I guess I could reword and repost it here, but why don’t you just head over to my own blog and read my little re-cap and requiem for Thing-a-Day 2008. And you can find out what the hell this thing is:
Thanks for a great month, everyone!
today i copied craftykeg and made a haramaki/tummy warmer:
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):
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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:
i’ll probably keep documenting my projects on my blog (probably not every day though) and look forward to next year!
This is dated the 29th, but it is actually my thing for the 28th (it was just after midnight when I put the date in I guess). We get one more last one tomorrow.
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…
Today, I stole something and made something with it, and I’m going to give it as a gift as if it were my own. (Don’t worry; nothing I did is actually illegal.)
But all you get for a picture is this one clue:
Time spent: about 20 minutes.
It’s well worth it for me to dock at the Stanford Mother Ship every now & then. One of the great advantages is that one can get a jumpstart on spring. Another is that, as a Stanford employee, one of my benefits is a yearly transit pass that allows me to ride the Monterey/Salinas (MST), San Jose (VTA) and Caltrain transit systems for FREE. Thus, having secured said pass at Stanford 2 weeks ago, I started my return voyage to Seattle yesterday, taking the route 55 to San Jose and then the Caltrain to SF without spending a penny for my fare. Then, we hopped on the N/Judah trolley line at the Caltrain station and got off at 7th Avenue in Sunset to get what I consider the best burrito in San Fran: the sauteed mushroom burrito with black beans and rice at L’Avenida. I know this is a fairly bold claim (I encourage any readers to post their personal fave burrito joint in the comment section here). But the mushrooms are sauteed to order, and the balance with the other ingredients as well as the delectable salsas are surely difficult to top. Since our N driver gave us a phat transfer time of 3 hours, I did the return trip on the same $1.50 fare, thus making my grand total $10 from Monterey to SF, with side trip for burrito con cerveza…tip was extra 
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 see this every day and don’t know why it hasn’t dawned on me to use it as a feature on TAD. This was a Christmas gift from Lil Mel a couple years ago. I’m cheating a little bit but giving props too so, it evens out.
The rare lost poster artwork from the 1972 Bollywood remake of Masculin Féminin.
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’m sure they meant steel. Here’s a close up of a new steel sculpture down the street. Much too heavy (and bolted down) to steal.
I created a short visit to Outpost for the express purpose of making this drawing, but the soy latte was a pretty sweet bonus. And I’ll take pretty much any excuse to visit Outpost.
I’ve been inspired to do shrinky dinks after seeing all the cool things people are doing here at thing-a-day. thefabricator had fun with them yesterday, shinwa made a really cool keychain for her husband on the 19th, craftkeg made some neat buttons on the 18th, and before rakka made the awesome cheeto Britney and Bender Easter egg, there was the terribly cute shrinky dink cloud necklace, and of course, Lu’s been having a field day with it, the shrinky dink owl necklace being my favorite of her many creations. I had just had to join all the cool kids just to see what the fun is all about.
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.
Tonight I made an instrument - it has a sweet little unsophisticated sound that you can hear here. I used one of those old AOL CD mailers and a stick along with some picture hanging nylon twine and some scraps i had around. i had those red wooden pegs too. I enjoyed this one!
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!
I finished reverse engineering a GAP scarf today and knit up enough of it to prove it works. The free pattern can be found here.
Time spent: quite a bit.
