ALL THE YARN

I am proud to announce I can now go into Len's Mill without attempting to buy ALL THE YARN. I think it's because I'm now a total yarn snob, and want to save my yarn money for buying gorgeous fancy yarn.

Anyway, I got some white 100% wool yarn because I want to practice dying yarn! I'm only using food colouring for now, since I can get it locally, it makes bright colours, and I can still use the dishes I dye in afterwards. I've only dyed yarn I've spun so far, but spinning takes quite a while, and I'd like to be able to practise on yarn I didn't put tons of effort into.

Here's the skein of yarn I spun + dyed most recently:



100% "organic fibre" from Louet (I'm not sure what "organic fibre" means). Hand spun with a drop spindle. Single ply. Hand dyed with food colouring. Approx 200m, 145g, DK weight. There's a bit of slub in this, but not as much as previous yarn I've spun!

Exciting Things

Look what I found at the Michael's dumpster this time! A gazillion dried flowers and random styrofoam balls with nature-y things on them. The dried flowers are gradually being passed out to people who can use them (I can't, they're scented and I'm allergic...I stole several peacock feathers out of them though!), and we have made MOST EXCELLENT use of the styrofoam balls, which I will talk about when I get pictures of it. But for now it's a SURPRISE!


I went back with my sister, and we found her a really awesome portfolio case! In perfect condition except for where the plastic got cracked a little, but that is easily fixed with duct tape! It's enough to make me go to Michael's and "accidentally" break things I want.

And now, for a bunch of ATCs!



Also, the following ATC, which is what I did with the background from my last post. I am...reasonably pleased with it.



In less exciting news, I sweated so much at a rave that my phone broke. :( It stealthily deletes texts now, and the camera WORKS, but exits before I can take any pictures.

:O

My FUCK!! ATC swap on swapbot has made it into the top ten swaps list! (At #9 currently, but still...)

I feel famous. And a little silly.

WIPs

I have a couple cards I'm stuck on.

The first one has stamped flowers that were washed out on a foreign text. I really like how it's turned out so far, but it feels like just a background right now. I was thinking I might make a flower (or something) with wire, but I'm not sure!



The second one is layers of mushroom stamps in green ink. Again, I like it so far, but it still just feels background-y. No idea what to do with this one!

Suggestions?

FUCK!! ATC SWAP

RARG!

On swap-bot recently, there was a One Word ATC swap. This seemed interesting, so I looked, and yes, it was an ATC swap where you picked a word and your partner ATC'd it. Only thing was that most of the chosen words were along the lines of "Breathe," "Faith," "Bliss," etc. While I'm sure the lovely people who requested those lovely words will enjoy them, as a young, tough (grrr), secular, foul-mouthed, etc, student-person I don't really want to make any of those into an ATC.

Choosing to focus on the foul-mouthed aspect of myself, I've made a FUCK!! ATC swap. If you join, you get to make an ATC with (and this is key) the word FUCK in it! So exciting...

And just so everyone is well-informed and educated in preparation for this swap, wikipedia gives us this fine information:

The word "fuck" did not come from any of:

* "File Under Carnal Knowledge"
* "Fornication Under the Christian King"
* "Fornication Under the Command of the King"
* "Fornication Under Carnal/Cardinal Knowledge"
* "False Use of Carnal Knowledge"
* "Felonious Use of Carnal Knowledge"
* "Felonious Unlawful Carnal Knowledge"
* "Full-On Unlawful Carnal Knowledge"
* "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge"
* "Found Under Carnal Knowledge"
* "Found Unlawful Carnal Knowledge"
* "Forced Unlawful Carnal Knowledge"

Censoring Myself

...sort of. So, I bought these labels to attach to my yarn bombing:



They say "Zilliah Bailey" and "zilliah.ca." They iron on but I'm sewing them on to be safe.

(Sidenote: look at my awesome tiny craft iron! )

Anyway, so now my yarn bombs are traceable to my website, which is traceable to here and my flickr. Plus I had to use my real name to get the website, etc, etc...and while I don't really think yarn bombs count as graffiti, certain other ...art-related things do. So pictures of graffiti aren't going to be public on my flickr anymore, and I probably won't blog about them (had I? I don't remember.). Oh well. At least I'm self-censoring instead of someone else doing it? I'm only going to censor things that have legal repercussions/fines. (If you want to see these secret pictures that may or may not exist, just message me on flickr, and I'll friend you.)

Bleh, I don't know if I'm overreacting, but a friend who yarnbombs was putting up a tag and got stopped by a police officer, who said it might be considered "mischief" and that they'd been noticing all the yarn things, so drawing attention to less cosy street art is probably not the best plan.

It seems unfair to talk about yarn bombing but not show anything, so here's the piece I put up tonight! Green acrylic yarn in a lacy pattern from this book (which is quite good, it has written and diagrammed patterns, which is nice). It's the first piece with a label attached!



It's on a tree! This is the first tag I've put up that fits around a normal-sized tree! Very exciting. Sorry for the terrible picture, my camera doesn't seem to like darkness.

On the way back I also stopped my the Michaels dumpster, and found these awesome plastic bucket things:



Ooooh, maybe I could use them for dying yarn, I wonder if they're watertight....

Dumpster diving ftw!

Evolution

I know I've remarked on this before, but my style really has changed a lot in a few months. Consider the following: (remember Bill Nye?!)



These are my three "Steampunk Garden" cards. The second and third were made as requests for cards similar to the first one, 2 weeks and 4 months after the first one. They're all basically made the same way, with rubber stamps, flower punches and beads, but I feel like the mood is really different in all of them. Pretty sure I'm getting better at layering colours effectively? Feedback is always welcome.

Man, I really want to get some more ink. I have eight ink pads (5 dye, 3 pigment) and they just never seem to be enough for all the stuff I want to do. Ink and stamps are so *expensive* though, even unmounted. I've found some AWESOME stamp sites which have the bestest stamps, and unmounted too, but getting lots is expensive and I never have any money.

/rant>

This ink, by the way, is pretty great. I must find somewhere online to purchase it cheaply.

ATCs

Some new ATCs! This first one I made a while ago but only recently unfinished; it's crocheted, stiffened with mod podge, and has a wire guy climbing on it.




Next is a multimedia collage similar to a card I made a while ago.



The second collage is simpler (only a couple cut up images and some rubber stamps), but I really like the colours in it.

People Are Strange

I posted a few brightly coloured pencil crayon ATCs on flickr and ATCsforall the day before yesterday (see my previous post). As of today, I have two people asking for trades for this card:



I like the card well enough I suppose, but it's the one I like least out of the pencil crayon ATCs I made. I like the colour combination, but there's not really any colour blending, and some of the vine edges are blurry from when I coloured the background in. I think it's the worst coloured in of those cards, and I prefer the content of the other ones.

I've noticed before that my tastes do not line up with most of the general population, I guess this is just confirming that. But still. Weird.

Pencil Crayons

I've had a lovely set of artist-quality pencil crayons for a while now, given to me by a lovely friend who was not using them. I've never really tried drawing with pencil crayons before, it's pretty different from pencils, but I just love bright colours so having with with these. I feel like my ATCs have gotten a lot more sophisticated in the last few months - a lot of that is due to getting reasonable art supplies but it's probably also because of actually spending time on them, and getting used to making art. I haven't taken any visual art classes since grade 8 (when I was 12) so there's a lot of really basic stuff I don't know much about yet. Like colour wheel things! My sister explained it to me over the weekend, and it is already being helpful.

The above ATCs are traded in a swap I made on swap-bot, but I have some still available as well! Here are two: