Spinning Uncensored

Continuing Voyages Pg6 – Drawing from Lem on Vimeo.

Continuing Voyages Pg6 – Colouring from Lem on Vimeo.

Stop motion animation short from the National Film Board of Canada. Everything about it is incredible. I’m fascinated with the eye movements of the characters, particularly Madame. Jake and I both decided that she was a life size doll, because all of her surroundings and possessions are actual found objects.

I’m working on my 3rd annual party dress for the Google holiday party. This time, owing to a hectic schedule, I am working from a pattern instead of designing my own. The pattern is Minna from BurdaStyle.com.

From the beginning, I decided to go with two layers of fabric, a black sheer over a chartreuse or some sort of similar green. I flirted with some iridescent sheers, but at $13 a yard, I would have been over my $70 budget. I’m still deciding on the shoulder/collar trim. Ideas so far have been feathers, fur, crocheted lace with iridescent jet black beads, or simply a loosely pleated collar of the same material.

Although I hope not. The last week has felt a bit more manageable. There are a few gaps opening up here and there on my calendar and my classes are more manageable than usual. So I give you images of the shirts I made for my niece and nephew in-law. Plus images of our work on our loft.

Both shirts were made from a Japanese pattern book I got in SF Japan Town. The entire text is in Japanese, but the illustrations are so good that you can puzzle out the directions.

I made Guthrie’s shirt out of an old shirt that Jake was going to send to Goodwill.

We moved our sleeping arrangements out of the upper loft down into the living space. The cats and warmer temperature of the loft made sleeping increasingly difficult. So last weekend, we took a trip to Ikea, forked over a bit of $ and transformed the space. The screen is something I redid. The iron frame had this awful discolored jute (or something) fabric. The fabric you see was something one of our designer neighbors put out into the hall one day. Serendipity, it matches my wall.

Two words, sleep deprivation.

Sincerely,

Your very cranky neighbor.

I started the summer with a big idea and quickly found myself getting a crash course in multiple content management systems. The two systems I’ve been using are Omeka and Drupal. I can’t show the first yet, but it is looking pretty cool. I’ll post that link Sept. 15th when the site goes live. The second is a personal site using Drupal: www.spinninguncensored.com/drupal. It’s a bit messy in places. But that’s because it’s one big learning experiment. The cookbook is pretty cool though.

For fun, I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yeah, I recognize that I should have been watching these in 1998 along with the rest of my peers, but I wasn’t hip on all the cool shows back then. Now, I mostly ignore TV. Nothing to do with being hip, because that I so am. See above paragraph.

It struck me while reading a paper this evening, that there are some words that become as familiar to you as your own name. It’s not just the look of the word or its sound. It’s the context, feelings and memories that are associated with the word. It’s how often you hear and read it. That word for me is ‘library.’ What’s your word?

I wish I could just fly out and see the current show at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Photograph from the exhibition.