I have neither found a bag in a store I liked enough nor been able to convince myself that it would be OK to purchase one - I made four small totes to choose from for Christmas gifts! There is no justification for not making something myself if I can!

So over to Craftster it was. A quick search for tutorials, and I found one called "pleatness." It's about the same size as my H&M bag, sounds good.

I ended up dyeing a bunch of cotton duck in red and green to match up to some prints I was thinking of using. Which should I use, HMM HMM?


red with space?


green with metrics?

I ended up using the red/space. I learned a lot about the pattern from making this first one, and made a few mistakes.


wholething!


A space print inside, too.

This was a good decision, sort of: I've been carrying the thing around for two weeks now. The rocket print is flannel, which is an unusual choice for a bag.. It's not fraying at all, BUT the front is starting to pill and get reeeally dirty. Ack. My top wasn't wide enough to match up with the end panels, so I ended up just overlocking the ends and leaving them open. I also figured out I really need pockets inside!

Now I'm torn between making another bag with the green/metric print with the pleating, or replacing the pleated panels with quilted panels. Quilted bits would add nice structure, I think.. I'm just not sure what I want to do! I love the metric stuff, but it's corduroy and I don't want to quilt that..!

Intro and Christmas gift roundup

I promised on LJ that my next post would be a roundup of all the things I made for Christmas gifts. Then I decided that I should throw a blog onto my regular site, so I could post exclusively about the stuff I made, and not include so much whining about other things in my life. I guess this decision could backfire a bit - I show up on LJ friends lists, so I theoretically have an audience there, and no promise of an audience here. Whatever. Blah blah.
So, hi. This post will be long and image filled.

Here's the stuff I made for people for Christmas. I made approximately 80% of the gifts we gave. I tried to make thoughtful, personal things, but definitely had some panic moments and threw in some generic Christmassy stuff.

I made ornament sets for all of my aunts and uncles, and my older cousins. I did some drawing/embroidery with my sewing machine and some felting.

On my mom's side, everyone got one of these:


The front is an image from 1950(?) of my grandfather in a motorcycle race in the Pine Barrens of NJ. The photo was printed on thin inkjet fabric, then fused it to another thin cotton, and put it over some poly batting with a cotton duck back. I sewed along some lines in the photo, and then cut a piece from his beloved hideous fleshtone polyester shirt (ubiquitous in family photos) for the backing. Overlocked the edges and added ribbon for hanging. I need to make a few more of these.

The sets:

Uncle


Aunt and uncle

(the pinball machine is my favorite, I think)

Aunt and uncle


Aunt and uncle


Uncle & his girlfriend


Cousin & her husband


Cousin & his wife


Cousin's two toddlers each got a six-page coloring book I had made (just Kinko's) from my drawings, and a crayon roll with her name embroidered on it.




18 year old cousin


13 year old cousin

both bags made from belle epoque's bias tape tote tutorial

16 year old cousin

from a knitting needle roll tutorial whose provenance I cannot remember

11 year old cousin

from Super Cool Wallet tutorial
We wrote out definitions from the board game Balderdash, and I laminated them and put them in the card slots, because my cousin thinks they're the funniest thing in the world.

Boyfriend's parents:

Same method as the ornaments of my grandfather, just with pictures of their dogs instead.

NP: Small wallhangings of my brother and his girlfriend and my boyfriend and I for my dad's mom.

Phew.