Like I could wait a month!

I knew there was no way I could have gone a whole month without sewing or crafting something! As I was going through the few things I have in storage I found these really cheesy angel inspiration cards that have good insights/thoughts to ponder, but the imagery makes me want to vomit. It's just toooooo newage (rhymes with sewage!) for me, so I've been covering the saccharine images on each card with random images from my craft books and the pile of pictures I'm releasing before this next move. Now the cards are much, much easier for me to digest, because I can translate the words into something useful much more efficiently if I'm not having to block out those horrible, anglo-centric sugary drawings too. This project began with me decorating the outside of the box, but now the cards are getting thicker because of my additions and won't fit inside the box any longer, so I will have to make a new container of some sort for them. It made me think of a deck of cards we had when I was a child that was stored in a box that had two spaces for the cards so half the deck was stored on the right and half the deck was stored on the left. I might try to make something like that for them.

Oh, and my sprouts turned out magnificently so now it's time to tackle yogurt!

Hello, Goodbye! (and much gorgeousness)

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I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.

-Japanese poem

I've been back in Oakland for a few days now and it's been wonderful. This is such a beautiful time of year here, everything is in bloom and it's been sunny every day! The plum trees in front of my house are covered in soft, pink blossoms that it seems I'm not allergic to this year, hurray! It's been beyond glorious to see my kitty The Princess again after months apart and today I got a massage from a friend of mine that was simply glorious. I'm a bit exhausted from all the going that's been going on, since I'd gotten used to very little socialization and not much happening outside of my house, but it's been fun nonetheless. I had a great day on Friday running around the conservatory and golden gate park with Bequi and Dan and last night and today I've been able to go through my stuff that was in storage at a friend's. While I'm not used to being as mobile as I've been, it's just been so gorgeous here that although I get exhausted I couldn't imagine not wandering around and looking at all the gorgeous purples and yellows and pinks and oranges and reds and whites that are bursting off of almost every plant around! What better time to be in Oakland? I'm glad that this will be my goodbye to this city, yes it's already time for goodbye, even though I've just arrived. Remember that massage I got a few months back that gave me a really strong urge to be in North Carolina? Well, things have been falling perfectly into place and I'm going to be moving to Asheville at the end of March, so I'll only be in Oakland for a month wrapping things up and saying my hellos and goodbyes, which is bittersweet, but I'd rather leave lovingly than burned out!

That said all my crafty/artsy stuff is still in GA waiting for me to come along and pick it up on my way up to Asheville and since I don't have any (or much of any) artsy/crafty stuff at my disposal I'm on a fun food project kick currently. Right now I'm sprouting lentils on top of my fridge, which I've never done before, but it's been really simple. I found the tutorial here and got started right away. I think my next project is going to be yogurt made from almond milk. From what I've been reading it can be made with anything and since I'm not a huge fan of the soy yogurts and I'd rather not have sugar in it, I'm going to give almond milk yogurt a whirl. We'll see how it turns out. Now I think it might be time to curl up with a book and The Princess while my bed is all sunny.

Wisdom in my pocket (instead of my mouth)

I just got back up from FL last night and now I have a little more than two weeks to pack up my belongings and move across the country for the second time in less than six months. While I was in FL I didn't place any merchandise in shops like I had planned because I got my wisdom teeth out instead! They've needed to come out for almost a decade now and when the opportunity presented itself I jumped at it. So that means that I will have to ship merch across the country, but at least I finally had a surgery I've needed for years! Well, I have to get high on lortab and sit around drinking my food. I may not post until I'm back in CA, but know it's just because I'm busy packing up my life again, not because I don't love you!

Burning New Designs and The Glorious Mable!

Oh joy, it's screen burning day! I just love this part of screenprinting, it's so magical! I put pictures on a screen, put it under a light and then after 15 minutes I get to go rinse out the picture. I *know* how it works, but my inner child sure does love the magic of it. I just put the first screen under the light to burn and I have two more to go after this one, so within about an hour, if all goes well, I should have three screens ready to print!

I'm excited about these designs. I'm currently burning a re-designed "chicks dig vegans" design and a dandelion gone to seed. The other designs I'm burning today are a re-designed "queerdoe", an anatomical heart, a femme-ish person on a bike and some birds and hearts for background/second color for some of the other designs. I'm excited to see how everything turns out and I have to say, I just adore screen printing! It's just so fun and exciting to me, probably because the process is quick and not overly delicate. Also, I think I will try doing a reduction design at some point, I've never done that and I was thinking about it last night.

I have a new family member now, I just inherited Mable, a gumdrop shaped i-mac. She's fabulous, and now I have a computer that I can use for watching movies (yipee!), and burning CDs (and DVDs, high class!), and using illustrator and photoshop (glory be!), which should make my arting and crafting life much, much richer! I do love my old dinosaur of a laptop and she has served me well. I'll be keeping her, but she's being converted to linux, which should be interesting and she'll mainly be a back up/alternate to Mable, once Mable's all up and running proper like with all the latest downloads, red sequin decorations, etc. Now I will finally be able to justify getting a digital camera, because I will have a computer to put the photos on (yes my laptop is really that ancient/slow that I can't hook a digital camera up to it). And that will make selling my things so much easier; Etsy here I come! Well, once I manage to snag a decent camera that is.

Well screen number one washed out beautifully and now number two is under the light getting cooked. I accidentally flipped my anatomical heart design again when I was placing it, thinking I hadn't already flipped it, so it's going to end up being backwards when I print. It's not too big of a deal because there are no words, but it will bother me a little bit because of my anatomy nerd-ness. Oh well, it must just be my imperfect heart wanting to memorialized!

Hopefully by tonight I'll have tons of fagulous new prints!

Quilts, Transfer Letters, and Serendipity, Oh My!

I dropped my quilt for Barakah Life's Sew Giving Bee, (the deadline has been extended, by the way) in the mail today and I got John to snap a bad cell phone picture of it before I sealed up the box. This is the second quilt I've made and it turned out so adorably! The robots are on a really nice, soft flannel and the yellow squares are from a soft, old sheet that is yellow and white stripey-ish.

While I was out I stopped by the craft store to get some black screen printing ink and I found a whole set of opaque, opalescent inks for fabric. Heaven! A bit pricey, but not unreasonable, so I got them. And glory of glories, right next to the screen printing supplies there were rub on transfer letters! I have been looking for these for quite some time now, I fell in love with them as a child and I simply adore them for embellishing crafts and mail! I was looking in the fabric/sewing/embroidery clearance section and I came across a cute design for embroidery. It was a map design and I've been obsessed with maps lately (probably all of the traveling I've done in the last 6 months or so), so I think I'm going to make my own map design to embroider. I'd rather use a real map that has some meaning to me, or maybe make a map of some of my favorite places and use that as an embroidery template. I'll keep you posted.

While I was there I also broke down and bought some quilt binding for the quilt I'm making for my sibling's child because it matched and now that means I have everything I need to complete the quilt! I'd really like to finish it before I pack up all my belongings (again) and ship my stuff to Oakland, so I can send it off from here before I leave instead of dragging it back to the west coast in pieces and finishing it there.

On my way back home I was having one of those moments of connection and extreme clarity with my intuition and guidance. I was thinking to myself "Am I going the wrong way?" about the road I was driving on, and I looked to the street sign to get my bearings. As I looked back up I had to stop short in order to avoid colliding with the car in front of me and their license plate said "POTTERY". I'm not kidding you!
After the way I was feeling when I got my massage on Saturday, it seems clear that it's important for me to get back into ceramics, because that's a pretty straightforward message, as far as I'm concerned.

Old screens, New prints

I've been screenprinting since last night, patches mostly. Although I've gathered supplies for it, I have actually put off printing the entire time I've been in Georgia, mostly because I don't have simple access to a printer/copier type set-up and it's apparently very hard to motivate myself to go to a copy center for whatever reason. Last night I got inspired to see what designs where still on my screens from the last time I printed (almost 2 years ago, yikes!) and I was happy to find the banana seat bike design and promptly printed up a few patches and a couple of shirts too. Today I printed a bunch of the 'gendernaught' design in patch size and I realized that I had never actually used that screen before. I really love the process of screen printing, it's so enjoyable to me. I wish I were better able to make astonishing graphics, but a ladyman can't be good at everything, I suppose.

I'm printing most of the patches on this amazing fabric that I found a while back at the Depot for Creative Reuse (in north Oakland). It's shiny and so luxe, and from the designs the had I think it must be scraps from some sort of industrial neck tie making process, surprise surprise I got the spotted designs, anyway I love it and gold ink is printing on it like a dream! Now I'm just inspired to print everything and fortunately I bought two packages of panties a while back, but I don't like the way they fit without some waistband surgery so most of them have just been sitting in the package for a month or two. I've decided that I will print on them tomorrow (as well as the few I claimed and bothered to perform surgery on), I've got 4 patch sized designs, all of which will fit very nicely on said panties, hurray! I think doing some actual printing was exactly what I needed to inspire me to reclaim the screens and burn some new designs. I may try to do that before I head down to Florida, because it's always good to take plenty of merch. on travels, but we'll see how my time and energy looks.

I got a massage earlier today and it was amazingly nice, I've been holding onto a lot of stuff around my heart for quite some time now and the massage really coincided nicely with my feeling ready (and able) to release some of it that I have wanted to let go of for a while, but just didn't know how to. What a relief. Having made this commitment to myself to maintain a certain level of self-care has really already made such a huge positive impact.
Also, I though it was interesting that at one point when I was on the table I was getting a really strong, distinct feeling that what I truly wanted to be doing with my life was to live out in the mountains of North Carolina and be a potter with my own, tiny ceramics studio. It's funny because I haven't worked with clay in many, many years or even given it much though at all, for that matter. Maybe I need to make a point to get myself into a ceramics studio when I get back to the bay area? At this point I'm probably actually centered enough in myself to be able to more effectively center clay, at the very least. Hmmmmmm.

Mini Art Quilt

Today I am working on a mini art quilt. I was piecing some fabric together to make a doll, but I decided that the combo wasn't what I wanted for that project, so there I had rectangle of a very interesting mix of polka dot fabrics. What to do with it? A mini art quilt, that's what! So now there is a flannel robot, a fancy lady and a polka dotted bird, along with two trees. I glued everything on and I'm waiting for the glue to dry before I throw in some decorative and functional stitches. I'm interested to see how it turns out, I've never made anything quite like this before. Sorry about the horrible picture quality, I'll try to get better pictures up when I'm finished.









I have been considering coming up with a years worth of weekly projects and posting them here, either as a tutorial or as contest/craft-a-long sort of thing. I think either way it would be a good way to motivate myself to make a new project each week, which will certainly help to keep my aires heart happy.

Next week I'm going to Florida for one last visit to friends and family before heading back to the west coast at the end of next month. I'm going to to have to start packing up my things after my Florida jaunt, and I must say I don't feel entirely ready to leave my sanctuary in the woods and return to the world of city living and working. I am, however, looking forward to seeing the folks I miss, The Princess, and having more resources available to me again (transit! free weekly yoga! vegan pizza delivery!). Ending this convalescence will certainly be bittersweet to say the least, but at least I still have about a month left.