Thing-a-day.com

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):

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!

today i copied invisible.co’s earlier post and followed the same tutorial to give a film-like effect to a photo. my photoshop version didn’t seem to have all of the adjustment layers/filters that the tutorial called for (exposure and lens blur) but i approximated the best that i could and tried the effect on two of my photos:

before	after

the vignetting effect on the top photo is too prominent/hard, i was going to add black bars to crop to cinemascope or re-do the vignette. i also saved non-cyan/blue tinted images that can be viewed here.

I spent a little time in Japan a couple months ago. Japanese gal culture is fascinating. So much of it is by-girls, for-girls, and it’s so driven by details. A sweet lolita in full regalia, done in sharpie on th back of some scrap paper with digital color added.

it’s the last day of my “japanese pop” theme and i’ll end it with an ultraman cat toy. (i swear it’s not an updated venus of willendorf. heh heh) he’s stuffed with cotton and cat nip for ultra cat enjoyment. you can see clouseau on the left sniffing his new friend..

today has been a cup noodle day.  not only did i make a freezer paper stencil of the logo and “screen” it on a shirt, but i also made a related cup noodle project on my blog “suspect and fugitive”.

what could be simpler than a hello kitty bento? the eyes are nori. the nose is made from fried egg and her bow is a large piece of red pepper.

my thingaday entry for today is a strawberry pocky eye pillow.  it’s made from a very soft flannel fabric with a felt backing.  the top is embroidered and it’s filled with lentils.  sadly, it’s not strawberry scented but i’m sure that it will feel nice on my eyes this evening after a long day of staring at the computer!

no, that doesn’t mean that i forgot to use baking powder, silly. these cupcakes are modeled after takashi murakami’s eyeballs that were part of the superflat art movement. (you can see an example of the painting in the right of the photo. (image from amazon))

continuing with the theme of “japan”, today i made fondant sushi. after mixing together a batch of fondant, i dyed it and formed the sushi shapes.

this week i’m working with the theme “japan” or, better still, “japanese pop culture”. my first entry for “thing-a day” is a totoro embroidery.