Super Meat Boy Birthday Time

My brother Daniel asked me to knit him a beanie with this Super Meat Boy gentleman on it.

1. I am unfamiliar with this Super Meat Boy. Though based on his name alone, he has my full support.

2. I really could not think of a way to knit a beanie featuring this gentleman without the whole thing looking like Mommy made it.

3. Remember that rule about foisting gifts on friends and family that were created with newly adopted hobbies before the skill is fully developed? Or even like half-ass developed? Remember?

So I decided the time was ripe for trying my hand at making patches. That way Daniel could go find a beanie that he liked and that fit him and just attach the Super Meat Boy patch to the front of it. Here they are:

The order in which I made them is:

1 3

2 4

You can probably tell that #1 is kind of crappy, but by the time I got to #4 I was doing pretty well. I wasn't sure what the deal was with the forehead bandage, so I made them both ways. Now he can put Super Meat Boy patches everywhere!

After I embroidered the fabric, I ironed on a one-sided fusing fabric to the back to stiffen it and cover up all the loose threads. I cut the shapes out and then ran them through the sewing machine to do the edging. When I sent them to Daniel I included the double-sided fusing he will need to iron the patches onto something, or he can skip the fusing and just stitch directly to the beanie, or fuse and stitch for maximum attachment. Or, rather, have his mommy do it.

As a special birthday treat, I also whipped up this lovely swallow to hang in his bedroom to pretty things up.

Isn't that sweet? I recommended he hang it near a light source so that it can be fully enjoyed to its fullest sweetness.

What? Can't I send my brother something sweet for his bedroom? What's the problem?? No one trusts me anymore!!

On a completely unrelated note, I recently discovered glow-in-the-dark embroidery floss. It looks almost exactly like regular white embroidery floss and cannot be distinguished when sewn right next to the white stuff. Hypothetically speaking, it could be used to stitch secret messages into regular embroidery projects that would not be seen until the lights were turned off. Wouldn't that be neat?

I won't tell you what that swallow says. You would slap my mouth. Happy Birthday, Bro!

Great Big Stitched Postcard Swap 5!

It's that time again:

Join in to win your chance at being horribly offended by my interpretation of "Discovery."

Beaver & Dee & SJP

A friend of mine works on a metal zine called Chips & Beer which also employs a brilliant illustrator named Beaver. I am currently using Beaver's illustration of GG Allin taking a shit on an album as the lock screen on my phone, which I won't trouble you with here.

Issue #3 of Chips & Beer, the current issue as of this writing, contains the following Beaver illustration:

No, you're absolutely right, it is Dee Snider brushing Sarah Jessica Parker's hair. You are not imagining that. And I can't tell you how pleased I was to see this; it actually filled a little hole in my heart that I didn't know existed. And I decided I couldn't just let it lie there on the page, hidden from the world! I felt compelled to embroider this commemorative pillow:

Incidentally, the chair in that photo is exactly that color. It is not this color, taken seconds later with the same light source:

I seriously give up on the lighting in my house. Anyhoo, I added Beaver's name to my tag so he gets full credit, and I'm mailing it to my friend as a surprise gift. He should get it today or tomorrow, and I am boldly posting this early despite the totally realistic chance that my internet fame will blow the surprise. Call me crazy.

"Damn You Krabs, I Went To College!"

I found a thrift store near my house that I haven't visited before, so I stopped in one day. It was kind of junky but I can always manage to find something in these places. This is a weird tote bag that has a reversible fabric liner inside, covered with a generic photo of the beach:

The back side of this is white, and the inside is denim. Predictably, the plastic part was filled with cat hair, and there were some noticeable scratches on it, but I cleaned it out with soap and water and threw the liner in the washing machine. Then I began the process of staring at it until something came to me.

In the meantime, I finally grew out of my Elvis tote bag (I have tote bags all over the house) that I use for my drumming stuff. So I bought a $5 canvas tote bag at Hobby Lobby and decided to cover it with patches. I dug out my patch collection, and lo and behold, I totally forgot I had some of these! I slapped them on the liner and decided I liked how it looked, so I ironed the new ones and glued the old ones. Voila:

Spongebob has spotted the skeleton-babe and, equally torn between fear and lust, has been driven to madness. Patrick's just glad to be outside and hasn't yet noticed that it's bat country.

If you look closely you can see a halo around the skeleton-babe shaped like an iron. That's because I thought "Well she's the same length, so I won't risk moving the iron around, I'll just hold it in one place for like thirty seconds on high heat. What could possibly go wrong?" I had hoped that the plastic liner would sort of obscure the burn, but judging by this photo, it won't. Therefore I have decided that it's an iron-shaped inter-dimensional portal that Plankton has rigged up to teleport the skeleton-babe into Bikini Bottom in the hope that he will break Spongebob and finally learn the recipe to the Krabby Patty. Of course he will fail spectacularly.

Moar Zombies

My brother is into gore, and he and his wife watch True Blood and all that other stuff. So when her birthday rolled around this year I decided to embroider some special tea towels for her kitchen. (Of course I decided this totally at the very last minute, and they were delivered late.)

This pattern hasn't changed in 400 years.

Awww, how sweet!!

OH DEAR GOD THE HORROR!

KILL IT WITH FIRE!!

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!

Awww. I can't stay mad at zombie kittens. I hope she liked them, because I haven't heard anything. Cross your fingers for me.

[Edit: Oh hey guess what, I found out why I haven't heard anything: I checked my mail yesterday to find the gift has been returned to me. They changed apartments about four days before I mailed it, so rather than forwarding it to the new place by, say, walking across the parking lot, the PO decided to go ahead and print their new address on a label, stick it to the package, and then send the whole thing back to Georgia. Because that was way easier. I'm reshipping today. Don't even get me started on the USPS.][Edit: She got it!]

I have a couple other embroidery projects that I can't share yet because they won't be delivered until mid-July, one project that I'll probably finish this weekend and will post after I mail it, and another that won't be delivered until Xmas, so you can forget me ever remembering to post that one.

Oh, ha! I forgot about this. We went to an outdoor concert on Memorial Day and I was lamenting not having a big straw hat to ward off the horrible, horrible sun. So before we went to Monster Bash this weekend I bought a $5 hat at Publix. But I doctored it up for the Heavy Metal Parking Lot meetup:

Here it is hanging on my Kuntry Koat Rack:

And here it is in action at the frost-bitten Blashyrkh Drive In:

I wish frost-bitten. Anyway the vodka watermelon that Heavy Metal Parking Lot is decimating in the background was frost-bitten. As was my Yuengling. Hails!

Putting the "F" in BFF

The BFF has been known to produce genius work under the influence. The morning after a Halloween party, I found this on my counter:

He does not remember drawing this. I have since laminated it. (With my awesome laminator. That I love.) Which was a good idea, because now I can slap some vellum on top of it, trace it out, stick some carbon paper under the vellum, trace it onto fabric I had lying around, embroider it, and make it into this pillow:

With this pom-pom fringe:

Then to thwart his inevitable copyright violation lawsuit (which he immediately, and predictably, threatened upon receiving these photos), I preemptively added his name to the tag:

HA. Screw you, BFF! But O, that's not the only artwork he has gifted me. It's all over the house:

Also similarly laminated with my awesome laminator, and similarly converted to an embroidery pattern:

Here is the matched set, flanking the Macho King:

I have piles of his artwork, but I don't really want to fill the whole house with throw pillows. I'm lining up some other ideas for where best to exhibit the BFF's genius. However, I have mentioned to him that maybe once in a while he could drunkenly scrawl some art that faces to the right? If it's not too much trouble.

Postscript:

I would like to point out that this whole project was made possible by the blessing of Craft Supply Hoarding. Of course I had enough fabric -- plus pom-pom fringe, plus stuffing -- lying around the house to create two throw pillows on the spur of the moment. I did actually go purchase carbon paper ($17 for 100 sheets at Staples) and the stylus (which was like $1.50 or something at Joann's), but everything else was hoarded. I try to keep it reasonable, like I don't want to end up on a reality show when they find my body decomposing under a pile of glue sticks. But I totally amass these things because I need to be able to execute these stupid ideas immediately or I go nuts. So you heard it here first: HOARDING PAYS. The End.

Monkey Box

I never took a before shot of this box either. I think I have the fantasy in my head that I am so super-organized and thorough that when I finally decide how to alter something, I will immediately reach for the camera to begin the Art Process. Which never, ever, ever, ever happens, so I don't know why I continue harbouring this delusion. What I normally do is stare at something for a month, then have an idea, grab it, and run full bore into the garage to coat it in primer, perhaps stopping to prep the area with newspaper first. PERHAPS.

Anyhoo, the following was a box covered in Winnie the Pooh whatnots that I found at a yard sale. It was oh-so-twee and adorable! Then I covered it with black acrylic paint. Then I bought this:

(Here's the link on Amazon.) Basically nothing in my house has been safe since I purchased this book. I took two of the stencils and combined them into this:

I covered the whole thing with a few coats of spray varnish, and I painted the inside with pink acrylic:

So far so good on that. I wondered if it would totally reek, but it's been okay. I should probably open it every once in a while to vent the cancerous gasses while it settles down. But it's been alright.

I left the handle brown because it's vinyl and I don't know of a way to color it without making the whole thing gummy. I'd rather have it the wrong color than have it be sticky and gross forever. Plus the brown looks more official, like maybe I have important legal documents in my monkey box.

One other thing I found at the thrift store on Saturday (when I found the clown previous) was this bizarre canvas painting of a brick wall:

The perspective on this thing is weird. Pretty much the whole thing is weird. But I decided that from now on, everyone that comes to my house has to graffiti the wall. I've already added a small monkey head stencil, and the husband wrote "OH NO!" Ultimately it will be festooned with dicks and fart jokes, as my friends are asshats. So this will probably be the last time the internet ever sees it.

By the way, even though it seems like I've been really productive lately, let me assure you that none of these things are on my running list of projects that need completing. I guess I'll get back to those eventually.