A Day in Philly

Mo is flying home today for Christmas so last night we stayed up late finishing a book we have been making for my nieces and nephew. I'm not sure exactly how to bind it but I have a grace period for sending it because they won't be home until after New Years. It's funny, I haven't spent much time in Center City and the things we wrote about are practically the only things I know how to get to. If only there were an art supply store in the Reading Terminal Market...



PS If you want to read the words, click on the slideshow and then the button that appears in the lower right hand corner. Press Esc to exit the slideshow.

House T-shirt

House T-shirt
Originally uploaded by runawaypenguin

My camera continues to have difficulty shooting the color purple. In real life this is a royal purple, the purple you remember from kindergarten color wheels. I'm very pleased with how these turned out.

I realize that I never properly explained how the illustration relates to the house. According to the Smith website, Park House was originally built in 1880 and acquired by the college in 1923. At some point close to when the college purchased the building, there was an addition put onto the house. Common spaces are primarily located in the footprint of the original building, and private rooms are primarily located in the addition. For some reason, the addition isn't exactly plumb. There are reports of a few dressers whose drawers wouldn't stay shut, and when I first got to college Parkies would play a game called "Will it Roll?". This involved dropping things in the hallway to see how far they could go.

There are a number of art students in the house, and a common assignment for the first drawing course is a perspective drawing of a hallway. I thought it was interesting that in order to to fulfill the assignment a student might be tempted to ignore the reality of slightly off-kilter walls. After coming up with a vision for the illustration I played around with a few slogans before landing on this one.

(I should mention that Park Complex also has an annex, which is a smaller building across the street. We have the same set of keys and you know how sometimes couples say they have one heart in two bodies? Well, that's creepy. But we're one house in two buildings. The cubism is slightly less applicable to the annex.)

I finally had time to bind off the back of Alouette. You should be unsurprised when I tell you that it looks almost identical to the picture I posted a week ago.

House T-shirt Design (second draft)

House T-shirt Design (draft 2)
Originally uploaded by runawaypenguin

Getting closer! Last night I scanned this into an editing program and Mo helped me finish it up. I didn't have too much to do (erasing the dots on the upper left side of the frame, replacing the inside of the frame with a cleaner version, drawing in a nail and wire) but it felt like it was taking forever. It would have been much faster to draw the entire thing by hand, but I didn't feel like I had enough room at the top.

Our house president is sending the file to the printers, so we should have a proof soon to check over for sizing. We didn't print it out, and I'm a little worried that the words will be out of scale for the size of a t-shirt. My vision for the colors are a deep burgundy or cranberry red shirt with goldenrod ink. I can't wait to be holding an actual shirt.

House T-shirt Design

House T-shirt Design (draft)
Originally uploaded by runawaypenguin

It's that time of year! At tea on Friday everyone with a submission for the house t-shirt brought a sketch so we could vote, and I won! Okay, really my design won. This is a close up, and underneath it will say "Park House: Making Cubism a Reality since 1890". My favorite part is the crazy shoulders on the radiator.

I don't know why I'm so excited about this, because really it just means I get to spend an ungodly number of hours at the computer lab making it look pretty in Adobe Illustrator. Someone in the house had a great addition to the design, drawing a fancy frame around it and then making it look like it's not hanging straight. She's an art student, though, so I may enlist her help with that part.

Midterms are this coming week and I am going to do my best to refrain from knitting (and obsessing about knitting) for the entire time. Studying has never made for good blog material, but fortunately for both of us I have a slight backlog of projects that I either failed to give a final report on or never posted about in the first place. I'll try to take photos of everything and post them throughout the week. If that doesn't work I can always show you more bulbs!

In which I become well acquainted with a seam ripper.

Apparently this is work-in-progress week. Here's a third project I'm working on: taking out this nearly invisible hand-sewn hem. Makes you want to cry, doesn't it?
Inspired by this gorgeous dress with a hand-sewn zipper at Pink Chalk Studio, I finally decided to finish this skirt, which I started almost exactly a year ago. I won't go into graphic detail about missteps along the way, but eventually I finished sewing in the lining and creating a hem along the top.

At this point I wasn't sure how to proceed, so I brought the skirt with me to Valley Fabrics. The owner was very helpful (she's just come out with a book about sewing skirts that seems less about strictly following a pattern than knowing what general shapes you should cut for different types of skirts) and made an offhand remark about how it would have made more sense to layer everything so that none of the edges would show from the inside. I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but now it will drive me crazy if I don't fix it.

In other news, it has finally snowed here (total accumulation: .0002 cm) and I have been feverishly working on the Norwegian Stockings. I'm hoping to finish the first and cast on for the second tonight. I had a moment of doubt in which I contemplated the relative merit of stockings vs. legwarmers (I'm not entirely sure that the finished stockings will fit in my only color-appropriate shoes) but I've decided to finish them following the pattern. I can keep them for inside wear if I have to, and now I will have plenty of red to use as an accent for a pair of legwarmers. I remember coming across a legwarmer KAL from a few years back, does anyone remember seeing this/know where to find it?

I've been on the cusp of making a case for my knitting needles, but I haven't been sure about how to deal with circulars. Lucky for me I found this tutorial about making a circulars case, which I am posting here both to share and make sure that I don't lose the link/forget about it.

The enthusiastic but bewildered response.

You know that weird situation that happens where you spend an inordinate amount of time making a gift and the person you give it to just doesn't get it? They just have no conception of how much care and effort went into what you've given them? There's a funny version of that, too. I gave my friends the linen facecloths, and they were touched, and appreciative, and clearly impressed, and we spent a great deal of time talking about them. We talked about how to take care of them, details about how they were made, which one was my favorite, &c. &c. Then as I was leaving I realized they hadn't a clue how they were meant to be used. Absolutely no idea. This is the second time this has happened to me recently, too, which means I should stop being lazy and start making up cards to give along with presents.

"Dear so-and-so," they will read, "I know how much you ______, I hope you enjoy this _____/nod and smile/thank me and hide it away in a cupboard."

Oh well. I guess I could have been clearer, or mentioned earlier on what their purpose was, but it just didn't seem like there were any doubts.
At least what I finished today shouldn't have that trouble. Mo has already seen this in progress, but it got hidden under my bed and forgotten, so it should at least be mildly surprising.
I think Mo found this at a thrift store, but it came with a giant moth hole. Fortunately for Mo it was in a good place for an embroidered patch. This is the first thing I've embroidered following my own design. I hadn't planned on changing the color of the grass, but I couldn't find the same colors of thread that I used before, and I think it makes sense to have a lighter putting green anyway. I'm modeling it here so you can see placement a little better.

Travel make-up case

My mom and I collaborated to make this make-up case following the pattern in Hip to Stitch. Instead of closing the case with tied ribbons we put in a snap, which will be much easier for the recipient to use. In general the embroidery instructions are easy to follow, but the instructions for finishing the rest of this project were quite confusing. I don't remember having trouble making the case for guitar picks, so I think part of the problem was that she included directions for two sizes (the larger size is for knitting needles). Both gifts were well received, so I'm glad to have made them. Although when I asked Dylan about taking a picture of the pick case I found out where he really keeps them...
Even though it isn't as secure I think it looks better without the top flap folded down and tucked in.And now the secret is out: I'm crushed! Just kidding. I know putting stuff away is hard. I just can't imagine this is good for the strings.

Last minute gift

It's not quite finished yet-can you see the pin sticking out of the bottom? More to follow. Stop. Hope all is well. Stop. Happy Holidays. Full stop.

Illustration Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

New game! Favorite object this week:
I misplaced my keys this weekend, which makes life frustrating. Public safety called my room and left a message, as indicated on the note. I've been bad at checking messages left on my room phone, so I still haven't heard exactly what the message said. I had a hunch that the keys had been turned in, though, so I stopped by to look in the Lost and Found. Reunited at last!

Procrastination

Sometimes looming deadlines help me start working.
And sometimes I make rubber stamps instead.
In my defense, there is no way that I would have accomplished anything at the studio in the short amount of time I spent on this, and as soon as I finished I started doing work.
I am not entirely pleased with how the penguin came out, but at least now I have a better idea of what kind of images would be appropriate. I'm taking as my model a still life of onions that was carved and stamped on the cover of a hand-bound recipe book. I wish I could remember where I saw the picture of it, I was drawn to it at the time.

Another book

This is one of the other books I made last summer. I found the fabric in a thrift store in the basement of a church. They were only open for three hours a week, and somehow I managed to show up when an entire grocery bag of stuff sold for less than $3. Quite the find.

As soon as I saw the square of this fabric it reminded me of my friend from school. She has a fantastic wardrobe, full of vintage clothes from her grandparents, and she has quite a few dresses and skirts which remind me of illustrations in children's books.


I recycle a stack of paper from high school, so I'm always running across advice on creating a biblio-
graphy or getting into college. I started using this book to write down vocabulary for my German class, but it's the perfect size to fit in a purse or carry around, so I ended up taking a lot of miscellaneous notes down inside.

I didn't want the writable side of the paper to reverse in the middle, so that meant doing without a fold. I used the board from an empty box of airmail stationary for the back. It's held up well, even though it isn't protected by anything, and I love the map. One of my favorite things about this book is that the front and the back are so different.

The next project we're working on in my typo-
graphy class is setting and then binding a story that Ann Patchett wrote when she was 19. Yes, that Ann Patchett, the Ann Patchett who wrote The Magician's Assistant; The Patron Saint of Liars; Taft; Truth and Beauty; and Bel Canto. Yesterday in class we decided on the size of the margins around the text. The dimensions of the page are predetermined by the paper we're using, so that was one less thing to worry about.

Book binding

Last summer I decided that I wanted to bind books. Immediately. Lucky for me I found a great book in the library which explained the entire process. Over about two days I made three bound books. A lot of the materials I used are either recycled or things I found in our "art cabinet", which at that point had a fairly high proportion of junk (but which has since been cleaned out and re-stocked).

I wanted to make a journal with lines, so I ended up taking apart one of those composition notebooks everyone uses in elementary school to get paper. I did a good job with the binding on this one. The cover is smooth, the bookcloth is cut well and lines up. I took a long time to decide what I would use for the endpapers, and I'm very satisfied with the result.

The only thing I should have done differently are the stitches which attach the signature of paper to the cover. Somehow they got loose enough while I was tying the knot for the signature to move by an eighth of an inch vertically.

Today in class Barry told us a horror story about a press which had printed a limited edition book on handmade paper and then sent it out to a commercial bindery. The bindery misread the order form, and so instead of sewing signatures together they bound the book like a cheap paperback. Yikes.

I started to write something in here once but I ended up tearing in out. I guess the elegance of the cover papers is intimidating. My favorite of the three books I made is the one with the most imperfections. I'll be posting about that one shortly.

Bicycle card

One of the students in my typography class set the poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens. For the facing page in the French fold she made a carving on an ice cream cone out of some plastic/rubbery material from the art store. I think I may follow suit with this bicycle. Bicycles certainly deserve as much respect as an ice cream cone. Stencils are fun to cut out, but it's time consuming to print more than once, especially when there are so many small fussy bits that need to be taped down.

I've also been spurred on by this typewriter (scroll down a bit) made by abbytrysagain, it's very much the type of look I was going for with these. The brown cover and the stamp go so well together.

I finally got a picture while I'm wearing the earrings:

You don't want to know how many pictures I deleted before deciding on this one. Thank goodness for digital cameras! This green is currently one of my favorite colors. As much as I hate to say it, blue tones may have been completely overthrown. If you take a glimpse behind the wispy hairs on my neck you can even see a hint of green from my walls. I bought three large sheets of green paper with a white magnolia and chrysanthemum pattern, and it makes such a huge difference having a large block of color on my wall.

Accepted at Threadless!

As you can see in the sidebar, my design was accepted at Threadless for voting. I'm very excited. While I was waiting I kept worrying that something had gone wrong, because the small picture of my design with a big "PENDING" written across it disappeared from my profile. I'll put another button here just for fun.

Please go leave feedback and vote!

Scrap apron plan

This is my plan for an apron with an inset scrap border. My other idea was to make a Chinese Coin quilt, which is the smaller doodle on the lower right hand side. QuiltBus has a huge selection of quilt block patterns online, including the Chinese Coin pattern here, which might give you a better idea of what it would have looked like. After sewing everything together I realized I wouldn't have had enough to make a quilt anyway. My plan is to make a small size that I can quilt by hand, but I'd want it to be only a little shorter than this length, and with two stripes:
This is the border resting on some grape leaves on the porch. I don't know if I'll work on this more before going home, because I'd like to have a rotary cutter to even out the top and bottom edges. Either way, I'm glad I've done something with the scraps, because seeing them lying around made me feel neglectful.

Threadless

Nervous nervous! I just submitted this design to Threadless, and I'll hear back in 4-8 days about whether they will put it up for voting. Then the voting public can tear apart my baby. If Threadless does they like it I'll still keep some rights, which is nice. I'd still be able to put it in my header, for example, although I'm not sure yet how to do such a thing.