First Carved From Stone, Then Painted On

So my friends, this is a t-shirt with an Easter Island head painted on it in glittery silver paint. So that doesn't need an explanation, right? Pretty simple?

Well, it goes something like this. My coworker was in quite a tizzy. It seems schools these days won't just let their kiddos dress in costumes for Halloween. (Yes, this is the first of several extremely belated Halloween posts. Sorry about that folks, I got a little teensy weensy bit behind.) Her middle school daughter had to dress in a costume that reflected her geography research project, which happened to be the mystery of the Easter Island heads. And as my coworker had neither the budget (hey, she blew the costume money assembling a kick-booty Hermoine Grainger outfit for Halloween night) nor the time to find a true Easter Island head costume, she decided to go for a different tack -- she decided to play up the fact one silly explanation for the statues is that aliens from outer space came down in their shiny silver UFOs and built the statues and lined them up facing the East. So she made a lovely foil headpiece and got up extra early to paint her daughter's face silver. All she needed was a t-shirt to tie the alien bit to the Easter Island thing.

And that's where I come in. She was lamenting this ridiculous story to me and asked if I had any iron-on transfers so she could print something off the Internet. I volunteered to undertake the project because its just the kind of ridiculousness that makes me love public schools in America. Off to target went my coworker for a cheap t-shirt -- got this one off the clearance rack -- and I brainstormed to make the Easter Island thing as alien-y as possible. Silver paint and some extraterrestrial stars do the trick as far as I'm concerned.

I sketched the guy on paper until he looked just right, put the paper beneath the t, used a sharpie to outline the design on the shirt and then filled in the rest with a home-mixed paint that used silver craft paint with some high-end pigment dust from Azel Art Supply. I used real silver flakes to up the luster and voila!

Little Miss Julia looked awesome, so I'm told, and she was really excited about her shirt. Too bad the silver flakes can't weather the washing machine. It's kind of a one time use only project. It was fun. Let me know next time you need something this ridiculous.

Sassy Sewing

Sewing isn't really my bag, man. My mom spends many an hour with her foot on the sewing machine pedal, humming along patterns and putting together pillows. I dig the occasional chance to sew, though, and I thought I'd share something I didn't make -- I made it better.

I got this skirt at a legendary Dallas bargain store, called quite appropriately, The $6.88 Store. Everything in the store costs $6.88, including this skirt. It's Isaac Mizrahi for Target, which means it didn't start out at too much more than $6.88, but it was also to the mid-calf (AKA ugly).

I decided to invent a bubble hem and make it a sassy cocktail skirt. It looks great with heels or heeled boots, depending on the occasion and the weather. In Dallas right now, we're struggling to winter-ize our summer clothes, since the highs have been reaching the 80s! So heels it is with this skirt! I guess I should mention how I invented the bubble hem, so others could try the ridiculously easy method I came up with. It's a poofy skirt, meaning that the longer the skirt gets, the more fabric you have to work with, so there is no such thing as just "taking it up" by a few inches, because you'll end up with bunched fabric and some bad looking pleats. So, instead of sewing all the way around the skirt to take up the length, I just sewed a short (as in less than a quarter of an inch) section every three inches, so that the excess fabric length makes up the bubble of the skirt.

All in all, I think it works. I think the sewing method is particularly suited to the fabric of this skirt, which is some sort of nylon/silk blend.

Eyes Wide Open

OK, so I started my blog yesterday. And I feel tremendous pressure to take stock of all the creative things I've got going on and present them in an organized way. To borrow a fav copy editing verb, I'll be mulling things over for a bit. (Mull is a wonderful headline verb, since it basically means "think" or "ponder" but takes up half the space of those. That's a little lesson in headline writing from someone who quit that industry after a measily two years. Note, however, that one's coworkers on the copy desk will make fun of each and every use of the word "mull" because it's so lame/lazy.)
Until I decide how to introduce all my creative little projects, I thought I'd throw up this picture of plastic snowflakes (yep, Target sells them 20 for 2 dollars or something terribly cheap like that) that hang from the ceiling all over my kitchen. They are so cheap and plastic, but for one or two months a year (I pull the Thanksgiving-to-Epiphany Christmas season) they make me happy with their bright colors and shiny ways.