No embroidery on the Yoka bear. Even with his appendages removed, his body is still too small to handle even a tiny needle. The plan now is to turn him into a gryphon. He will get polymer clay claws and a beak, and otherwise be covered with small felt “feathers.” On Friday I ordered a hole punch that makes teardrop shapes and works on felt. Hopefully it will arrive in time. These are probably not the colors I will use, but this is the general idea:
Sorry my posts have been so sporadic lately. In addition to prepping for holiday sales, I’ve got two art shows coming up in November that I haven’t finished the work for yet. I’m working with sort of childhood theme–lots of bright colors and repetitive geometry–and I’ve done a couple of studies, but no finished pieces yet.
The first piece I’m working on is a custom Yoka vinyl toy for a show at DesignerCon on November 21st. A Yoka is a cute, jointed, vinyl toy bear. Mine is only 3″ high.
I was kind of surprised at how many people have made custom-decorated Yokas. Check out this one by Phu! This is a 10″ but he’s also got a 3″ in the DC show.
With such high-caliber work to contend with, I want to make sure my Yoka isn’t jankity and represents my strengths/style as an artist. My first thought, of course was to make a plush Yoka, but Alisa Ross already did that.
Then I thought I would put silk pins into it and wrap the pins with colored string, like the string art projects I did in summer camp. I pictured a delicate, multi-colored scaffolding that was same shape as the bear, but floating about a centimeter off its body. You’d just barely be able to see the white toy underneath through its gossamer shell. But when I actually tried this on a little foam model, the threads all slid down to the bear’s body and he just ended up looking like a coloring-book version of Hellraiser.
I thought about trying to hold them up with those tiny orthodontic rubber bands but that’s just too bulky for such a small toy. Now I think I’ll just embroider the designs directly onto the toy. Not as cool as a floating rainbow exoskeleton, but still pretty sweet.
The other project I’m working on is a set of mandalas for The Lab’s Postcard Art Show Dec. 4-6. They’re small pieces (about 6″ squares) and made with sticker shapes I drew. Here are some of the stickers.
Ideally I’d make the whole mandala set with stickers I drew myself but that’s a lot of time spent cutting tiny shapes and I don’t have much time these days. Depending on how quickly the first few go, I will either make them with a combination of my own stickers and stickers I’ve bought (of the Mrs. Grossman’s ilk), or I will just make digital prints of the mandala patterns I’ve mocked up in Illustrator. Here’s one from yesterday:
Apologies in advance if my posts are widely spaced until the holidays. Wish me luck!
This weekend I re-organized my studio. I never realized how much my half-finished projects were stressing me out until I finally tackled my bin of cut but un-sewn plush pieces. I thought that perhaps I could turn them into kits, like the ones I have for making mini hams, but it wasn’t worth the time to make detailed instruction booklets. Could I somehow turn them into simple, no-frills kits?
Yup.
Inspired by the recession, the Helvetica movie, and the joy of removing physical and mental clutter, my thing-a-day was some quick and dirty identity packaging. The design takes a (huge) page from the no frills supermarket packaging I used to see growing up. Sure, the kerning could be better but what you you want? It’s no frills.
I’ve been missing my friends. So many of them are on the east coast now. They moved away from San Francisco in three waves this summer, and many of them ended up in and around New York. In order to ensure that they all come back someday, I thought I’d make them something to remind them of all the love that’s waiting here for them.
Friday’s thing-a-day was this stencil:
I meant it in the way that says “a lot of people in San Francisco love you,” but the more I looked at it, the more I realized, San Francisco really is a city that loves you back. In all the ways that New York tries to keep you out, San Francisco invites you in. From the weather to housing (rent control!) to the entrepreneurial spirit, San Francisco makes it really easy to live well on your own terms. New York requires you fight everyone else with sticks to get your own little piece of anything.
So to stick it to New York a little, I decided to change the stencil lettering to look like the “I heart New York” logo. I used the first stencil to cut out the skyline, and then used this stencil to carve out the letters:
Yesterday I made three stickers for my girls with the Xyron and a security envelope, as well as some stickers from the removed letters, which I put up in my very spare Etsy shop. Doing these San Francisco love projects has given me some great ideas for much larger projects that focus on the Bay Bridge.
For the last three days I’ve worked on just one project–a prototype for a fair ribbon. It’s a project I’m doing for free for a low-key client, but it seemed like an easy thing to start with. I thought I would be able to finish the whole thing in one day, but it turned out I know less about how to make fair ribbons than I thought.
Day 1: Picked out fabrics from scrap stash and embroidered a piece of blue quilting cotton with white embroidery thread. Wrapped it around the front of a 1.25″ Dritz make-your-own-shank-button, then snapped the back of the button on.
Day 2: Made the rosette for behind the button. I started by sewing two circular pieces of fabric together. Then I sewed a small circle in the middle, to create a ring. I thought that if I gathered the center of the ring, or threaded elastic through it, that this would create a nice rosette effect.
Instead it created this:
Then I sewed a long tube of fabric, and threaded the elastic through that with my nifty bias turner.
I tightened the elastic and let the fabric bunch. Still too messy. It looked like a scrunchie.
Out of ideas, I turned to the Internet for help, and found this post on the Chronicle Books blog about how to make a blue ribbon greeting card for Father’s Day. I sewed another (much longer) tube, and this time, I accordion-folded the fabric while sewing the folds together to secure them in a circle.
Day 3: Cut and hemmed the bottom ribbons, and glued everything together. Added a pin and a string to the back. Covered up the unsightly mess in the back with a blue felt circle.
Each day I completed at least one item, so I feel like I made a small, complete object each day, even though they were part of one project. Today I worked for an hour on the Amy Sedaris cross-stitch while I was at the DMV. After posting this, I’m feeling too tired to start anything new. Four days down, twenty-six to go.
Spent my day hand-sewing dog squeakers into 48 plush toys then dealing with UPS (see prevous post). Not ideal. But I also managed to finish this image for my newsletter announcing the Shapin’ Bacon to the world.
sweet meats shapin' bacon plush newsletter
Using a very limited font collection and breaking TONS of typography rules, I tried my best to imitate this California Gold Rush pamphlet I found with Google images:
As soon as I finish entering the hundreds of new subscribers I picked up during fair season, this baby will be good to go.
