Tag Archives: pink

embroidery and textiles

Your ugliness is what makes you special…

time for soda?

In a blogging universe where everybody is trying to outdo each other in chic, trendy, or beautiful accessories for the home, I am posting pics of the wall clock that my better half brought home today. Tres chic, n’est-ce pas?

It’s not for our home and houseboat, thankfully…Kris needed a wall clock for his sailboat, to time his sextant shots with; the last clock he had melted when some molten steel from his above-deck welding dripped into the boat and set the bed, and then the built-in furniture, on fire. That wall clock, amazingly, still works…but the face is black beyond reading, and it is shaped like a Dali timepiece, now. A tribute to the resilience of Time.

Conceivable Soda

Enter Strawberry Soda clock. The elbowed straw sticking out at the top has its own battery, so that it can wave left-right-left, in time with the tick-tocking of the second hand. The pink beverage this box is supposed to contain has a shelf life of 180 months, and besides being “vacuumize” and “Appetizing”, is also “conceivable”. Well, that explains China’s population, right there.

Ugliness beyond belief, but it was the only large wall clock he could find in a hurry, and he paid all of $8 for it. You get what you pay for, I mumbled. (Terry Pratchett would counter “You get what you deserve.”) I was compelled to photograph it; I don’t think I’ve seen any home accessory so ghastly in my life. I can’t believe it’s ours. In a funny way, I feel proud. I’ll betcha Design*Sponge hasn’t got one of these! ;)

But Kris couldn’t stand it either, and he cracked the straw off…says he will paint the box white, tomorrow. So these may be the last Strawberry Soda Wall Clock photographs the world will ever see. Naturally I just had to share them with you. Now isn’t that special?

Not increase the antiseptic.

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embroidery and textiles

Secret Message Ninja

Secret Message Ninja
I’m all over the place, you’ll notice that about this blog. Just the way I roll…single-mindedness and constancy aren’t my virtues. :) I hop from one thing to the next, as my enthusiasm ranges. But I finish what I start, so it’s okay.

Today’s project was something new: a little Secret Message Ninja, made in felt. She’s going to dress up the cover of a commissioned ‘secret messages’ journal, later today. I loved making this! Am definitely going to make a few more…hopefully before something else comes along and distracts me.

So much fun, and easy to do…she was done in a couple of hours. She’s basically 2-dimensional—a front and a back—with a bit of stuffing between to give her some form.

The pattern’s not mine to give away—I would share it, otherwise— it came from a Japanese craft magazine that I purchased from NataliaLujan on ETSY:

Felt Mascots Japanese magazinethe ninja mascot from the magazine

I changed the design around a bit, of course, because my client wants a little girl ninja, in hot colors, and I felt there should be a reference to the secret messages; so I made her in hot pink, gave her pigtails, bent her arm over and put a little love letter in her hand.

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embroidery and textiles

bookbinding : : pink hippies

Pink hippies is my 904th handbound journal; an original and one of a kind book inspired by pink lillies, Hippeastrum puniceum,…I used to have hundreds growing in my garden in El Nido, Palawan, and they were a favorite subject for my drawings and paintings.

This is a flat back, case-bound book that opens flat at any point. It measures H6 5/8″ x W4 3/4″ x 1 1/2″ (170mm x 120mm x 40mm)

Paper is Edición avorio 110gsm, acid-free, in ivory, unlined. It is a beautiful paper for writing, sketching, drawing, and other dry media. There are 200 leaves (400 pages) so it is a chunky book, but will fit in your shoulder bag. Endpages are handmade paste paper sheets made using old sailing charts.

The cover is of acrylic paints on artist’s canvas. It has been protected with Soluvar artist’s varnish, which waterprooofs it and protects it from stains.

Pink hippies has a stripey handsewn headband in variegated shades of yellow-orange and coral-pink.

Available in my ETSY and Madeit online craft shops.

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embroidery and textiles

all pinked out…

…February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring…
—excerpt from February by Margaret Atwood

It’s actually been gray and sunless long enough to starve our solar panels, which in turn has left our bank of 12-volt batteries flat. I’m under strict orders not to use my laptop for more than an hour…and only during the ‘day,’ when there is presumably more light in the sky than during the ‘night,’ though some days I can’t tell which way is up, and neither can the sulphur-crested cockatoos, who snooze in the mangroves until something like half-past-eight in the morning. I think hunger probably wakes them up, more than the sun.

I’m happy that my time on the macbook has been curtailed, though I miss the music more than anything—I just got Keith Jarrett‘s spontaneous jazz piano piece Köln, January 24, 1975, Pt. II C before all the weather started, and I haven’t been able to listen to it properly yet! Still, it’s not going anywhere; nice to have something to anticipate hungrily.

I had a brief Valentine’s Day rash, a week back, where I painted up some cases in pink and went wild with the hearts and doilies and lace and poetry and whatnot. Owls, did I really do owls?! I think I’m over it now, thank you, (I AM doing just one more, for my friend Miss Hurro Kitty, because she said pretty please) feeling much more like myself again…don’t know what came over me.

But it was a good rash, because I sold the first two of these journals right away, there’s just the last one left…it started with the needle in the upper left corner of the back cover, and before I knew what was happening, I’d added in a whole bunch of needleworking accessories. So it has become A Valentine for an Embroiderer (or Needlewoman, at any rate)

Day? Night? Dude (aka Pink Bumhole) doesn’t care…it’s all just “weather for sleeping” to him. He’s found a new spot this week, too…next to the flat 12-volt batteries.

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embroidery and textiles

Yay! Fun!

Och! I am having so much fun, holed up all the rainy weekend in this little floating room, it almost feels reprehensible. The little last bits of hesitation have disintegrated, and I am fully engaged in this playful creativity now. The characters walk in unbidden—barn owls and lacy underwear, heart-shaped doilies and stripey socks—and all I have to do is find a spot and draw them in. This is always a fantastic place to be, and I am savouring every minute of it.

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bookbinding, paints and pens, stuff i've made

Doodling doilies…

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

—Jalal al din Rumi, ca. 13th century

Give me some white encre de Chine ink and a dip pen with a fine steel mapping nib; pour me a cup of black coffee (*thank you, my darling*), then shut the door to my studio softly…and I will very happily doodle bits of lace and doily loveliness for the rest of the day. I love this sort of mindless doodling…a dozen loops, a picot, a scallop or three…

I can still sort of remember how to crochet, but don’t feel the urge to take it up again—it never really made an impression on me; I love the look and feel of doilies and crocheted lace, though, as love drawing these bits of fiddly finery.

This is a ‘case’…a made-up pair of covers for a hardbound, flat-backed book…minus the book. Just a little something Valentine-ey to brighten (i.e. to em-Pink-en) my etsy and Madeit shops soon. The lines are from a short poem by the incomparable Sufi mystic, Rumi (transl. Coleman Barks)…the most beautifully ecstatic and mystic poet I know, and, hands-down, my absolute personal favorite.

P.S. The beautiful drop cap ‘G’ above is from Jessica Hische’s amazing Daily Drop Cap project…you really have to go over there and see! The equivalent of 12 alphabets of quirky, classic, showy, modern, eye-catching drop caps—each one such an individual, with a character all its own— are available free for personal use, to jazz up your blog posts. It’s incredibly generous of her to share these typographical works of art with everyone, when people of much less talent are so grinchy about everything they post on the internet, don’t you think?

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embroidery and textiles, stuff i've made

sewing : : a Spool bird softie

I guess I could’ve/should’ve used the sewing machine to make this, it would’ve gone faster. But I couldn’t be bothered, this weekend, to fire up the petrol generator (I live on a solar-powered boat) and make all that noise + use fuel, just to stitch up a soft toy–so this has been stitched by hand.

It’s my first attempt at this pattern, and one of the few times I’ve attempted a soft sculpture, so consequently it’s a little bumpy and puckered…I just wanted to see what making it felt like before I committed myself to making two dozen of them (I have two little girls in mind)

I found the pattern for this gorgeous little bird on www.spoolsewing.com and am grateful to the folks who have shared it so freely. I love the smooth simplicity of the form even better than if it had been more realistic (with wings, eyes and such, which idea I considered, but rejected in the end).

This prototype goes in the post to my husband, who is currently cycling from Darwin to Adelaide on his own, without GPS or technology of any sort. She’ll be his “direction-finding dove” (named after Michael Leunig’s “Direction-finding Duck”.) She fell breast-first into the coffee cup after I took this picture, so she’s been Colombian-coffee-christened (and scented), which only means he’ll love her even more…

There’s a Flickr group just for these birds, so if you download the pattern and try your hand at a Spool bird, remember to share it with other enthusiasts!

Bird Mobile from www.spoolsewing.com/blog/

Bird Mobile from http://www.spoolsewing.com/blog/

via Spool Sewing » Blog Archive » Bird Mobile.

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