By sion, on November 28th, 2007%
or does this look like a dreadfully nifty watersaving greenie style option for felting?
- Three washing mode: Strong, Standard and Gentle;
- Super-strong motor, washing time is adjustable between 1-15 minutes;
- 1 KG washing capacity;
- Small foot print and light weight, portable so it is easy to move and store.
- Made from toughen plastic, corrosion proof, fully recycleable material;
- Multiple safty protection: high temperature cuts out, sealed circuit;
- Water Inlet /Outlet pipe supplied;
- Fashionable blue and translucent colour which shows water level
I can’t figure out whether the use of plastics and just the idea of even its unconspicuous consumption outweighs the assumed water/power benefits. Just as well I don’t do any felting my ownself & can leave the moral quandary to others, eh?
By sion, on November 25th, 2007%
Bye Li’l Johnny! Dude, may I say that your speech tonight made you seem not only human, which was gobsmackworthy enough, but almost likeable? This is not something I thought I’d ever say. Jolly unfair of you really to make me feel sorry for you when I’d been working up to a big NYAH NYAH WOOHOO.
By sion, on November 24th, 2007%
By sion, on November 23rd, 2007%
By sion, on November 22nd, 2007%
Paul has a few words. Whether you like the man or not (I always have even when I disagreed with his ideas, but then I’m chronically amused & entertained by the type), you’d nearly have to admit he brought STYLE to aussie politics, style that’s been sorely lacking for the last umpteen bloody years. I miss good dialogue, interesting insults, flair, COLOUR. I’ve been so damn BORED by this election, like for 6 months before it was even called. When I’m not bored I’m really distressed by the reactionary crap from almost everybody ABOUT almost everything. It obviously doesn’t really matter who the hell is voted in because you all suck, so for pity’s sake just get it over with and shut the hell UP already. Please.
Maybe I’m just grumpy because I’m sore. One of these days I’ll figure out what the hell is wrong with me – fine for weeks, and then a week or two of days when I can barely move because everything hurts. Everything, ache, ache. Not that sitting still, or even lying down, is any better: it all hurts anyway. Tired, tired, tired. Been tested for RA, thyroid probs, diabetes, lyme disease, dengue/ross river/barmah forest/etc fever, etc & so on. Nuttin. Fed up. Unimpressed that my doctor – the first doctor I’ve ever liked enough to patronise almost exclusively – quit her practise a couple of months ago so I have to find somebody else who actually gives a damn, is stubbornly curious, & won’t just think I’m malingering. Grumble grumble. The only thing I managed to accomplish today at the shop was making up a few bundles of fabric to list on ebay. They look rather pretty, but the camera cacked itself before I found out whether the photos are anything like reality so I have to keep my fingers crossed a bit longer (makes typing the listing descriptions etc difficult <insert annoying fox> boom boom!</fox>). Somewhere I have at least one more full set of rechargables, but no idea where – took over an hour to find the charger lol.
oh, I guess what I finally got out of the box? It was on layby FOREVER it seemed, and then I was waiting for dad to modify my table for me, and then I bought a different table and was waiting for that to be modified, and then I decided this is ridiculous and took advantage of my son’s visit to get it inside. not on its proper base, because I’m hoping dad can mess with its innards & get the electronic uppy-downy stuff working. I love the idea of a sewing table I can raise & lower to suit … so meanwhile I’ve got the shaped top resting on the manual uppy-downy table, so I can make sure I like working inside a boomerang before I get dad to cut a whacking great hole in it. I took a photo of the noo ‘chine on the “noo” table to post, but …
By sion, on November 20th, 2007%
I’ve put them all up at flickr, even the awful ones, but I’ll post a couple here too. Clicking any of them will open my flickr pics in a new window/tab.
2007-11-15:
2007-11-16:
2007-11-19:
putting the coreldraw plan in probably verges on cheating, but tough. I drew it!
meanwhile, the delightful Delta’s tagged me with a “you make me smile” award. I need to sit down & make a list of my own now, I guess! My son’s in town for the week right now though, so I’m spending a fair bit of time occupied with non-internetty stuff.
By sion, on November 19th, 2007%
I’ve been silent because I’ve been working on listing a bunch of our patterns etc on ebay. Haven’t added any fabric (have to make some packs up, photograph them, & put them somewhere we won’t accidentally sell/use them lol) yet, but the shop is up for at least the trial month … Sionwyn Lee Design on eBay.
By sion, on November 14th, 2007%
… now all I have to do is munge around with the templates & start using it …
By sion, on November 14th, 2007%
By sion, on November 12th, 2007%
my mummy lubs me :)
By sion, on November 12th, 2007%
this is what I’m sayin …
Cinderella, despite her popularity, has developed a reputation as a simpering, whimpering girl who is helpless until the right magic comes along. But this is the Cinderella of the later twentieth century. The earlier Cinderella, in many of her original forms, was not a wishing-only kind of person. She was self-reliant, devoted to family and ancestors, and willing to make her own future. from EDSITEment
roughed out a bodice pattern. This mannequin has very definite boobs, so trying to figure out flame shapes that can be sewn together to frame them accurately is a bit of a task …
 
By sion, on November 12th, 2007%
cinders sketch, with a couple of fabrics I’m auditioning, & rough colour plan.
 
 
I love that pleated stuff. Somewhere there’s a piece of the same fabric in grey, which if I can find will probably end up in this instead – I’ve got Cinders’s envisioned in greys which range from “dirty” to “elegant”. I’m toying with a “fiery” idea here, but I’m not sure it’s warranted – Cinderella in the commonly accepted version of the tale is fairly colourless, doesn’t tell her horrible sisters to bite their bums, doesn’t do much but drudge about feeling sorry for herself, and basically it’s all a great big “meek shall inherit” thang. I do like the versions with the birch tree on her mother’s grave, or the one with the magic fish bones; she has a little fire in those & a healthy dose of cunning. Have I said all this before? I’m losing track. Given the generally-accepted meekness – and even in the other tales, she’s still pretty colourless – perhaps I should stick with the greys and the soldering iron lace etc. Don’t know if that means giving up the flame motif or not …
By sion, on November 11th, 2007%
 
one of the sketches for corset/dress segments of the folktale series, and the light cast I made of one of the mannequin torsos.
By sion, on November 10th, 2007%
  I made a start on a torso today, making a cast of the mannequin so I can cut it up for a pattern. I’m hoping, see, to be able to make a series of interesting flat shapes (ie, little quilts) which when laced together become a decent analog of the female form. I could have started figuring out my shapes by tonight, if the weather weren’t so jolly DAMP. Ah well, it’ll be dry sometime tomorrow.
So, I went hunting for various pieces of fabric I intend to use on Cinders, most of which seems to have been put Somewhere Sensible (IOW I’ll have to pull everything out of every cupboard & box to find it all, because what seems logical when I’m tidying/organising never turns out to be logical when I’m in creative mode). Bah, daytime job.
I did however in my search find a box which needed doublechecking before being sent off to the sallies. Mostly just thriftshop junk, but down the bottom of the box was a folder containing a bunch of artwork & notes for the Rags stories, a BIG pile of new black Canson paper, my son’s “first year” recordbook calendar (eek!!), and a pile of etching plates I thought I’d lost years ago. Years and years and years. A couple of pristine blanks (ooh!), a few in various stages of marking & scribing, and a couple I’ve already pulled prints from. I was quite stoked, so I scanned a few. The top two have had editions pulled, and with a bit of TLC might still be ok. The one below left is partly scribed & pretty hard to see, & I have no idea if there’s enough of the protective coating left to finish & etch it. The one below right was a drypoint my son did – Bognor, despite grumping quite a bit initially over having an 8 yr old underfoot occasionally, ended up shoving materials at Asa & kept several of his prints in his “exemplary student work” folio (a privilege nobody else in our group was granted lol).
 
Drawmo:
big fat texta. Didn’t like how it was going, so played around with patterned backgrounds as per the challenge mandy issued in my flickr comments. Not a patch on hers, I’m afraid. I had forgotten until I was doing it though that I used to do these vast, involved doodles with lots of echoed lines and patterns and tiny little surprise bits hidden in the patterning. I’d also forgotten what it’s like to draw just for the hell of it, having given up on getting anything terrific out of a sketch, and rather than throwing it away or starting over, just pure playing. Fun!
Miss E’s decided to join in the drawmo fun, so I might as well throw an extra kid art pic in. This is me in stripey clothes, my STB remote, and E “walking on her stripey floor without asking” (don’t ask, I have no idea).
By sion, on November 9th, 2007%
Some kind of seedpod I collected under trees down near the hospital a while back. They’re big, 6-10″ – this one’s 8″ (20cm) long. Watercolour pencils in new sketchbook, before:
and after:
adding water. Meh, pretty ordinary really.
BTW – I’m feeling slightly weirded out by all the new visitors and nobody leaving comments. Talk to me!
Thanks to all the rain (for which everyone is grateful, but …) the ceiling’s collapsed down at the shop. Right over the scrapbooking stuff, of course, so there’s thousands of dollars worth of paper & embellishments & albums etc gone in the skip. Poor C has been dealing pretty well but it’s all starting to get to her now. I went in yesterday & we ended up (after the plumber stuffed around for hours & eventually said it was going to be the weekend at least before he could do anything to fix the problem, which means the place will be a disaster zone for at least 2 more weeks) spending all day moving stock around to keep the place open & customers safe. I dunno how many hundred bolts of fabric we pulled out of shelves so I could move the shelves only to put the bolts back in, but I haven’t worked so hard in yonks! Dad came in to help out so he & I moved all the heavy button & thread etc stands as well, moved the counters & till etc out from under another ceiling threatening to collapse, & rearranged a few other big items to blockade the back half of the shop.
I feel surprisingly good actually; I’d forgotten what it’s like to feel kind of energised by physical labour, after years of often being ruined by so much as sweeping a floor. Kind of the energy equivalent of suddenly not being in chronic pain any more heh. I’ve got a car full of other people’s quilts in case it gets worse, and since there’s not enough room for our fabrics etc in the front half of the shop, as soon as I get rid of the quilts I’m going to be loading up with all our fabrics etc to bring home & try & flog online. Which means I have to pull my finger out & finalise setting up the shop on the website, and do a big pile of listings on ebay as well. Woo yay fun.
All the ceiling issues at the shop were caused, btw, by the previous dipshit tenants from the flat upstairs throwing/sweeping empty bourbon & coke cans into the downpipe. Thanks also go to the bright spark who decided to extend the shop out to the property line and rather than reroute the gutter just enclose it and then hide it in a big dropped ceiling around the perimeter, which meant that the blockage, backflow, breaks and leaks all took place inside the shop (note: “the shop” is not mine, it’s C’s. I sell my fabric/patterns/jewellery/etc there, and I run classes and workshops there, and I help out, but it isn’t my shop. JFTR).
By sion, on November 8th, 2007%
A couple of CHILDREN in the Centrelink waiting room this morning.
(My apologies to anyone with a blog reader that shows this as a new post; I was getting seriously squicked by all the searches for the word I used to indicate girls who are still babies dammit and don’t deserve to be drooled over by pervy freaks – and, as corollary: if you’re a pervy freak looking for titillation, GO AWAY, nothing to see here).
By sion, on November 6th, 2007%
By sion, on November 6th, 2007%
I was a bit uninspired tonight (and to be honest it was already tomorrow), so I just drew a pair of pliers left on the table after a beading bee. Pigma pen on some sort of “parchment” inkjet paper. Neither scanner at the folks’ place wants to play nice, so I just took a pic w the webcam.
I’m kind of astonished at how not-bad it is, to be honest – I’m scared of the commitment pens involve, one wrong move and it’s all fubared, but I just went for it and it was surprisingly smooth. As usual one of my biggest bugbears is trying to capture tone when there are shadows AND colours involved. That sort of thing is much easier when you’re working from a photo; for starters it’s already been made 2D so you’re not fighting your knowledge of its dimensionality and slight changes in your view or the light or whatever so much, but there’s also something about the tone that becomes much easier to translate. This is why they make you work from life at art school … anyway, where was I?
So I’m drawing away thinking about the fact that I’ve made few hesitation marks, and that made me think about forensics shows and how they’re always talking about first-time killers having hesitation marks. Which eventually led me to thinking that if one’s hesitation marks when drawing/writing bear any resemblance to the hesitation marks one would leave when stabbing some poor schmuck, then anyone my dear old dad ever decided to knife would die of boredom or a thousand papercuts before he got down to business … which is admittedly a fairly peculiar thing to think, but hey, Criminal Minds was on tonight.
Re the beading bee: I made her highness a wee necklace & bracelet to wear with her gorgeous Christmas dress. She loves that dress so much, can’t wait to wear it – in fact, she had her jammies off & the dress on last week so she could sway around in front of the mirror adoring herself. Getting it back off her was surprisingly drama-free, but she has been insisting on wearing all her other beautiful dresses (most courtesy of her paternal Grandma, aka Dammah) even at home lately. Anyway, so the necklace & bracelet look absolutely bloody gorgeous on her of course – going with the Christmas theme (and to match the dress, which is white with a border print of red roses around the hem) it’s green glass leaves and ruby-red teardrop beads with green & red seed beads & very yummy translucent white AB Czech 4mm rounds. It’s a bit wobbly since she stuffed it into a cable pod, but que sera, sera … one of these days I’ll learn not to use tigertail on anything for her :)
By sion, on November 5th, 2007%
 Found courtesy of the skull-a-day blog, Christopher Conte‘s amazing sculptures seem to contain an awful lot of very familiar components …
By sion, on November 5th, 2007%
referencing the Handless Maiden folktale – “but she wept bitter tears over her wounds and he could not take her”. Drawn on the metal from a Cadbury’s drinking choc tin, with a regular pencil. Scan makes it look kind of dull, but it’s actually quite shiny.
I’ve been collecting these pieces of foil for a couple of years now, from the tops of coffee cans and Cadbury’s tins and Milo tins etc. No clue what I was going to do with them when I started, but I’ve always loved metal shim, especially stuff like the metalwork you see in Mexico (and yes, back in the 70s I was one of legions making those relief images from sheets of copper). I think I was considering making fancy hinges and stuff for scrapbooking, but since I only ever made two pages with the $800-odd worth of scrapbooking crap I bought with my guess-who-quit-smoking-finally money, THAT just ain’t likely to ever eventuate. One of the bloggers I read uses shim of some description in tiny quiltlets, and that amazed me (you can SEW through it! OMG, the possibilities!) but do you think I can remember who? Of course not (if you know, leave me a comment please & I’ll find examples & link).
ANYWAY, where was I? Yeah anyway, so the shim has been on my mind for possible use in an eventual Handless Maiden piece – for those not familiar with the tale, her husband has silver hands made for her. I’m not especially fond of the story, but the silver hands reminds me of Nuadha of the Silver Hand (aka Lludd Llaw Eraint, which is why I get him mixed up with Lugh of the Long Arm. I’m not vouching for the accuracy of any of these links, JFTR; Irish & Welsh mythology has suffered more than most at the hands of eager & often misguided web denizens. I did a lot of research at actual libraries Before Internet, and I still figure it’s a case of finding the version that rings truest to you). Anyhow, again … So, thought I’d have a quick play tonight since I didn’t get my shit together to do any proper drawing today thanks to spending all day on the couch feeling very sorry for my perimenopausal self.
[EDIT] – It’s Judy Perez I was thinking of, duh! Go look, they’re absolutely stupendously gawjus.
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CHITCHAT