Another journal

I’ve been really good on blogging every week, and often getting it in by Thursday (I feel like using the stay-up-later ability of Friday is kind of like cheating? like getting an assignment in at the last minute). This week, instead of thinking of a thing to blog about I have been using up all the brain meat on working on holiday presents. It’s a whole THING for us.

We used to make mix CDs with cool paper cases and give those to friends, there were some very cool themes. I don’t have them well-documented but here’s an old post about two of them! Then one year we made a soundtrack for a movie that never existed and sent them in DVD cases with a minicomic (which you can read here) and I made a fake google alerts printout about this imaginary movie and everything.

After this one, we reduced the number of folks who got gifts and also moved away from mix CDs as less people had ways to play CDs (wild times!). We moved to a cool card and then, for a handful of closer folks, a tuck-in of some kind. The cards have varied from normal folded cards that I got printed at a place, to smaller ones more like post cards that we print at home, to the year we did full on linocuts.

The tuck-ins have ranged from a mini colouring book to a phenakistoscope, which was a fun build. I try to not do something that has a HUGE time investment every year, but sometimes the assembly is so fun, even when its fussy. I blogged about the phenakistoscope here (and there’s a link to go make your own from there). Hate when I make something that is like: I can’t top this, sorry.

It’s like, we do about 50 cards, about 25 of those have a tuck-in, and then about 12 of those have a more personal gift (which ranges within themes across the whole group like its a kids birthday party–it’s been everything from nostalgic school supplies to a series of prints from an artist to pamphlet binds of short stories).

I am from the kind of family where there are so, so many cousins, so this sort of approach feels natural. Things get mailed out in January because that’s what aligns with the holiday I celebrate and also it’s so much nicer to not be part of the rush of mail mail mail, gift gift gift (my dentist and I have bonded over the pros of celebrating in January, an unexpected moment).

Anyway, this year will be fun? I hope! I have the card done, we have to go get more printer ink, also a specific paper for something. I have to finish 12 craft items, print the things, assemble, write notes (all of those 50 cards get something! I am not mailing you if I don’t love you, so I am writing something, even if my hand hates me for it). It’s a mad rush of joy that reminds me why the darkest of winter can be full of feast days–and I have so many wonderful people in so many places, I welcome the project of cards and gifts every year. The chance to send a little joy to my friends and family is a precious thing, especially as someone who can’t remember birthdays, even with reminders.

Maybe I can’t have everyone over to feed them, one of those all-day meals with people breaking up into groups around the house, moving and snacking and playing video games and petting the cat. But I can send you a card.

I have finished crocheting my first piece of clothing. That is wonderful, but what is less wonderful is that I’ve somehow forgotten I’m actually a small creature and my attempts to make this sweater a bit oversize have resulted in something that does not fit due to being too large.I think it may be salvageable, but I’m finding it difficult to drag myself back to the project after “finishing” it and finding it lacking.

Fabric never does me bad like this. Well, it does, but I’m used to how it misbehaves. Example: for some of this crochet project I planned to dye the yarn, so it wouldn’t just be plain white.

“I’ll get to it when I need it,” I thought. You see, with fabric the dyeing process can be a hassle (above a certain quantity of yardage, fabric is always a hassle), but it is straightforward. Yarn though? It’s not fabric.

With yarn, you have to turn it from a tidy skein into a hank (or several),which means unwinding an entire skein and spending quite a lot of the dyeing process trying not to tangle everything. Then, when you’re done, re-winding it.

I survived though. Here is some evidence. I have not colour corrected these for shit, which is fine because tbh the resulting colours are some of the literal worst to get accurate (I hate you, teal and peach).

What is hilarious is that, in the end, I almost perfectly matched a skein of store bought yarn. Not my intention! I doubt I could replicate!! Notes for myself I guess: this is SEI Tumble Die in maybe? Aqua?? (the colour is not labelled) and RIT Rose Pink in a misting bottle.

Anyway, fibre arts remain fun and frustrating in equal measures, which is why they have me by the throat. You can see the sweater when I’ve fixed it. This whole thing could have gone sideways and it DIDN’T, which means I’ve learned nothing and will probably approach yarn with the same “fuck it” energy next time I have to dye a batch.

I’ve had on my to-do of blog posts to write “old embroidery” for a while. For many years, I had a commute that was a four hour round trip. On the way to work I tried very hard not to fall asleep, and keeping my hands busy with embroidery was a good way to do it (I also tore through so many books thanks to Project Gutenberg and a little Nokia mobile with wifi).

I had a little kit in a mint tin that held my needles and some of the thread or other things I needed. A dear friend made me a sort of soft folio container that I kept my projects and other hanks of thread in. The whole kit fit neatly into my backpack and off I went.

The earliest examples of what I embroidered on my Flickr seem to be a series I did illustrating different states, based on what I knew of them (which was not much). This was around 2008.

I started playing more with embroidery as sketching, “drawing” the other commuters I saw regularly on the train. I wasn’t much for cross-stitch, but I did have the aida fabric from various friend’s destashes and a life of scrounging craft materials and it was fun to approach the pixel-like limitations of the fabric outside of cross stitch.

Now, imagine if you will, an internet where a sassy man doing cross stitch could reach viral heights. Bacon and moustaches were the height of… something. Steampunk was doing things (and I was involved, writing about papier mâché, of course). I was in my twenties and found it all rather annoying. So I did a litle cross stitch series about it.

It was a fun, weird time for embroidery online, actually. A friend kept a blog where each post was embroidered and had a scroll-over effect, which I commented on in kind. Writing was sort of a focus for a bit, like this line from Fanny Hill, or this ranking of movie trilogies that I think got on some pages back in the day (the cleaner scan of it has 6k views, lol).

What my true love, with embroidery though, was sculpture. I loved stumpwork for being a great way to use up thread scraps as stuffing. There’s so much structure and thick texture possible.

In my years of commuting I amassed a nice amount of work. I didn’t just embroider on the train though, I liked taking it on trips, like this freeform cutwork practise I did when we drove to Wyoming. Please enjoy the same muslin ground used for this and the one above–I dyed a true fuckload of muslin for a backdrop in theatre than nobody wanted after the show was done so I’ve been carrying it around since and have almost used it all now, some 20 years later.

Eventually, I stumbled on Opusanglicanum, which introduced me to what has remained one of my favourite surface work approaches–laid and couch work. Its an approach I always enjoy, and it’s been around so long there’s something lovely about doing a stitch people have done for ages and ages.

Looking back it feels like it was a couple-year rush of embroidery but then the practise followed me along like a dog. The embroidery tag here on the blog has stuff as “recent” as 2015. I wonder if, from there I in general stopped blogging and also started focusing on other craft. My commute was mostly walking at that point, then a couple years later we moved states and everything changed.

I may not embroider as much as I used to, there’s just so much craft be doing. But the love and the skills are still there and I pulled them out to fix the worn out old cuffs and pockets on this coat I made nine years ago.

There’s a bag, in all my various craft storage, of what work I still have from this era of embroidery that I realise was close to 15 years ago. Maybe when I’m done with my current craft projects (which include crocheting my first sweater!), I’ll return to the stitching I miss.

Now, I’ve made some Fallout: New Vegas themed items before, because I’m super normal about the game. Big as my fannish love is, I have avoided making props because I live in a very small apartment and don’t need more clutter. That said, I had a realisation last playthrough that I could both have a game prop AND use up some crafting supplies in one go, so: the Sierra Madre Casino snow globe.

A few years ago, Chase got me a cute kiddy craft kit to make snow globes. The theme was sparkly baked goods. I made one, it was delightful, then packed the pieces for the other two away because I don’t need three snow globes around that aren’t quite my style. Now, in FNV, you collect these from different locations, it’s a fun little bonus thing. I realised while playing that they’re close enough to the same shape as those in the craft kit and was very !!! about it.

The problem was, as with any craft I do: how do I do this while not buying anything and just using what I have to hand (which to be fair, is a lot of stuff). If I had one of those laser cutting machines then heck, this would be a simple build, I could knock out the figures inside from acrylic, do the letters, build the paths for it all from the asset itself. However, I am not so blessed.

You know what I did have though? Shrinky Dinks. I could blow up an image of the asset, trace it, paint it, shrink it, and it would look (close enough) to the screen-printed acrylic that a perfect facsimile would have. Thanks to poking around I found the “oh that’s obvious” solution to calculating the shrink size that my oven would give (thank you craftmehappy), you make a ruler and shrink that. I also very carefully outlined Pip Boy, then realised I forgot to flip him. THEN carefully outlined him again and realised I forgot to trace him sized up (because: shrinking) and then third time was the charm.

Which is why the proportions are not so perfect, on the letters specifically. I ah, my main enemies are precision cutting and lettering. But I think I did a very good job despite it all, cutting them from craft foam. Then! I glued them onto the base upside down and had to do it all over again. Very me-coded thing to do.

In the end though, it was all worth it. I broke up the build over two weekends, it was my reward for meeting goals throughout the week. I sealed the backs of the Shrinky Dink pieces, found my red glitter, mixed actually a spot-on colour for the back, and got the whole thing together.

You can see from the side that the casino itself is a little warped but that I got everything this flat is a miracle as far as my history with Shrinky Dinks is concerned.

And, just for you, a bonus view of the back, where I glued the letters on SO GOOD, just upside down.

A very satisfying craft! This is my favourite of the DLC, so it felt like the perfect way to celebrate that. I still have the pieces for one more snow globe in the kit, but I’m in no rush to make another. I will wait for inspiration to hit me, though let’s be honest it will probably be Fallout: New Vegas themed as well. Such is life.

Really, when it comes to fanbinding I clearly love a gimmick. My last go was making a mock Samuel French script and this time I decided to go for my beloved classic mass market paperback, soft paper and all.

I think I did okay for a first try? I was at the end of my glue bottle and pushing beyond my skills for the cover illustration (which is based on Gay Vets Ross Hossannah), but I am pleased with the end result. I’m already re-laying out the text block to incorporate what I’ve learned. I think the next try I am going to break the collection up so I can have two slim volumes that better fit the look of the mid-century era I was trying to evoke. See how thick this is next to the real thing!

Anyway here are the deets!

• Story: Take Your Shot (series, unfinished) by Inbox.
• Paper: Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in Manila for the body, 60lb double-sided Polar Matte from Red River.
• Types: Overseer and Body Grotesque (Cover), Bahnschrift SemiBold and Constantia (Interior).
• Binding style: Perfect binding.

Okay, pics!

I think I did okay for the cover!! This is not my style and I straight up did a version to completion, hated it and tried again. On the rebind I’m going to have to make another cover illustration and I’m D: about it. That sprayed edge though–airbrush bb, thank you Createx Airbrush Colors in Opaque Aqua.

Now have some interiors.

See, the whole build. All of this madness that consumed me for like two weeks-plus as I hunted paper etc.–this was all for this final thing.

My answer for “how do you bind an unfinished fic?” Like, how does one convey: this is complete but not done? I don’t know how much truly beat to shit paperbacks you’ve handled in your life (or if you’re part of the elite who have several with no covers), but there is a flavour to the texture of pages ripped out of this kind of book. Which is part of why the paper type was so important. I needed the effect to feel right and “nice” book paper isn’t it. Anyway:

I feel like this story ends on an emotional fade-to-black. Like YES I would like to read more, but the last update was in 2016? We’re almost a decade from that. And part of me is like, “these guys need their privacy for how they ended this,” in a way. So this felt right. And, I have kind of a thing around Books As Objects and that the wear on an object, how it degrades and is used over time, is a huge part of what actually informs the experience of a book. So: I added a bunch of blank pages to the end of the text block, bound this whole thing and then ripped them out.

I saw an engagement-type post recently that was like “what were you doing in 2008” and I went and looked at my Flickr, which I’ve kept since 2005 and works like a sort of backup memory for me.

In 2008 I’d been out of college for three years, was making a sculpture a day for a bit, went to Wyoming for the first time, tabled at a comics fest for the last time, and we paid $650 for a two bedroom apartment where I had an entire room just for craft and making things. This was also the year I first shaved the sides of my head, realised that less hair was much easier to deal with, and never looked back. I think I’d moved to full time at the job I’d hold until we left Oregon completely (a horrible job but one that cemented my logistics and spreadsheet real-world experience, moulding me into the mix of product management wetworks I am today).

The key thing is though, I was still making minicomics and zines. As my life became one that included 20-24 hours of commute a week, I started writing more and reading lots (thank you, Project Gutenberg) and comics didn’t like, fall by the wayside but they faded out like all the little guys in Labyrinth at the end. It’s not like I stopped doing comics but I did stop printing them out or doing anything with them. I still had a long-arm stapler though.

And I did keep buying zines (I’ve even had subscriptions to some!) and have enjoyed watching the push and pull of “zine” changing from “thing I photocopied” to “nice printed and bound thing” while also seeing the return of the good ol’ one page zine.

Eventually, I got (back) into bookbinding, via fanbinding. Specifically, fanbinding fic I’d written with a friend of OCs from our D&D game. Bookbinding is fun as hell but sometimes you want something a little faster, which is where pamphlet binding comes in. Last winter I made my family group pamphlet books of short stories only available online. A pamphlet bind is like a high-end zine, tbh. Sewn instead of staples.

What’s funny is, through all of this, I’ve always laid out my various ebooks, like my flash fiction collections the same way you lay things out to be printed. I could not tell you why, tbh. Then I encountered a post by veronique about the joy of zines and turning ephemeral/digital things like blog posts into zines.

“Well dang, wait,” I thought, “that would be so easy to do.” I did still have that long arm stapler.

And so, here’s the past four years of Flash Fiction February collections, in physical form.

It’s wild how much more real this very real amount of work (daily writing, editing, illustrations, laying out the text block) feels in a physical form.

They do feel more like a “chapbook” than a zine though. So I tried laying out the first two essays from my newsletter, along with the pictures and book recommendations. It worked out swimmingly, and I then filled the two blank pages at the end with puzzles.

I don’t know what I am going to do with these? LAPL actually has a robust zine collection and maybe I’ll whack out a bunch of the FFF collections and send those in? Maybe I don’t need to do anything with them right now, maybe it’s just the joy of making. I have a bunch more newsletter essays that I can lay out and print out and be delighted by.

I got into my head that Tamsyn Muir’s The Unwanted Guest needed to be bound to look like a Samuel French script. You know them, if you’ve done theatre. And although they’ve redesigned their covers, they looked the same for a very long time. I’d hoped to unearth one of mine as a reference (No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre), but I have no idea where it disappeared to in the two decades and half-dozen moves since I first marked it up.

Luckily, “vintage” acting editions abound in the second-hand world and I was able to find reference images to suit. I think I did a good job getting the vibe right. I made three copies, two gifts and one for me (which worked out great since I fully forgot orientation for my printer and the inside cover of my copy is upside down).

For this bind I added a lot of fluff, like inside covers advertising posters, other scripts available from the Mithraeum Play Service Inc. library and a new play available – The Noniad.

I also wrote little character descriptions, which I’m proud of. Luckily the script book I had to hand to physically ref was also a two-person play so it helped with the vibe. The inside text block is… fine. I realised way too late that I had mucked up the scene headers, so we won’t look at those.

Also fun: text on the spine. You know, to become completely rubbed off as your sweaty hands keep fussing with the script as you completely destroy it while memorising your lines. Probably nowhere near accurately bound but it gives the vibes.

This was a delight to do, and (other than messing up the scene headers) they turned out exactly as I’d hoped and imagined. The covers were off-cuts from a photo backdrop! The perfect colour I think.

As I posted earlier, I did some pamphlet binds of short stories for family gifts this year. Pamphlet sewing is my comfort craft, tbh. It’s always satisfying, easy to play with form, just a delight up and down. If you missed the earlier post check it out here.

Which is good because I had to make a grip of them in a week (I put things off a touch). I had done a very niche bind in a set of three as more specific presents, then realised I should just indulge myself and do something similar for everyone. You can get a peek of what the initial bind was here, but it will get its own post.

All this talk of pamphlet binding and this first one isn’t that. It’s three signatures, with a soft cover. I selected three favourite trope-based stories and wrapped them in the brightest dang red I have tried to photograph. The illustrations for each section I drew myself based off of images found in Wikimedia Commons.

The stories are:

• Getaway by Nicole Kornher-Stace, time loop
• If We Survive the Night by Carlie St. George, final girl
• Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim – what it says on the tin

One of the fun things with this project was thinking about what story would make someone the happiest – what they’d read and loved or had never read and might love. For this friend, I couldn’t think of a better match than Pockets by Amal El–Mohtar. The images were sourced from Wikimedia Commons, coloured with watercolour pencil and gold pen.

This one I haven’t mailed yet because first: I always mess up this person’s address somehow and USPS will say they don’t know where that is. And second: because we are very close to one of the big LA County fires and our power has been out and schedules disarrayed. Elves in Illinois by Sarah J. Wu is a true delight and the length pushes the appropriateness of pamphlet sewing.

This searingly bright bind is a fanfic for a very specific ship, if you have AO3, def kudos All The Things You Are by bossbeth, this is just chapter one.

Okay, I’ll get to the bind that started it all next. These were such a joy to make, there’s something very magical about being able to hold something in your hands you otherwise can only access on your phone.

One of my favourite things about winter is making a bunch of gifts for my family (who I am related to only one of, but: family). I like to have a “party favours” energy to it often. For a while I rotated through folks with who got “big” things that required more build time, but the past couple of years have been tired ones so everybody gets something a little smaller instead now.

This year, I decided to indulge my love of pamphlet binding and make little gifts of short stories only available online, or as part of larger collections. Pamphlet binding is just a delightful way to transform something ephemeral/online into a physical object. And it’s one of the easiest ways to make a book, I think.

There’s one I did three copies of (two gifts, and one for me) that I’ll share later, but here’s the first half of the bunch!

Let’s start with the silliest one. RE: REQUEST FOR PROPHECIES AND QUEST FUNDING APPLICATION GUIDELINES by Sara Ryan. When you’re sending a gift to someone who also binds books you want to have a little more silliness. This amazing short story, done in the style of a grant application, I bound in a re-sized manilla folder, using brads to secure the pages. These brads, btw, were salvaged from an archive project and I love that they show their age.

I had a lot of fun both using foil and finding free-for-personal-use fonts to act as section delineators (there’s a word for them but its escaping me). For The Nalendar by Ann Leckie (also available in her AMAZING short story collection Lake of Souls) I used Nature Boho by Edy Wiyono.

For Velvet Man by Leone Ross, I loved Under by imagex. I also drew the spotch that I foiled for the cover.

I’ll share the next half in a new post, since this is getting a bit big!

Even though we’re no-grain there’s a jar of white flour in the cupboard. It’s a vital part of a lot of my crafting, mostly in flour glue for papier mâché. What I forgot that it’s great for, until recently, was salt dough.

I used to sculpt a lot, with polymer clay. I still have a good bunch of polymer clay, but most of it is old and pretty much useless (the problem with an attic being your studio, there’s a lot of extreme temperatures). So when I got the bug to sculpt some things some months ago, conditioning clay that had a 50% chance of turning into a texture I liked wasn’t really something I wanted to do. So I checked the proportions (1 part salt to 2 parts flour, enough water to make it a “dough”) and made a batch.

It’s fabulous stuff to work with, silky but with a good body, sticks to itself with water, the only draw back is how it takes FOREVER to dry, in or out of the oven. From some of the feedback my snaps on Instagram got I gathered that a lot of folks must have played with it growing up.

One of the reasons I got into papier mâché was that it was a media that didn’t cost anything. I needed to make “art” for school, there are copious free weeklies around a campus and I was baking bread so there was always flour (which is stupid cheap in bulk, anyway). I’ve spent maybe 15 years just collecting junk to make things with, the home craft media of papier mâché and salt dough fit perfectly into my world-view of making things out of what you’ve got (sewing is where this breaks down for me, ohhhh fabrics and notions, you dirty temptresses).

I miss sculpture a lot, it’s what I relate most media to, from sewing to painting. Which, I guess that’s obvious in how a lot of my sculpts turn out. I pretty rarely start with a plan, it’s all enjoying the process of making something.

Anyway, my point is this. I’ve never seen anyone waste their time playing with clay. I’ve seen fabulously ugly beasts formed lovingly, shapes built and destroyed in endless cycles, the surprising genesis of something amazing. But always there’s something, never nothing, even if you junk it all at the end.

If you’ve got a free evening and a bit of flour and salt on hand (ideally at least a quarter cup of flour), give it a try. The worst thing that could happen is you add too much water and end up with soup. But if you only add a little water at a time you’ll be fine. I mean, if you’re doing this in your home, nobody will see the stupid stuff you make. You don’t have to prove skills to anyone, just let yourself play.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.