CrumpArt

Mr Crumpet has been trying to get me to read DemonBaby’s blog for a long time.

He’s finally succeeded.

Will the most conservative person I know love these…

Or hate them…?

And if it’s the latter, can I convince her that it’s an investment? She does work in finance, after all…

Well, one of my prints is in this collection (bad picture of it though… I’ve always wanted to replace it with a brighter version but never quite got around to it.)

Periodic Table of Printmaking

Edited to add:

Also Boing Boing!

And the image of my Xenon print has been updated so it no longer looks like shite.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this here already or not, but about a month ago Mr Crumpet was very naughty. He’d been talking about buying a projector, and when the secondhand one that we were going to buy fell through because of a technical fault, we agreed to wait and buy one when we’d saved enough money.

Apparently that was all a ruse.

And as angry as I was, I do really, really, really love it. It makes our front room look far neater and more spacious, and I can now watch David Boreanaz in bigger than life-size mode.

The next problem, though, was that I could only watch my favourite vampire after the sun had gone down (although that does make sense, in a way.) We have wooden venetian blinds on our windows, and while they look lovely, they don’t block out the light so much. So, we had some friends over for dinner and a movie, and they brought over their overlocker for an extended loan.

It’s a Husqvarna Huskylock 905, and after downloading a manual and spending a little quality time together, we’ve forged a happy relationship. This particular overlocker is very easy to thread and I have so many projects in mind to use it for. Plus it’s just fun to say Husqvarna.

But what does an overlocker have to do with a projector?

New curtains!

Not the greatest project in the world, though. Wrangling thick, heavy pieces of fabric bigger than the floor space in my studio is not so much fun. While they would have been better hand sewn, it was a project that needed to be done quickly, and I value my sanity. I did the whole thing on the overlocker using a “blind hem”. You’d actually have to be blind not to see some of the stitching that’s not supposed to be visible, but the job is done, looks relatively good and works well for us. Also, the front room is way cooler already, because the curtains are blocking out the excessive heat too. Bonus!

And now that’s over, I can work on things like this! (We can also finally have people like m1k3y over to watch a film. Hooray!)

I started a couple of new paintings yesterday. It’s the first time I’ve really made any art since the end of the semester (I wanted to make sure I had a break), and the first time I’ve done any painting for a year. It feels good. The paintings are a gift for a friend. I don’t know if she’ll like them, as she’s pretty much my polar opposite, but I love them.

And yes, those are Amazon boxes being used as a dropsheet. I have an easel, but I kind of prefer to paint with the canvas flat out on the floor.

Scarily enough, the boxes aren’t from my stash that I keep to recycle. They’re all new.

The 1001 Paintings book was a Christmas gift from my parents, The Portable Atheist was a Christmas gift from myself (gotta love irony). Fitted Knits, Stardust and Signal to Noise were bought on sale after Christmas with gift money, Pollock: Veiling the Image was purchased secondhand from Amazon with a gift voucher from the awesome Alex, and the rest were well thought out splurges made with my extra public holiday pay. So while not all the books were from Amazon, I have managed to winnow my wish list down to two pages. You know, so it’s easier for y’all to choose something for my birthday, coming up in exactly one month.

I just made me a bobbin of blues
Some strange comfort for a soul to soothe
It was hard
It was hard,
To stop the drive band from falling right off

And I’ve been waiting for a year, a day
To make this yarn but things got in my way
Cause I had no time to spin or to play,
To treadle in time

I made plans for a loud colour scheme
Used laws of physics to make my own string
Put extra twist in to help with plying
I spun faster and slower
I spun faster and slower
Like a crazy crafter
With nothing’ to knit
And nowhere to put
This bobbin of blues

The drive band
Would not stay on
The damn wheel
Drove me crazy
Fred would not deliver
Fibre from the sliver
There just was no relief

I told myself that I really can’t hate
This stupid-arsed wheel
Cos it’s usually great
And the tension built
In the old-school machine
And it rang through my bones

I saw the knot that was causing the slip
I found the scissors and gave it the clip
Put a splice in the ends of the string
I glued over and over
And made the tension lower
Like a tired crafter
With nothing’ to lose
I fixed it up to get this
Bobbin of blues

And all you other helpdesk/IT types.