Creepy dolly

Well, here she is!  Finished project, sitting on my mantelpiece.

I like to think of her as Olga, the Chubby, Germanic, Awestruck Wunder-Child.  Which is a much nicer name that what I have said out loud.

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Because even I can't figure out how the hell to follow blogs, I figured I'd make life easier and join myself to the Borg Collective.

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T-shirt Deconstruction Bullshit

Thinking to do my part for Mother Earth, I grabbed two ugly pink t-shirts from the Goodwill pile at work.  Because our office is moving this fall,  a wealth of Goodwill-appropriate riches have accumulated in the main hallway.

And I hopped onto the Internet, to determine a wise way to "upcycle" them.  Or "deconstruct," if you will.

I was looking for something easy as well as theoretically useful.  Hence, I came upon the upcycled t-shirt scarf (or, l'echarpe du t-shirt recycle, for my French friends).

It really did take about 10 minutes of simple snip snips:

And then I streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetched the strips, and bound them with the hem:

OH MY GOD A SCARF!

Will I wear this?  That remains to be seen.  I'd like to wear more scarves in my everyday life, but the ones you can buy at Target (le Target) entail way more fabric than my small frame can bear.  I wind up looking like I'm trying to artfully hide a neck brace.

I had one more shitty tshirt to go, and so I thought I'd experiment with something more daring... a workout shirt (un t-shirt de l'exercise, Froggies!).

While I liked the back...

                                                                                                                                                               

Well, I mean I kinda liked the back... Ialthough did just leave the bottom twiney bit loose, which looks stupid, but.  When you get lazy, you get lazy, ya know?

WHOA Blogger is acting stupid.  Ignore the brand new word above, which should read "although I".  Obviously! 

Anyway.  Would I wear this as a workout shirt?  Sure, except that for this particular deconstruction did not change the very cringe-worthy frontside of the shirt.  So fucking cheesy, but it made for a power shot:

Give Life, Live life, bitches!  Register as an organ donor today, etc.

Just for a laugh, I pulled a sleeve over my head and tried to convince Husband that I'd crafted a tiny hat.  He nodded very respectfully.  When I told him I was just kidding, this is just a stupid sleeve, he looked relieved and said "Oh, phew.  I was having trouble pretending that your hat didn't look stupid."

Ha!

I hath birthed a curriculum!

First off, I wrote a pretty bad-ass $20K grant for this project, so I"m pleased to have been the one who saw it through.  Initially, we were set to hire an external curriculum developer, which always struck me as a little silly - I mean, I do have a teaching license so I know how to do this kind of curriculum-development-jazz.

But anyway, that fell through and I rose up as the Mighty Writer of a Cool Thing.

You can download it now at GoRecycleYourself.com for free.  Just click on Resources for Educators.  And realize that I was the one behind everything you see (even the video selection for the gallery).  Yay!

One sad thing is that my boss made me delete my byline within the actual curriculum's Acknowledgements section.  I'm merely listed as a contributor, along with several people to whom I talked to about the project.  I suspect that sometimes, bosses want to take some credit for projects they did not participate in.  And it helps if they can physically erase the authorship of the actual worker bee. 

But I actually wrote the entire thing, dammit.  Let this be known to the world!

New York Rye and Bob's Red Mill!

Yes, I count my breadmaker as an outlet for culinary creativity. 

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to begin stockpiling exotic bread ingredients, such as sesame oil, raw pumpkin seeds, and non-fat dry milk powder.  I purchased a bunch of rye flour, upon spying it in the bulk bins of Fred Meyer.  I wanted to be able to produce beautifully named mystery breads, such as Lakota, 14 grain, and Rosemary Mugwump, at the drop of a hat.  So impressive and delicious!

But it turns out that I bought DARK rye flour, which is apparently of limited use to breadmaker enthusiasts such as myself.  The majority of recipe writers seem to very much prefer LIGHT rye flour.  What fuckers!

But because Bob's Red Mill is amazing, I found a pretty good recipe, and so dumped my dark rye into the magic tin hole of gluten-based goodness. 

It's called New York Rye, and turned out to be a squat little loaf that my husband won't eat.  "Too minty!" he says.  "Those are caraway seeds,"  I replied.  "Too minty!" was the unwavering verdict.  But he also thinks Coca Cola Zero counts as water, so whatcha gonna do?

Ignore him.  It's pretty good! 

This makes a 1.5 pound loaf.  For whatever reason, the original recipe puts the ingredients all out of order, so here they are properly (because the order makes a huge difference to your machine). 

• 1-1/8 cups Water at room temperature
• 1-1/3 Tbsp Vegetable Oil
• 2 Tbsp Honey
• 1 tsp Sea Salt
• 1 Tbsp Whole Caraway Seeds
• 1-1/3 cups Organic Dark Rye Flour
• 2-1/4 cups Unbleached White Flour
• 1 Tbsp Vital Wheat Gluten (optional)
• 1/4 cup Non-Fat Dry Milk Powder
• 2-1/4 tsp Active Dry Yeast

Result:  BREAD!



Original recipe here:  http://www.bobsredmill.com/recipes.php?recipe=720

I want a DIY Kimono

I'm going to make this, I swear to god!

 

The instructions I found on Babble are a little puzzling, but on the other hand - it ain't no big challenge to make a kimono, which is practically a square with two holes for your arms.  A five second plunge into Google reveals that there are a million free "patterns" out there.

Beyond the actual pattern, I was very excited to discover Girl Charlee, an LA-based purveyor of fabric fineries.   

I think it'd look lovely in Dusty Red Pink Flowers...

And I also feel like there's got to be a good reason for me to buy two yards of Black Chevron on Heather Gray.

Especially since there's a 10% off discount for new customers such as myself.

Girls with Guns

I had never painted a human face (that is, making any attempt to realistically portray a human face) prior to my husband making a birthday request of me last spring:

"Can you paint me the cover of The Big Sleep?"

I will assume that he said "please" at some point, because I said yes.  Then, I learned that he specifically meant this cover:

 

Oh my goodness.  

People!  Bedsheets!  A gun!  Shadows!  Hair!  This shit be tough!

But he bought me a canvas, so I had to give it a try.  

Copying the art of another is a more fun and creative process than I had anticipated.  I guess there's a reason people do it all the time - imitation being a sincere form of flattery, learning from the masters, and all that.  The fact that I didn't have to come up with the image made my lazy brain feel very relaxed.  Whereas, approximating the colors... trying to capture her coquette look... that is what gave me conniptions.

My husband, being unfamiliar with oil paint, assumed the process would take me a week.

This is what I came up with, in June, after about three months of weekend labor. 

Although there is an obvious difference in quality, I must say I'm pretty darned proud of what I finished with.  Her skin looks relatively skin-like!  That is very likely a bed she is laying on! 

The tousle of her hair is beyond me, and don't even get me started on the lazy black outlines that the original artist basted upon her head.  I tried, and it immediately looked like I was trying too hard.  But hey, the bedsheets turned out about 1000% better than I'd anticipated.  And weirdly, the gun looks pretty good.

Butterface.  Yes, her face.  Her face is soooo narrow and perfect in the original.  There's just something so bad ass about her eyes, the ever-so-slight curve of her lip, the downward tilt of her chin, and the way her eyebrows disappear into a cloud of hair.  Yeah.  No.  I have painted a decent looking lady with a sunburned shoulder.

Husband was somewhat bummed that I did not stencil THE BIG SLEEP over her head, because, as it turns out, he had hoped for a very literal painting of the book cover.  But I made the decision early on that sacrificing all that space to the blue margin was questionable; replicating the multiple fonts would be very difficult, and basically, fuck it.

To date, this painting has made its way onto the wall which introduces people into the cool depths of our basement. 




This month, I decided to play with my oil paints, and felt inspired by my Pinterest board of portraits: 

There is a pretty bad-ass picture of Diana Riggs as Emma Peale, of the Avengers.  So, I picked up an old canvas that had a really ugly old picture on it, and decided to do an exercise in monochromatic painting, using only crimson, and wiping out parts of the background to supply some texture:

Again, only the second time I've painted a person with any attempt at reality.

Whenever I post some digital picture of a work, it seems to suffer in the process, as does my initial surety that the painting had turned out well.     

The gun came out pretty well in both paintings.  Maybe I should skip the girls and devote myself to painting guns?