Welcome!

One more thing about this place of mine. It's true that I have a coat rack on my porch, but this is how you really know you're at my joint. This is the beautiful redhead that greets you outside my door. (Yes, she's mounted on my front door. You can just see the frame in the photo in the previous post.)

"It's just grass."

I've been in my house for about 2.5 years now. You may have noticed that I like taking pictures of it. I don't know how long I'll be here, but I do enjoy documenting the place. Today's photo is a slightly different view from my usual top-of-driveway. Semi-ironically, what you can't see is a big part of my inspiration for spending all day today mowing and trimming and bricking and hosing -- my porch overhang has finally been reaffixed with a light that isn't a fingernail away from falling out of the hole and knocking out the pizza dude. And my roof and gutters are clean. Thanks, Buddha! (I'm not allowed to use ladders by myself.)

When I was originally looking at buying this place, it was late Fall, and before letting ourselves in, my Realtor and I paused to watch a crew of about 6 men working on the 1++ acre yard. Bruce looked down at me in that patriarchal way that's almost avoidable from a man a foot taller than myself. "That's... an awful lot of yard," he said, the little lady understood but unspoken.

I smiled in goofy desperation, because from the time I'd seen the place I knew I'd be living here. "It's just grass." flutter flutter

Well, let me tell you. "It's just grass" becomes a lot more fun when you've got the right pardner. And this is my pardner. I won't go all Tim Taylor here, but I will say that the motor on this little golden devil is almost as big as what's in my motorcycle (and quite a bit bigger than my first bike).

Seriously.

Handsome, really.

I know they're pests. I know he would kill me if given half the chance. But still... cayooooot! I'm enthralled by ANY critters in my yard, of course (maybe you've noticed), but in my couple of years at my wildness abode, I've never seen a raccoon here. Seriously. Coyotes? Check. Spiders the size of my hand? Double-check. But this is my first bandito. So I got a little footage through my kitchen windows.



(My original footage is a little better, but I had to let YouTube chew it up for posting purposes.)

Amber Suite

A couple of months ago I went to a gem and jewelry show at a local civic center. I hadn't bought beads in a long time because I still have bags and bags of unutilized beauty awaiting attention, so I went mostly for entertainment, with the idea that something would have to be particularly notable to come home with me.

And then I saw these hanks of semi-raw amber. They were so chunky and unpolished and interesting! I grabbed a strand thinking, all right, this is mine IF I can find something that is going to go with it TODAY. No hoarding -- either we come away from this show with a project ready to go, or we come away empty-handed. After visiting every booth in the joint, I had my collection: lavastone, moonstone and a large carved bone Chinese bat (a favorite symbol of mine) to serve as a focus. A feast of natural textures!

I think it was the next afternoon that I put it all together in a jewelry suite -- necklace, bracelet (on elastic) and ring (wire-wrapped). The bat disc is about 3" across and is attached by waxed cord, looped through Chinese stopper knots, which match the little black lavastones nicely.

Each of the pieces is actually kind of big, so some planning goes into wearing them. Pretty, though. Click on any of 'em to see bigger versions with more of the pretty.

My bedroom is about an hour darker now.

I didn't think I needed a new shade for my bedroom. Then I saw a heat-fusible roller shade kit in the clearance aisle at Joann. Red stickers work like magic. This particular one promised me that if I found a fabric I liked in that very store on that very day, it would join forces with me to make the gee-golly-keenest bedroom shade ever! And thus the hunt began.

I did find that perfect* fabric, and grabbed a bundle. Then home to the big cutting table.

Neat, huh? More subtle from a distance, but practically hollers my name in the up-close.

In addition to the fabric being 5839038 miles long, it's a geometric pattern, which meant that I had to get it perfectly straight to the edges of the shade. Because... I had to. I didn't take any pictures of the assembly process, but using this shade kit is quite simple. However. Have you ever folded king-size sheets by yourself? Working with a big, uncut length of fabric is a bit like doing that. With both hands asleep. Which is why there are no photos -- arms not long enough.

Once the length of fabric is in place, all you have to do is iron, iron, iron your way to a funktastic new shade! It's not very light-blocking, but the finished product is pretty cool as a detail. Worth the hassle. Oh and definitely worth the $5 it cost me for the kit.

P.S. My bedroom is never ever actually this bright. I had to take a flash-photo to show what was going on.

*There is no such thing as perfection in anything. Ever.

Private Swaps and the Therapy of Creating

At craftster, people do swaps of different sorts. The swaps of the organized variety are typically around a theme -- zombies, maybe, or the color blue. Last summer I participated in my first swap, the Unconditional Wish List swap. The concept for this is that each participant creates a list of things she likes or wants, from which any other participant chooses something to make or simply send. What makes it "unconditional" is that it is not a one-for-one swap. If Blorah chooses to make something for me from my list, I do not have to make something for Blorah -- I just pick any of the participants who has something interesting to me on her list.

I chose to make a skirt and a bag for a sweet girl in Britain. These are the pictures she sent me, as I hadn't yet trained myself to take pictures of things I made.

Because of the design of this swap, me making something doesn't mean I'll get something, if I'm not chosen. And I wasn't. So they listed me again in October and again in November... and I still wasn't getting chosen. Eventually, two people actually did send me things from that swap, but before that happened, I got email from a young woman in Canada. She said that she dug some of the "likes" I'd listed and said that "A Clockwork Orange" is also her favorite movie, so she proposed we do a personal/private swap based on that movie. Apparently this is also something crafster people do fairly often, but I never had. I said cool, let's do it, even though I have no idea what sorts of things she crafts, or really much of anything else about her.

She and I carried on some email correspondence for a couple of months, talking about progress without giving anything away. (We gave ourselves a long deadline because it was the "holiday season.") I learned a little more about what she likes, and more importantly that she wouldn't creep out easily. I initially thought I'd make her a little printed bag with images from the movie (she loved the Zipperhead bag), until I got the idea of making some sort of eyeball shirtcuffs like Alex wears. I thought maybe some taxidermy eyes attached to cuffs removed from a Salvation Army shirt... Which would be cool, but seems so hard -- not difficult, I mean, but physically hard. Wouldn't it be cute to do something like that but in yarn? I thought. Yes, yarn! There's gotta be a way to knit or crochet an eyeball.

I hadn't crocheted anything in years and was probably never very good at it, but it came back pretty easily, and after one failed prototype (big mutant eyeball!), I quickly whipped up two nice blue eyeballs. Now... what? They have to go ON something... something appropriately soft/fuzzy, and variable enough to fit someone whose dimensions I don't even know... Oh, I know just the thing!

Who would have guessed that finding plain white sweatbands would be so difficult?

All the ones I found had logos on them, and after spending $6 on a pair of (pretty nice) Under Armor wristbands, I discovered that getting those logos off is nearly impossible. I couldn't bring myself to go to WalMart, which I just knew would have them, so I did the next best thing -- asked a friend to look at one of his Meijer stores while he was at work. At about 3.45 am a couple of nights later, I got the following text message: "If I do find those plain white sweatbands, what do I get in exchange?" My gratitude, of course. And I'd have repaid him as well, except it turns out he lifted them. My hero.

Plain wristbands in hand, I started plotting the attachments and details. Alex's cuffs are never very clearly shown in the movie, but they seem to have red viscera of some sort next to the eyballs. So I'd have to do that, of course. With a tiny crochet hook and painfully small red floss, I started making stitches, just trying to make some sort of shape.

And this, my friends, is why crafting is such good therapy for me.

My "real" personality sometimes suffers under delusions of perfectionism. But when I'm doing something like this, I'm aware that I don't know what I'm doing. I know the stitches are uneven, the piece is wobbly, and there wasn't really any plan before I got started. I know there is a danger that knots will pop out, or the whole thing may simply unravel through wear, since I've never done anything like this before and can't possibly fully test it before I give it to her. I also know that the person who gets these is absolutely going to love them, in part, I would bet, for the wobbliness, not in spite of it. I also know that if I made a pair for myself, people would want to know where I got them. (Well, except people who know me, who would probably assume I made 'em.)

Still not entirely knowing the plan, or even feasibility, I stitched two "optic nerves" (I know there's only one per eye) to one of the white cuffs with the fluffy blue eyeball in the middle, making stitches that are impossible to hide (though I did my best). I stretched it out, put it on my own wrist, and I gotta say, I was totally tickled with how the first one turned out. It's great not only to make something, and from scratch, but to do it strictly from imagination. I mean, yeah, the movie was the inspiration, but it's been a long time since I did a concept that was totally my own.

Some time during the next week, I finished the other cuff, then took a good handful of pictures. I was sure to get close-ups because I had every intention of making another pair for myself, but... I probably never will.

And whatever my swap partner sends me, I know I'll totally love it.

Pyramid Bags

Here are a couple of little bags I made from a pattern I found online. They are about 6 inches tall.

The one on the left was my test go. Sometimes you can look at a pattern or instructions a thousand times, but until you actually DO it, it doesn't come together in the noggin. So I did the beigey one with a light interfacing and no lining to see how to handle the zipper. Then I made the bag that I really wanted to make.

The black and red bag is made from marine vinyl, which is nice and heavy with a very interesting feel to it. I made it to wear with an all red and black outfit, thus the red topstitching etc. The white spots are mother of pearl studs which I got from a swap with someone on craftster (she sent me 300 of them!) and the wrist strap was cannibalized from a $3 resale purse (which also yielded two zippers and a silver tone slidy/clippy closure). The studs are more evenly-aligned than they look in the photo -- it's an angle thing. It IS.

"Dead Pets" Hoodie

This is definitely one of my favorite projects of recent memory.

The inspiration came from this craftster post. Craftster is fantastic, by the way. You'll get overloaded with ideas, techniques and inspirations and love it.

The finished hoodie started life as one Dead Pets concert t-shirt (friend's garage sale, $5), one acid green t-shirt (Value Village, $.80), one black t-shirt (drawer, $0), one green stripy sweater (Value Village, $3.50), one yard of woven trim (Joann, about $1.50) and one 24-inch zipper (Joann, $2.50).

When I saw the green sweater, I knew it would make great sleeves, but it had short-sleeves. Until you cut your own, it's easy to underestimate how much fabric sleeves take -- pretty much the entire width of a front panel! Fortunately, the length of the sweater was enough that I could make one sleeve from the front and one from the back, using the bottom hem at my wrists.

While I was planning this project, I found this great woven black and green trim at Joann, and decided I had to find a way to work it in. It wound up trimming the front hood edge.

I finished the hoodie one week ago, and I think I've worn it three times already. It's a great way to make t-shirts more wearable -- I have bunches that I like, but I never just wear a t-shirt alone.

Fun with Electricity

This is a long story which I believe is much more interesting to the person having experienced it (me) than to anyone hearing it. And besides, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a little snippet of video is worth millions.

So let's keep it to a timeline:

0230 15 January
Freezing rain has been coming down for a few hours. Inside my house, awake, watching a movie and doing some needlepoint, I hear a BZZT and see a faint orange flash through the window in my front door. After unplugging everything in the house, I go outside to investigate. That's when I see the two downed wires on my driveway, flashing, crackling and carrying on. I call 911.

0245 15 January
With the presence of mind to grab my digital camera and put it into video mode, I am standing in the turnoff section of my driveway, waiting for the fire department and documenting the zap-and-smoke show. That's when this happened:



Yes that's me and my rarely-heard yelp there. My two favorite comments about this video are "You sound really cute when shitting yourself!" and "I've never heard you sound so innocent." Aww.

0248 15 January
The fire department arrives, stops at the end of my driveway with floodlights trained on the pole and my driveway, and sits there. For about 6 hours. I come in and out of my house during this time, in the freezing rain, hoping someone will come and tell me something. No one does. I return to my house, change into dry clothes and attempt to nod off in the 50-degree living room. It doesn't work. Until around...

0830 15 January
After I finally doze off for a minute, I'm awaked by what sounds like a harsh alarm clock buzz. My first thought is that my power is back on and my alarm clock is going off. Then I remember I don't have an alarm clock, and I'm on my feet at a run. Something new is going on. I step outside with my camera once again, to this:



Those of you who have been to my house should recognize this as the view from my front door, a post I was reluctant to leave. Realizing the fire truck was no longer at the end of my driveway, I make my third call to 911. "Where did my truck go?" I ask the dispatcher. "I show them at your location," she tells me. "I'm looking right now... they're not here." "Oh, well, hang on, let me call them. ...pause... Apparently they had to go for gas. They've been there for six hours." "I'm well aware of that. I've been here, too." Which is how I also knew that the tree now lying across my driveway had not been there the night before. It didn't break -- it simply toppled out of the ground at the roots.



I still have no idea what it was going on at that pole, but it took until noon on Monday for the power company to show up and do something about it. In the meantime, the lights in my house which were on soft dimmer switches were flashing like in a haunted house. Oh, and a fireman finally greeted me at my door, telling me that I should stay inside with the door closed. At 4pm that day, I was finally told it was safe to leave... Although that was easier said than done, with 4 trucks in my driveway. Taking matters into my own hands, I cleared some downed branches and drove across the far side of my yard to get to light and warmth.

Miraculously enough, when I got home Tuesday night, my power was back on, and the electrical, telephone, cable and fiber optic communications lines (whatever those are used for) had all been restrung. Of course, there's an entire tree's worth of hastily-chopped, frozen wood in my front yard... But at least I can finish my needlepoint.

Lines Down 2.30 am

Lines Down 2.30 am
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

This is the view at the end of my driveway on the night of January 14th. Much more I want to say about this, but for now, just try to imagine walking out of your house and seeing that. For six hours.

Faux Leather Kimono

Last week I decided I wanted to try working with one of the faux leather "home decorating" fabrics from the local Joann. They are very interesting to look at and to feel and are typically pretty cheap. I wanted something simple which would show off the texture without details that would create too many layers of the thick fabric. I chose a kimono, as this crappy picture with a random scarf at the waist shows.

I already had the sewing pattern (Simplicity 5839), which apparently approaches kimono fabrication from a fairly traditional viewpoint. This included a lining which was very integrated into the construction, but which I wanted to omit. This meant some pattern editing on the fly -- skipping the lining made it simpler in some ways, but trickier in others since I couldn't actually use the instructions. The most complicated portion (and I hesitate to say "complicated" since the whole garment is traditionally quite simple) was the sleeves. But the sleeves really do make the kimono. (The outer corners really are radiused as they should be on those sleeves... Just doesn't show in the crappy picture. Did I mention the picture is crappy? I did? Carrying on then.)

I chose a black/brown printed faux leather lightweight upholstery fabric from the clearance table (ultimately <$3/yd), with a fairly dense, plain knit backing. After folding it and flipping it around a little at the store, I decided it would be sufficiently floppy to make a garment, light enough to actually wear, while stiff and glossy enough to at least look like it was trying to be leather.

Cutting was easy and no-ravel, and the stitching went well with longer stitch-lengths and a Teflon foot where needed. Seams could be trimmed very tightly and left unfinished because of the plasticky nature of the material, and it took topstitching like a dream. The only problem I had was my own fault, when it came time to attach the neck band. I tore the thing off and restitched it at least 3 times. Grr! Too many layers moving at different speeds was the culprit. Once I figured out a way to keep everything cruising together, it went just fine.

I intend to wear it with either a large mesh/elastic waist cincher or a corset (to be named later). I was considering making some belting out of regular webbing covered in the same faux leather, terminating in some big silver buckles, and attaching 2 or 3 of those to the kimono, but I'm reconsidering putting anything permanent on it. I think I'd like to be able to wear different obi-substitutes as the mood strikes me. (As if I'm going to be wearing this thing every weekend. In this weather?!)

Star Lanyard

Star Lanyard
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

Another quickie. Sometimes it's difficult to figure out what to do with large focus beads like this composite star that I got at a bead show probably 2 or 3 years ago. I tend to like making fiddly little elaborate beadwork, but the large singular objects always get my attention! A couple of weeks ago, I decided it was finally time to make something with it, and here's what we got -- a simple lanyard with black glass beads, small green stars and, of course, the big central star, intended to sit flat on the breastbone.

There is no alternative.

Skull Slipons
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

If you need any further proof that the subversive is mainstream, here it is: Red and white skull slip-ons that I bought at Burlington Coat Factory today for $12.

Monkey Capelet

Monkey Capelet
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

This is the end result of the monkey carnage, the Monkey Capelet. I had intended to wear this to a monkey gallery event, but wound up losing patience and leaving it at home after I'd already finished it. (The flame dress that's modelling it has also since been finished.)

Sometimes the image is even funner...

Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys!
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

...than the doing. But THIS time, it was actually hilariously fun. I was sitting on the sofa tonight, about half an eye on the telly, while the other 1.5 eyes were surgically removing the arms and tail off this stuffed monkey.

No reason, really. I just felt like torturing something. I'm only sad that it couldn't scream.

Actually, I'm making a monkey project. The little rainbow of monklets are also involved. Something will come of it... something.

Pleated Spider Skirt

When I saw this plaid fabric with black flocked spiders, I knew it had to be a pleated skirt. I've never done pleats before, so it was a good progressive choice.

Because it was almost experimental, I decided not to worry too much about matching the plaids across the panels. Unfortunately, accidentally, one side panel matched when I cut it, and the other didn't. Exactly the wrong position -- either they should both match or they should both NOT match! Once I'd folded all the pleats in, I realized no one but me (and anyone who reads this) would notice, so I soldiered on.

I changed the waistband from the pattern, as it originally included a drop-waist, which didn't make sense for this fabric. The other part of the experiment was that I decided to stitch along the mountain folds of the pleats so they would be forever crisp (especially since this fabric was not ironing well). It worked very well, and it's something I will do again, to be sure.

Glass Spider Ring

Glass Spider Ring
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

After having had a heavy/stressful/unpleasant week, by Friday I had decided to be more lighthearted if it killed me. Within my first hour at work, one of my coworkers came to me sing-songing "I have a present for you!"

And she dropped into my grubby little mitt a hand-blown glass ring of blue and yellow stripes with a clear dome on top -- with a teeny little glass spider inside. Cutest thing ever! But I have big fingers, so I knew it wasn't going to slip right onto my ring finger, which is exactly what it did. Softened all the edges on the week.

Not easy to photograph, for obvious reasons. But it's really great, and I foresee a lot of me sticking it into people's faces in the future.

The Devil's Electric Bill

The Devil's Electric Bill
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

I got the Devil's 'lectric bill... in my mail... Got the Devil's 'lectric bill...

Tool Leash

Tool Leash
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

It's not unusual to attach commonly-used tools to a clip of some sort to keep within reach. It occurred to me tonight how extra-dork is my scissors-leash.

EGL Style Choker

EGL Style Choker
Originally uploaded by shefightslikeagirl.

Sometimes the simplest things are the most gratifying. I made this choker from a scrap of lace, plaid ribbon and pleather grommet tape (not visible is the ribbon-crimp closure) literally minutes before leaving for the event to which I wore it. The plaid ribbon almost perfectly matches my knee-high plaid boots -- I was going to say "as a bonus," but that's why I BOUGHT the ribbon.