I found this great drawing in those old 1970s encyclopaedias I was cutting up. It’s pretty close to our vision for the built-in music shelving we’re planning for our living room. Except that instead of this luxuriously spacious modern room, we’ll be shelving up an entire wall of a tiny 1911 cheapo Sears house living room. Also, our shelves will be filled mostly with records.
Which records? Why, these ones.
Here is a picture I just found while cutting up my childhood encyclopaedias from the 70s.
Sweet dreams, everyone.
Getting started on the stitching and cutting on this skirt. It’s a bit washed out in the photo but the layer underneath is a bright, pale turquoise.
Easter weekend, 2016, a collection of accidental photos that ended up on my phone while we were walking around the sad remains of the industrial park of my hometown. The military sized airport now houses a company that outfits luxury private jets for Qatari billionaires. The buildings of the former agricultural college still sit empty, although rumour has it a new buyer plans to convert the main building into a cinema complex and some kind of long term care facility. I’ll believe it when I see it.
This handspun was given to me by Stacie years and years ago, and immediately knit up into these socks, toe-up in order to squeeze out every last bit of gorgeous yarn. They’ve never been worn, because an afterthought heel is the worst and toe-up socks are terrible and no bind off in the world is both stretchy enough for a sock cuff while still being attractive and I don’t know what I was thinking.
So! These are finally getting fixed, completely reknit from the top down, with a nice sturdy long-tail cast on and a perfectly fitted half-handkerchief heel, as socks should be. Of course I’m too lazy to properly unravel and take the kink out (although not too lazy to rip and reknit an entire pair of socks), so the pretty pattern of the first sock looks rather sloppy in the second. Let’s hope it blocks out.
This is two layers of jersey fabric basted together, with woodblock printing on the top layer. It’s already been cut, before the printing, into pattern pieces for a swingy, a-line, above-the-knee skirt. Now I’m stitching around some of the motifs and cutting away parts of the top fabric to reveal the contrasting fabric beneath.
In an effort to get away from buying clothing, I’m working on a small series of these that will be part of my new uniform. Here are the panels for a second skirt, printed this morning with the leftover ink from a Block Printing on T-shirts class I taught in the studio last night.
Yeah, they’re both red. Im trying to use up the fabric I have! And they’re not the same red! The first one is a 1×1 rib, and more orangey, printed in black, white, and pale olive green with an olive green backing, while the second is a darker red, printed in neon orange, blue, and white, with a brilliant turquoise backing. Unfortunately the olive and turquoise aren’t great for the outer layer thanks to a very obvious fade/dirt line where they were folded along the end of the bolts. All of this came from McKay’s, the mythical Fabric Warehouse That Time Forgot. Yup, the one in the wet old barn with squirrels living in the roof and the terrifying toilet chute and the acres and acres of smelly old polyester overlock from the 70s. My favourite place! No, really.
This year’s first batch of roasted tomatoes just came out of the oven. After all these years we’ve finally realized that we can set our oven to start and stop automatically, so we can avoid roasting during the day (when we’re billed for hydro at a higher rate). It also means waking up to the delicious smell of slow roasted tomatoes.
Walking through the alleys in our neighbourhood last night we found this painting hidden amongst some trees.
My dad once asked me, is a two-four* filled with empty bottles full, or empty? Or full and empty? Full of empty?
I think my response was something along the lines of, “whatever, Dad. It’s full of empties”.
This website isn’t gone, it’s just hidden. Personal weblogs are dead, diaries are boring, I felt boring just having all that shite sitting here. Maybe some of it will come back, or maybe not. The empty page looks so clean it’s tempting to leave it that way forever. But of course, there’s that Horror Vacui problem.
Here is an accidental phone photo of my studio floor.
