sew-n-so’s

For those of you who are familiar with my bathroom, ( a better description would be water closet, because it is about the size of a closet) then you know very well how limited the storage is. There are no cabinets or shelves. No baskets or crates. There literally is no storage - The only place for storage is a small cove in the wall and that is housed by my shrine to St. Anthony. Even though there is a statue of Joseph and a picture of the boy jesus - The grotto belongs to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things - to whom I am indebted to. I invoke him daily.

So those who have used the bathroom in my house may be very aware that there is a real risk for getting stranded while you are in there. In the past, I thought I was very clever by teaching my dog to run and get replacement T.P. when I would be in one of those unfortunate situations of sitting down and discovering that the cardboard roll is hanging there in front of me when it is FAR too late. But while teaching a dog to run and get you toilet paper sounds genius… there are some ramifications. For one, my dog doesn’t have opposable thumbs. Which means that he can not open the door to the bathroom. So that means that if you happen to get stranded, you also must have happened to have left the bathroom door wide open as well.

Not having opposable thumbs also means that my dog MUST grab the T.P with his mouth. This may not sound that bad. Well to train my dog to do this and to reinforce this wonderful trick - I had to reward him with treats. Remember Pavlov? By the time the T.P. is delivered the outer layer of the roll will be soaked in drool, rendering it almost useless. But when you find yourself in a pinch - it’s better than nothing, and it is definitely better than the waddle.

I may or may not have gotten stranded this week….

When you need to wipe your warhol

This was a rough week.

One of the things I am learning, is that because of my technical skills I have to be careful of what I take on. This week I struggled with what to make, even though I had a long list.

I had a lot going on, so late last night…knowing I was up against my own personal deadline, I picked an obvious thing… a bunny… because it’s easter. I really wanted to do a crucifix, but I didn’t have the right cloth that would do a crown of thorns and INRI justice. A floppsy stripped bunny is the best I can do to celebrate the washing away of all of our sins. Thank you mr. jesus.

happy easter !

Again I am a day late. BUT I had this finished on wednesday.

Last night, one of my dogs was invited to model with my beautiful friend Stephanie at Boutiques Unleashed. Tater is a great ambassador for jack russells as she has nerves of steel and is still pretty calm, cool and collect. But she still is a jack russell and that could mean that she could, at any moment, scream bloody murder if she sees an animal that she thinks should be chased down a hole… which means anything NON-dog that has four legs and breathes air, such as an elephant. She handled herself well, she strutted her stuff, and she didn’t eat the llama.

She modeled a cute little cookie monster shirt from a local boutique, Bentley B’s. So that’s what I was doing instead of blogging. All two of you can understand that, right?

This week’s project was inspired by my (who I like to call best -she needn’t return the favor) friend Jessica. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t call, I don’t email, I don’t write…. it’s a character flaw that I have been working on for the better part of this century. Jessica turned 30 a few weekends ago. She made the trip down here for my 30th, but did I get in a car and go to her birthday party on a monday night? <— LAME. NOOOOoooo ooooo. She totally believed me when I told her I couldn’t make it because I got run over by a car (which is the truth), I just can’t believe she believed me! And there is the other tid-bit, that I thought it was on the weekend but later realized it was on a Monday, so that put the kibosh on my plans as well.

This project is a belated birthday gift. A gift that will hopefully resurrect her memories of her birthday party that she probably thought were long put to rest. I mean who wants to remember the death of their twenties? Speaking of death, this project is also inspired by my close brush with death and bad cooking. One thing that has been freaking me out lately is that almost every picture of me post-accident, my face is blurred out, even when other people’s are in focus. Here is an example. But what is really freaking me out is what happened when this picture was taken. Look closely and tell me if you see what I see?

Enough about me, back to Jessica…. Jessica spelled backwards and forwards spells fun — in some foriegn language - I am sure of it. Jessica is one of the funniest and most creative people I know, and I know a lot. She is also really good at board games, and collecting things. This year her birthday was themed around cupcakes. I am not sure why, maybe it is because they are becoming trendy right now, and Jessica is a trend setter. Or maybe it’s because it makes sense to have a variety of flavors of cakes at your party so there isn’t a person, like me, who is hoping when that knife breaks through the icing surface that the cake is BROWN with gooey runny BROWN in it instead of white with red in it. Jessica is like that. I bet her name, even spells empathy in some foreign language, too.

So death and cupcakes (and the re-release of THRILLER) brings me to…

Zombie CUPCAKE!

You know how some things seem like really good ideas and soon after doing them you learn that it really wasn’t… you know what I am talking about - like taking a group photo sans “shirt” in front of your catholic school’s sign, or not paying attention to that stop sign. There are always consequences and this week’s idea/project was no exception to the laws of the universe.This week I decided to take on my own paper project. I had high aspirations, in fact you could say I was a bit tickled with the whole idea, in fact it turned out to be an illicit romance, that half way through it I knew it was wrong but I had to stick with it until the end, just because I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t meet the expectations that I had fantasized about in my head. okay okay… on with it.

Things I learned:

1. don’t start a cut and paste project without getting the necessary tools in place before you begin - such as a glue stick
2. It’s okay for a project to fail in these next 52 weeks.
3. If you are worried, have a plan B in place.
4. I should have lived in Nebraska.

I had talked about my inspiration of the little readymech toys. Well another point of inspiration was a friend of my sister’s who had learned the whole geography of the planet earth in the span of a few days. He was unemployed and bored and decided to learn EVERY country by taking online tests. He did it. I subjected him to rigorous testing. Well that was very inspiring to me, so I gave it a try… all of about 15 minutes. So while I am no geographic savant, I did take one thing from attempting to learn my non-North American countries (just in case I’m caught on Jay-walkin’), that countries look like they are 3-D templates for constructing paper figures.

I set out to choose me a country… Italy was calling my name, but I just couldn’t betray the homeland. But I didn’t want to take that leap to construct Ireland, for fear of the final product turning out like crap. A compromise had to be made, and there was Florida. NOT a country, but still a peninsula like Italy, and a place that I grew up in, like Ireland - but I have no fear of offending Florida.

(more…)

I have a running list of things that I would like to do. It is an expansive list. An overwhelming list. Some of the list doesn’t even involve sewing. I am trying to decide if I will venture into other non-textile projects… maybe I stated that this blog would venture into other crafty type things. I may have hit my head harder than I thought, because I can’t quite remember what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, and I am toooooo lazy to take the five seconds it would take to check. I may be re-iterating what was already said.

I am struggling with whether I should paint a picture, make another plushie, or make a paper something… you’ve seen em’ around… some of my design friends have made their own based on readymech’s paper doodads.

I have seen them all over the place, and as I have discovered in the mere two weeks that I have been blogging, I am all about being un-original and jumping on the proverbial band wagon — but n’er do I fall off. My aim again, is THURSDAY. So my faithful readers come back to see what paper crap or plushie rip off I have kree-8-ted.

And in life news— today i sat in a neurologist’s office and had a needle stuck into my leg muscles and proceeded to be shocked. This was my second trip, and this time the pain made me cry. I had to ask for a towel to bite down on. I do not recommend this procedure ever ever ever ever. Be happy your nerves are shot and go dunk em in some soothing hot scented water and pray you don’t pee.

Ok so I am a little late. This was supposed to be up by Thursday evening. Truth be told, I did have this finished, but extenuating circumstances involved me having zero motivation to take photos and put up the finished product. I did make another little small thing to get up Thursday evening, but it did not turn out quite like I had hoped so I just set it aside as a lesson learned.

When I was attending the University of Washington, my roommate had a friend who turned out to be one of my favorite illustrators. I love his type studies and his books. His name is Scott Teplin and he is currently living in brooklyn…. living the life of an artist. Whatever that life is like. I highly recommend you check out his website. Some of my favorite work are his mouths.

Ever since I started working with the needle and the thread I really wanted to tackle one of these mouths. Can you guess which one I picked?

I tell you this project took me so long. I hand made each tooth from clay. I felt like a dentist sewing these together. It was so difficult trying to figure out how to assemble this thing. It really felt like painting myself into a corner at times. But I did learn a few things, such as assembling two different fabrics together.

Oh and another kind of cool thing about this piece… it just so happened that 32 teeth fit upon it………..annnnnnnnnd last night I went and watched Cloverfield at the cheap theater and I ended up walking into the lobby and barfing into a trash can at about the 20 minute mark. I will definitely be doing a plush version of that experience. What is worse is that I took dramamine before we went. cheesus.