Thing-a-day.com

I made another scarf, thicker (on purpose) and slight shorter (oops) than last time:

In purple for mom.

Guess what I’m busy doing. 

This is actually an image I’m using in a powerpoint presentation- I added the cussin just for you, though.

The house of God isn’t doing so well up in Oakland y’all.  But the liquor store a few doors over is full.

 Really, I just liked their hair.

*Also, I’m having trouble with the scanner at the edges, but it’ll have to wait tills tomorrow to fix it.*

seeing as I missed 4 days here’s a quick bonus- margaret in blue

thrown into a crappy old frame and looking as pensive as can be about it.

Amelia, 15 

Copied from a photo in the book: Girl Culture by Lauren Greenfield

Gouache round 2 on paper made for dry media, one day we’ll get it right gouache..

 I had some beets in the fridge and wanted to try some sort of food carving on ‘em, but there was nothing in the book I had, so I went literal:

raw cut  

cooked and on salad

I also tried a viking ship made out of a cucumber from the aforementioned book:

That ugly bird head with what looks like a mickey mouse hat on was my way of trying to recreate one of those dragon/ loch ness monsters you see on some old depictions of viking boats.. not so much.

But hey, it floats in water! (without the mast which is heavy and messes up it’s balance)

I tried out gouache for the first time (I actually thought I was watercoloring)… not that it matters I wouldn’t know what I was doing either way.  I’m also going to add that I don’t do anything delicately, nor do I do flowers.  I was trying to make a  card that grandma would like to say thanks for an awesomely old-timey hardcover cookbook she recently passed on to me.  And all she gets in return in a sloppy test run at trying to paint…  

so why not post it.

breakfast (eggs, toast, leftover vegetable jumble):

dinner (fried sausage wrapped in pancetta over citrusy pasta and more leftover vegetables):

and I turned this honeydew into a swan with a crooked tail full of melon balls which was pretty magical:

… as in, insane.

Quit that, would you.

I’ve got some sort of awful sickness creeping in and sucking my will to do any-thing-a-day..

These guys told me to cheer the eff up about it:

Hey thing-a-day, I fell off the map for a few days but we’re still cool, right? 

While I was gone I almost got ate by these dogs:

found out where all the munis sleep:

and pondered the existence of these sort of creepy giant anthropomorphic daschund heads:

On Day 13…

 I fed myself (yet another salad, and an improvised blt using pancetta for bacon- which works pretty well):

I planned to feed others (lemony “sunshine cupcakes” from William Sonoma Deserts cookbook, frosting forthcoming):

and I did my laundry:

exciting, no?

I watched one of the movies I had recorded on the tee-vee tonight.  To be honest, The 47 Ronin part II was hard for me to get through and not a favorite.  Maybe it would’ve helped if I had see part I?  I wanted to check it out because the synopsis looked promising: samurai seek revenge and all 47 of them are sentenced to death by suicide based on a true story. Visually the film had some nice stuff to look at (costumes, hair, a look into different country and different time period). 

This drawing is a paused screenshot from the movie jotted down on paper.  I roughly sketched out the courtyard that these two dudes were sitting in, but later decided to paste over the green-blue notebook paper background instead.  As the movie was in black and white, I was also able to color it however I liked.

Scarf completed:

Margaret approved:

I got the idea for this from: http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2008/01/how_to_make_a_noknit_scarf.html 

More food y’all:

Pan-fried steak with carmelized mango, shallots and avocado “salsa”(?) on top.  Served with more grilled shallots and red bell peppers on the side.  Also a salad with raspberries, apple slices, almonds, shaved parmesan, avocado, parsley and cilantro on top of all the regular players.  I was hungry, thus portions were pretty mountainous today.

I’m also just starting a scarf that isn’t knitted, but held together with knots because…  I can’t knit.

As you can see, there were 4 main strands tied together to create a scarf with a little less width than I normally like.  So, now that I’ve taken this picture- I’m going to pull it apart and start all over with an extra two strands to hopefully fatten it up nicely. Here goes..

So, I came up with this “great” idea to make stuffed heart pillows for the upcoming holiday, the twist being that they would have decidedly un-Valentine sayings cross-stitched onto them.

As I tried to figure out how to do this, I realized there’s a whole subculture of these kind of “subversive cross-stitch”-ers already out there: http://www.subversivecrossstitch.com/index.html.  Not only that- there’s a web-comic who is doing basically the same thing I was thinking of, only better http://www.subversivecrossstitch.com/valentines2008.htm

Motherfucker.

But I went ahead with it anyway.  To ensure my failure, I opted not to get the appropriate cross-stitch fabric (I used an old handkerchief), and I did basically no pre-planning for the layout of my sparse ”design” (I was too impatient).  Also, I drank as I stitched erratically.  Here’s what I came up with:

and

tried again at the neopastels.. still not sure we have a future together.

so this dude http://www.thing-a-day.com/author/rowstyles/ has been putting up some mad dope fonts for days.. which in turn made me want to do the same. Unfortunately all I got is this one sad little guy:

And even more tragic-  I tried neopastels for the first time on a portait with disasterous results. The garish neon bright colors I had to choose from didn’t help any as I attempted to approximate skin tones. All that being said, here she is anyway:

Finally, I put Margaret in a sweater mostly to amuse myself. She, on the other hand, doesn’t look amused at all. Since this was probably my most successful attempt at anything the whole damn night I think I’ll post it:

Alright.. day 6 was kind of a throw away.  Copious amounts of school and tired left me looking to the closest thing for inspiration- Margaret, that jerk:

in pencil:

in conte (it won’t let me thumbnail all of a sudden):

a tuna salad with fixins:

and a homemade ice cream sandwich (this was technically thrown together yesterday to freeze up and devoured today right in margaret’s face):