Octo Friends!

Meet my new octo friend! (and check out my greasy hair).


He doesn't have a name yet. He's gonna go live at e's house, so I'll let him pick a name. I've been looking for quick sewing projects to work on to break up my cover letter writing sessions, and this little cephalopod will be the first of many. I found the pattern on Craftster.org. I'm going to make the tentacles a little wider on the next one to make machine sewing and turning it right side out a little easier.

Ant Farm Costume!

For Halloween 2010, I decided to be the classic Uncle Milton's Art Farm.

I love making costumes that are also wearable; I want to restrict my movement and ability to move through crowds as little as possible. For this one, I started by making a simple tank dress to use as the base.

To make the tunnels, I blew up a photo of actual ant farm tunnels in Photoshop and traced them onto a piece of white muslin. Then I used a paint brush to apply Sobo glue to the non-tunnel portions and poured white corn meal onto the glue. I let this dry, dumped off the corn meal and kept laying it with glue and cornmeal. When I had enough cornmeal layers to look like a real ant farm, I sprayed it with a fixative to seal in the grain.

As soon as the tunnels were dry, I hot glued the plastic ants marching through them. (I would've preferred to use a glue that dried clear, but I was running out of time. Hot glue saved the day!) In case you're wondering, I did have a queen ant. She's on the bottom right down in the tunnels; she's just a tiny bit larger than the rest of the ants.

I cut the farm silhouette and edges out of a thin, green foam. I hot glued the farm scene to the dress while I was wearing it so the placement was perfect. Then I hot glued the tunnels onto the dress, and covered up the fabric edges with the foam edge pieces. For the finished look, I wore gold sparkly tights with a pair of green boots, just about the color of the farm scene.

Sadly, I only got to wear my creation for about two hours. I decided to take it off so I could bike easily from Park Slope to Williamsburg. I hit a bump and it flew out of my basket, and I realized it too late. Eric, Sam and I retraced our path, but it disappeared. So guess what I'm going to be next year...

100% Organic, 2% Bile

I saw a (presumably) homeless man sitting on the bench of an L Train car. His two bags were laying on the floor, the rest of the passengers had avoided sitting next to him. As I stepped into the car, I saw a jug of Apple and Eve brand juice sitting at his feet. "I hope that's actually apple juice," I thought as I stepped into the car, taking a whiff of the air to test. It was fine, so I sat on a bench several banks away from him. I could see him eating some sort of black twiggy thing from out of an unlabeled metal can. This lasted for several stops. The train doors opened at a stop shortly after he finished eating, and he chucked the can across the car onto the tracks below.

He stood when the train started moving again, grabbing the apple juice jug and facing the set of doors. I thought maybe he just wanted a view of the inside of the train tunnel while he drank his juice. But he never raised the jug to his lips. Instead, he lowered it further below his waist, right near the crotch of his pants. I saw him fiddling with his fly over the top of my National Geographic, and then the liquid level in the jug started to rise.