The hermit comes out of her shell

View the horrid state of my sewing room. I have too much stuff. Waaaaay too much. My other grandmother died and my sister moved to a different state. I got a lot of stuff from each. I've also been promoted to manager at my job, so I have not much time on my hands.

I've gotten a little stuff done... but not much. I started altering a book...



... and worked on my journal a whole lot. But that's pretty much it. I'll try and be more forthcoming with recent creative endeavors. Time to come out of my hole.

BTW, Lily Allen is awesome. I'm loving this album of hers.

Evolution

I can be such an organized person that I overcompartmentalize. This goes here, that goes there. I may have overcompartmentalized my journaling a bit, and it's acting as a bit of a barrier against the flow of ideas and thoughts and streams of consciousness that I want.

In an effort to marry the concepts of my craft blog with my journaling, I think I'll write more on here, even if it doesn't seem to be about a specific work in progress. It would actually be about the work in progress of my creative journey as a whole.

If you're easily confused by the changing purpose of this blog, please don't be. I tend to do this alot with my journals. Each has to have a purpose, and sometimes the journal evolves past its purpose and I have to rename the purpose to keep it cohesive. Again, the compartmentalization. This can be a good thing. Sometimes I can use organization to incite much-needed chaos. It just depends on the day.

One of my latest entries in my art journal. Scan to come soon. (On my way out the door to work.)

"Almost sunrise at Crystal Beach. (Galveston) Tanya and I successfully built a fire and made smores. Now we're waiting for the sun to come up before we go hunting for seashells. The sand is cool on my feet. I love the feel of it, even though it means I'll be picking sand out of my toes for weeks. Although the beach is beautiful, the damage of Hurricane Ike is still evident all around us. Houses that Tanya says were here months ago and lined the streets are now gone, some now empty shells, others leaving no evidence they were ever there. Trees are permanently bent, showing their struggle to stay in the ground. There are no more dunes. But some houses still stand. People still live and work and persist."
4/5/2009

Contemplation and other words that start with C.

The moon is out, a sliver like a cup in the sky. I am contemplating Creation and Completion and Cohesion.

My mind is foggy but silent. Tranquil. The air is Chill but bearable, the scent of the night carrying a very faint, almost indistinguishable trace of grass and sweet peas. I don't know where the sweet peas come from. I live in the Center of town. But it's there all the same, perhaps traveling from the small field a block away.

I feel Content and Complete. I feel Capable. I feel slightly Catatonic.

I feel Carefree.

The romantic notions of needlepoint

Today has been a grand adventure so far. And when I say that, it's with a certain degree of sarcasm, but still a partial bit of truth. My days have melted into quiet routine. But today, I had errands to run, specifically paying the car insurance and making a copy of our house key because I lost my car keys and my spare set doesn't have the house key and yesterday I had to wait around for an hour after work so that Dane could get home and let me in...

But interesting things happen when you accept instinctual possibilities and follow whimsical ideas. After paying the car insurance bill, I noticed the Goodwill store across the street. Having not been to that particular location in a while, I stopped in to see if they might have a shirt or two that I can wear to work (as the vast majority of my wardrobe is t-shirts with shiny stars or Ralph Wiggum or Rocko's Modern Life or something on them). And while perusing the back area, a jumbled mess of old Easter baskets, forlorn looking stuffed bunnies from holidays past, fifty mismatched pillowcases and at least one package of The Office postie notes, I found something entirely awesome.



Ignore the buttons. I'll get to those in a minute. First, concentrate on that needlepoint kit. It looks simple enough. Even run-of-the-mill, average, unremarkable. But it isn't. It's a spark of vintagey goodness from 1974. It's a splash of color and fun with the kit entirely intact and unopened, preserving the delicious yarn within. It's the antithesis of boredom, packaged neatly in a portable bundle that I get to open for the first time.

I realize I may sound overly romantic, but here's what went through my mind at the thrift shop. Imagine it's 1974 and this package, along with five or ten of its brothers, is placed on a hook or on a shelf in a craft or fabric store. It waits patiently, the packaging shiny and smooth, without a wrinkle or a tear. Someone comes along, a nice grandmother, seeing possibilities in the kit as a gift for a small toddler.

The kit is bought, taken home, put in the sewing room... and left. Every time the woman passes by, the kit gets excited. It's going to be used. Its purpose will be fulfilled. But she never opens it. She has other things on her mind. She found a more appropriate gift, or her arthritis has been bothering her lately and she just can't do needlework. She feels heartbroken that she can't do what she loves, so eventually, she stops going into her sewing room at all. Eventually, she can't even get out of bed, not because she is pining away from lack of needlework. No, we shall not be that dramatic... but she's definitely feeling her age. And finally, she slips away.

Time passes. Items are passed down through the family. Boxes of craft items are presented to cousins and nieces and grandchildren to paw through and take what's wanted. The packaging on our dear kit has gotten crinkled and mauled. Old. The price sticker came off long ago, leaving a pale sticky ghost on the plastic. Even the paper inside the kit has started to curl at the edges. And finally, the granddaughter perhaps, going through the garage and clearing space for the lawnmower, throws the kit in with other junk, some broken, some no better than trash for the dump. She drops it at Goodwill and goes home.

The kit is now not only forgotten, but essentially homeless. Its last hope of fulfilling its destiny was dashed with this final act of abandonment. It's thrown facedown in a large tupperware bin next to dinged candlesticks and a block of dented floral foam. It doesn't care anymore. It waits to die.

That is how I rescued it. And that entire romantic scene played out in my head over a second and a half and I knew I needed this. I will resurrect the life of this kit and what it was intended for. I will be the first to open it and sort the colored strands of yarn, the first to thread the small needle, the first to weave the strands through the plastic canvas squares. Columbia-Minerva Needlepoint Baby Blocks 5 pc set from 1974... you shall live again!



Oh yeah, the buttons. I also stopped at a cute antique store and found this adorable old jar filled with old buttons. These buttons are not as forlorn as the needlepoint kit was, but they still begged to come home with me. I'll probably sort through them later and use a large portion of them to make some sort of buttons-stitched-to-fabric-in-an-appealing-pattern type project.

I'm not actually dead (an update in photos)

Contrary to popular belief, I did not die. I simply got incredibly lazy busy with life. I got a new job, I went back to school, I cured cancer, I saved a third-world country. You know, the usual. Takes up so much time.

I've also been working on a lot of projects, surprisingly. I've been getting huge boxes of fabric from my mother, courtesy of my dead grandmother's estate. It's the ultimate estate sale, but I don't have to pay anything. (Though it takes my mom $20 a box to ship them to me, God bless her.)

Here's what I've been up to!



I've been taking all my tiny scraps and making crazy blocks. They came in handy when we found ourselves broke at Christmastime and needed quick presents. I stuck a couple of these together, whacking the sides to make perfect squares, then sewed on a quick border and sashing. Instant placemats for the mom-in-law! I felt so accomplished, and I'm pretty sure she liked them, though I did preface her opening of the bag with "Look, these were an experiment, and you're the guinea pig. I'm sorry."



The rolls of paper on the left are little patterns traced onto fusible web from this book, which was a present from my aunt one Christmas a few years back.



I finally took all of my reproduction Aunt Gracie prints and cut them into nice little squares. I'm going to stick these together with some white squares for some lovely bright nine-patches. It will no doubt make a very lovely lap quilt.



I've been drawing out different blocks that I like and looking at the pieces and how they come together. I need to figure out what to do with the ridiculous amounts of fabric I've inherited. It's quite shameful, how much I'm getting, and me with no earthly clue how to store it or what to sew it into. But when my aunt asked me what I wanted from the estate, I just said "Give me all the fabric you have! It ships well and it will satisfy my collector's OCD."



A small sample of some of the pieces I've gotten cut out from various scraps and pieces. There are exactly 1,213 triangles in that box, every single one cut out by hand without the benefit of cutting mat or ruler, while seated in front of the television and watching seasons of X-Files. I'm up to season three already.



My little work box with all that I need to cut out the rest of my triangles, along with my most favoritest pincushion in the world, a beautiful gift from Monica Magness. See that roll of pink fabric? My grandmother seemed to have an affinity for taking old pants and shirts and cutting them into ridiculously shaped pieces, then rolling them up in little bundles and rubber-banding them for some unknown purpose. I think I know where some of my mother's crazy came from.



The other thing taking up my time (besides my new job) is my Anatomy and Physiology II class. Wait, you ask me why I'm taking it again? Did I fail? No, I did not. I got a B. This is unacceptable to me. I am taking it again. And we get fresh cats this semester, so I've been really excited about dissections. I've heard such horror stories about mold and bugs infesting the leftovers from A&P I.



Finally, there is the husband. Such a wonderful, interesting man. Our friends and relations fondly remember the recent Pork Chop Incident in which Dane attempted to cook a pork chop, failed to put it under the broiler, got extremely angry, and threw the offending chop across the kitchen! I thought that was the end of his kitchen-related tantrums, but he tried to make pancakes several weeks later, with similar results. (He was able to aim the flying batter into the sink, at least.) Our friend Skylar responded by then making his own delicious pancakes and taunting Dane with photos of them posted to Facebook.

Other than that, business as usual. I've been getting a lot done, so I really can't complain. I just haven't put blogging at the top of my list. Y'all can beat me with flexible bamboo sticks later. For now, I have to go to bed.

Yield

Life expands and moves in interesting directions. I have been busy and not busy, working, relaxing, doing nothing and everything.

We'll see how the holidays shape up. I have a lot of things I need to restart and finish. I made a cover for a cookbook for my good friend Les for his birthday and I really should have taken a photo so I can have some evidence of being active and alive.

Tanya and I sat at The Kettle (a good diner for sitting) and made self-improvement lists and Christmas lists. We talked about journals and their many uses (as we all know my complete and total obsession with journals) and perhaps I will come back to what I have been missing over this last month.

Don't you hate when life moves on without you and you're still trying to read the sign posts?

Boredom and an excess amount of Teh Intarwebs will do this to anyone

I'm not a big meme fan, not because they aren't fun, but because I can easily get addicted to them, and they're really only poor substitutes for content. (So clearly, I've chosen to post nothing whatsoever as opposed to poor content.... )

However, I stole this from Judy who stole it from Twitchy Knitter, who stole it from someone who stole it from a clown. That's my theory. Every meme originates from clowns because that sounds silly to me and I like to spread silly rumors.

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search. (Use the advanced search and scroll down and click on Creative Commons License so you use shareable photos!)
b. Using only the results on the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.
d. Credits to photos are below.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.



I'll try to give a little substance and insight into my answers.

1. My first name is Cindi, and that is not short for Cynthia. Cindi is written on my birth certificate, with that spelling. I loathe Ys. (sj and cindi)

2. Chocolate will always be my favorite food because it satisfies my inner glutton and sensualist at the same time. (Communist chocolate !)

3. I went to Sparks High School in Sparks, Nevada. Sparks is sister city to Reno, and no, I do not watch Reno 911. (IMG_2996)

4. Fav color is green. Apparently, geniuses pick green. (london green)

5. Gerard Butler is the one man that, should I meet him on the street and he asks me to have sex with him and cheat on my husband, I would absolutely say yes, no questions, no hesitations. I told my husband this before we got married and made sure he understood I was dead serious. I also have a photo of Gerry in my wallet. It is the only photo in my wallet. (Gerry Butler)

6. I love Cape Cods because they have cranberry juice in them and the vodka gets me completely smashed after only two. (My "Usual")

7. Dane and I plan on visiting Germany some day to meet his extended family. His grandmother emigrated from there and Dane still has close relatives. (germany.swabian-hall: beautiful.evening.mood.(593☺26))

8. Mmmmm, cheesecake. My love and passion. (Strawberry Cheesecake)

9. I would like to be a Dental Hygienist because they make a ridiculous amount of money for a minimal amount of time and debt. (Poly Dynia)

10. What I love most about life is the ability and freedom to do whatever I want. (Well, sans murder.) (Expression of freedom)

11. If I couldn't be considered intense, I fear to meet the person who is. (Intense Blue)

12. I searched for 'cindibee' but couldn't find anything, so I had to cut it down to just 'bee'. Cindibee was a nickname a former friend gave me. I thought it was way too cute to forget. (Soggy wet bee)

Presents are an awesome way to start the day

What can I possibly say about Monica Magness right now other than, Oh my god, Amazing. I was having one of the most god-awful weeks of my life, full of stress and mood swings and fights and flu symptoms and migraines and pregnancy scares (can't afford a baby right now) and a complete and utter lack of any sort of creative spark. I can usually handle the stress when I can turn to my art for solace, but that hasn't been the case lately. (Dane taking over the spare room to play Warhammer Online all night long may have something to do with it as well...)

But this morning, when I woke up and decided to check the mail, I joked with myself that "Wouldn't it be awesome if I got something cool in the mail today?" And like God himself had thought that You know what? Cindi's had enough for one year-crammed-into-a-week-of-shite.... ta-da!



What a beautiful little package of goodies that just happened to be waiting for me. Fabric with skulls on it! How did you know I adore skulls in my "secretly Hot Topic" sort of way? Vintage-y buttons and OMG a dice bead to satisfy my Nevada upbringing. A pincushion full of I-Spy fabric goodness. I spent ten minutes just identifying fabrics and prints. Like, for a solid two minutes, I kept thinking this section right here was alien heads before it dawned on me that they were ladybugs, and then I contemplated the awesomeness of a print that can be two such entirely separate things at once.



(Are you getting the idea that I'm overly obsessed with fabric and prints of all kinds? Why do you think my husband has taken away my fabric shopping privileges? He got so tired of hearing "But look at the priiiint!!! Of course I had to have it! These owls look different than the other fifteen owl prints I have. These ones are greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen!")

And what an ingenious tag on that pincushion. You must have the mostest awesomest sewing machine in the whole wide world.

Pardon if I'm overstating my happiness and joy, but wrapped up in this simple bundle of goodness was a ton of inspiration, love, and good will that has brought me out of a gloom faster than any amount of prescription drugs. Monica, you are amazing and a wonderful friend to have.

My fifteen minutes of almost fame

I feel very flattered and privileged right now. An article has been written about my humble little blog! Linda from Top Blogs by Crafters is doing a Get To Know The Crafter series, and I was lucky enough to be able to answer her question! You can see the article here, as well as many other interviews of other wonderful crafters.

This makes me very happy! Now, I sleep. Nappy time.

Custom Awesomeness

I finally got an invite to try out Spoonflower, a great website still in its beta form that allows you to design your own fabric! I've already made my first order of this owl design based on the doodle in my header. The color may not be as vibrant upon printing on fabric, but I know I'll love it anyways. (For each of these designs, click on the image to see how it'll look as a tiled piece of fabric. One mark = 1 inch on image rulers.)



I've also ordered a swatch of this row of eyes. I think it'll print out rather small and I want to see how much, if at all, I should increase the size of the eyes. I may play around with this design a bit more later, maybe with some varied sizes and placements.



Here's another workup of the eye design.



And this the last design I made, using my house doodle.



I'm so excited to be able to make some of my drawings into my own custom fabric! (If anyone would be interested in purchasing my fabric designs, let me know and I can send you a free swatch once I receive my order and you can decide how much, if any, you'd like to buy.)

(And if you're my good friend Monica Magness, I'll give you a fat quarter for free of my owl fabric once it comes in!)

Some useless contemplation

I seem to have settled into the mess that is my spare room and my life. I've taken a break from many projects and plans because of a need to reorganize, and when life's gotten in the way of that reorganization, I've just let it all lie, let the dust settle, let the soft couch take my tired body and cradle it as I watch old episodes of Law and Order. I don't know if it's laziness or a forced acceptance of ennui.

My brain is still silently buzzing, and I still manage to get out my creative outbursts with short visits to my journal, cutouts and glue stick in hand... but I'm sure a vast wave is slowly building, coming closer and closer to the shore, ready to crash down upon all the innocent and unsuspecting sunbathers, maybe taking a few annoying children on their floaty rafts and giving them a satisfying faceplant in the harsh sand.....

What I meant to say was that I'm sure such little endeavors will do little to abate the inevitable overflowing of frustrated energy that always comes after a long period of nothingness. One creates, one makes, one experiences, throwing all into a feeling, an experience, an existence of doing. Eventually that flame burns out, having sucked up all the fuel and oxygen and bringing itself to a gasping, suffocating end. But there's always a little something that needs time to build up again, think new ideas and look at new viewpoints. That little something will slowly but definitely grow into the next avalanche of creation. And the cycle continues.

I've worried for some time that I've stretched myself too thin, branching out into so many different mediums of expression, but I think that when I do feel that mental ache from too many arms going in too many directions, thin and fragile like a spider's legs, these periods of calm, these eyes in the massive storm of my inspirational drive, are what help "bulk up" those thin projections. My connection to these different ideas and forms of expression just gets stronger, waiting to flex itself at the next incoming wave.

This is a bunch of useless, but enlightening contemplation.

An actual notification...

...as opposed to just disappearing for a while.

Tomorrow I pick up my nephews, who will be staying with us for five days while my sister goes to our cousin's wedding, where she is maid of honor. I don't have the money to fly to Reno, so I have no problem being on kid duty for the next few days.

Summer semester II is finally done, and now I can have a few weeks to breathe before Fall semester begins. Tanya's asked me if I regret doing back-to-back-to-back semesters, and I'd have to say... ask me when I've graduated. Then I'll add up the busy weekends and immense brain-expanding headaches and calculate them against my massive salary.

In other news, before I wrap this up and start washing the dishes, my grandmother is coming to the end of things, so my husband and I have been invited to Utah over Labor Day weekend for a small family reunion. It's a sort-of last big hurrah before the colder months start to roll in and take their toll on her waning health. Tickets are already bought and paid for, courtesy of my uncle. I'll have to remind Dane that Utah isn't like Texas. He'll need to bring a sweater! And will actually wear it! He had to bring a coat on our honeymoon because he hadn't realized that Octobers in Utah act like they're supposed to, instead of oh-my-god-my-face-is-melting-off like Texas.

Later!

Tiny Seashells

Something I've been wanting to do is get involved in Inspire Me Thursday. I've had the link up on my sidebar for a while now, but I keep missing Thursdays. So this will be my first, even though it's on a Sunday. The theme this week was The Beach and, looking around for something inspiring, you would think I pulled out my nearly 200 seashells from the Gulf of Mexico in Galveston. But that seems like too much the obvious choice.

Instead, I grabbed my stamp carving stuff and made some little seashell stamps, a little bigger than a dime. I think they're cute.

Knit, Purl, Whatever

This semester has been killing me, so I apologize for any prolonged absence. Lots of things have happened this month. I had my 25th birthday. I went to a Stone Temple Pilots concert. I got in a car accident that left my car with many thousands of dollars of damage and a need to sue the woman who refuses to pay...

My cousin is also getting married soon, and my sister is the maid of honor. She can't take her boys with her to the wedding, so I'll be taking care of my two nephews, 7 and 2 years, for about a week. Dane and I get to be like parents for a while. We'll see whether or not it forces one or both of us to get ourselves fixed.




So, I've taught myself to knit. I found a very lovely and informative website (complete with videos!) here that really helped a lot. I've managed to walk myself through a very cute pattern for a little doll dress. I'm not done yet, but it's fairly straightforward. And I have yet to stab myself with the knitting needles, so I suppose that counts as a huge victory for me!

I like knitting. I was afraid of it at first, but now that I've gotten the hang of it and I can see what awesome things just a few stitches can do, maybe I'll finally pay attention to that expanding knitting section at the book store. Knitting is becoming a very cathartic activity. Cross stitch and embroidery are like that too, but knitting doesn't require nearly so much thinking and stopping-and-starting. I can let my right brain take over quite easily.



I've also got my charms finished for the Think Pink Charms Exchange, another crafty project that benefits the fight against breast cancer. My charms are wrapped up in a Priority box sitting right next to my elbow. Dane forgot to drop it off at the post office yesterday...

Expect another post in the next ten minutes. I'm separating them because the next bit I want to post about is a self-containing topic.

Stinky Rag Ball 101

So, you have acquired a large box of rag balls. That kind of smell like an old woman's dirty clothes hamper that's been forgotten in the basement for two years. But they still look cool. What do you do?


Step One: Unwind the rag balls.


Step Two: Begin cutting the rag balls apart, collecting the individual strips in a basket...


...and the connecting bits in a cigar box, since you're too lazy to pick apart all the stitching holding the balls together...


...and come up with some ideas for what to DO with the connecting bits...


Step Three: Admire the giant pile of fabric strips. Do not admire the smell.


Step Four: Handwash thoroughly with Woolite in a bucket in the middle of the kitchen. Ignore odd looks from the husband.


Step Five: Hang up the wet strips to dry, making a really cool-looking flag banner that spans the dining room. Make it difficult for your husband to get to the washer and dryer. Laugh when he almost decapitates himself by walking into the line strung all over the room.


Step Six: Iron out all of the dried strips of fabric. Admire. Let them sit on your ironing board for several weeks until you know what to do with them.