Thanks for a great month, everyone!

Phew!

Time spent: about an hour.

mine is very simple, not like hers with the cute pattern, but i like it still and am going to wear it today. i didn’t follow the instructions to the tutorial closely and chose to make mine single layered instead of double (basically, i just sewed 2 pieces of jersey together on each side)—i liked craftykeg’s idea of tapering for the waist and did the same. i like to layer my tshirts, so i think of this as an extra tshirt layer that i can interchange easily. i want to make more—with patterns and designs, i also think it’d be cute to add lace or a lettuce/rolled edge using a serger. i also might want to add long sleeve arms to a short sleeve tee following the same idea.

i also wasn’t entirely happy with my results from yesterday, so i re-worked one of them (the first one):

yesterday	today

i tried to make the vignette softer, but i didn’t really notice until afterwards that i probably could have softened it even more and made it lighter. i also backed off on the cyan/blue color tinting because i thought it was too heavy handed yesterday. similarly for the second photo, i took out the color tinting effect entirely.

i have really enjoyed participating in thing.a.day and am sad that today is the last day. there are some projects that i’d hope to do/do more of this past month that i didn’t get to, so i’ll try to do them in the near future:

• re-learn illustrator
• make tshirts from illustrator and/other designs—try iron-on transfers or diy silkscreening
• needle felting
• re-learn crochet
• crochet hyperbolic planes and sea slugs
• knit squares for a blanket
• make more stuffed animals/creatures

i’ll probably keep documenting my projects on my blog (probably not every day though) and look forward to next year!

i like russian poster style, and lately i’ve been wanting to draw a giant squid, because someone at work had a cool sweatshirt with some on it. but i opted for an octopus, and decided to mash it up with the russian poster thing. i’m not sure if the green takes away from the russian feeling, but i like the result anyway. long live the sharpie! i also like that octopusses have so many legs, and the russian text on the drawing translates into “Our strengths are uncountable.”

and so they are…

But all you get for a picture is this one clue:

Time spent: about 20 minutes.

From left to right: a picture I got just in time before Beatriz ate the last bite; the required elements for the trip and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; two photos crossing the bay bridge on the greyhound heading North, two hours later. Adios California!

I got inspired by Jeremiah’s Indy pin cushion with the steel wool leg, and stole the idea of the steel wool portion of his project as filling for my smaller version of the red die pin cushion from earlier. I think it came out great for a first try.  I’ve never hand sewn anything this small before and I thought it would be easy, but it was a real challenge.  Because I was using the steel wool as the filling, and it being so small, I had to turn it inside out after I sewed the first wall of the sixth side so that whole other three sides are hand sewn on, and don’t look all that great.  The stitches bulge all over and I’m not sure why this is.  Maybe I need to use a different type of stitch?  I’d appreciate any tips/advice on sewing small items from others who’ve done it because I’d like to try this project again.

I used some number 6 plastic I had from some store bought food items, sanded them down, and drew/colored them in with pencils. I did the two square ones with a black sharpie just to see the difference in sharpness in color variation, both the squares being one inch squares to measure the shrinkage. Just to see how the metal pin would fair, I made the five pipped die side with the pin stuck inside per instructions on wee wonderfuls shrinky dink pins. They all came out pretty good for a first time, I think. In the future, I’m going to invest in a nice set of permanent markers to do these in. I think they’d come out looking more vivid instead of dulled like my robot kind of does.

i was just thinking that i was inspired by ranjit! and just as i posted this - his looks very similar! but sounds way way cool. thanks ranjit!

Time spent: quite a bit.

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..

Raw Food Restaraunt Song

I decided to do something with one of my extra journals I had lying around that my friend bought for me awhile ago (when I looked at it in a store and went ‘ooh pretty’).

More photos of the quote book beneath the cut…

(more…)

I burned cds for my car!

That right thur is my playlist. It shows my wonderfully eccentric music taste, huzzah. Yes, you do see all sorts of bad pop in there. Mmmm bad pop.

And on a random sidenote, if you have the song “Edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks, play the beginning before she starts to sing. Just listen to it. Listen to it. KEEP LISTENING. …. DOESN’T IT SOUND EXACTLY LIKE DESTINY’S CHILD “BOOTYLICIOUS”?! You have no idea how much this threw me. Sitting in my car. All of a sudden this comes on and I’m sitting there wtf’ing all over the place, and then I’m like oh, good it’s just stevie nicks…. I was a little worried…

ALSO I would like to take this time to promote my friend, Tara Mackey, who is on that playlist there. She’s currently working on her first demo to send off to record companies, and she has an amazing voice. She’s also highly talented - actively pursuing photography, drawing, modeling, and writing, you know, as hobbies. Because she’s crazy. Crazy, loveable Tara. Anyway, you should check out her webpage for further information about her artistic endeavors and to hear her songs (it’s worth it I promise) that she wrote herself. Go here, please. She can also be found at: her livejournal.