Another journal

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.

I tend to feel like I don’t make enough or do enough creative work. Compared to the output I used to do, I don’t. I try to remind myself that it’s okay! I work a fulfilling, creative job and sleep more and am pretty much happy. But it bums me out, especially since so many folks I know are constantly pumping out notable, awesome work. So when I sat down with my Flickr archive for this year (because Flickr has been my memory bank for years now), I didn’t expect much. This was the year I stopped doing focus months, I mean, how much could I have done?

Turns out? A decent amount.

January
Focus month: Branding Ma-Mé. I built and did the branding work for a friend’s site. It was super fun and I got paid for it! I like making other people’s ideas because I just like making stuff more than thinking of what to make.

Non-focus things made:
• I painted a painting that I then slid behind a bookcase, because I couldn’t throw it away, but why keep it?
• A TARDIS piñata for a dear friend. This has been re-Pinned on Pinterest about a million times.

February
Focus month: Airbrush! I have an airbrush and love it, but spent this month really learning it.

Non-focus things made:
• Rebuilt arbour in yard.
• Murder-wall anniversary present for Chase.

March
Focus month: Mending & old work. Cleaned a bunch of stuff, got rid of a bunch of stuff, a really great feeling.

Non-focus things made:
• I did get a wig that is now my web avatar wig. God, I love this fake hair.
• Wrote a short-short.
• Finished serialising the first draft of The Audacity Gambit.

April
Focus month: Chase’s show production, in which I showed you nothing.

Non-focus things made:
• Nothin. But I did start using Instagram.

May
Focus month: Embroidery. Which was fun, but not a lot produced.

Non-focus things made:
• Taught myself eggshell veneer.

June
Focus Month: Another writing month. Editing The Audacity Gambit and working on the second book!

Non-focus things made:
• Made a sky bison costume for a cat.
• Shot a cover for TAG’s Draft 2 Lulu print.

July
Focus month: Animatic. Which got extended, due to summer fun.

Non-focus things made:
• Swatched my insane nail polish collection.
• Helped manage my workplace’s move to a new place.
• Made Chase a hell of a cake for his birthday.

August
Focus month: Animatic, still. Which didn’t end how I expected. I decided to stop doing focus months.

Non-focus things made:
• Research for a friend’s Halloween costume.
• Ridiculous Adventure Time/Breaking Bad drawing.
• Modified a department store ball-jointed doll into a dryad.

September
•We bought a car, wtf.
• Built rig for San’s cape from Princess Mononoke.
• Wrote lots of TAG book 2

October
• Got my first hand tattoos
• Made Princess Mononoke costume.

November
• Worked on a thing I hope to show you guys soon.
• Made a ridiculous cake

December
• Shot photos of cats in both old west and Avedon’s In the American West styles as presents.

So, a decent amount of things, I think? And through all of it, trying to keep my nails sick.

Not a bad 2012, let’s hope for more in 2013!

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

Only ten days left in the month and I’ve only two of my hoped-for four eyepiece things done.  That is fine! Now that TBA (a ten-day art fest that we went to almost every day) is over I can hopefully whip them out.

The first one I wanted to go as far away as I could from steampunk-ness.  It’s a costume piece, not a useful one, but I like it.  I had endless fun creating the density of surface embellishment.

There’s movement to the red lens, at least, which I like.

The second piece is super useful and more utilitarian.

It magnifies like a badass.

Chase took all the pretty pictures and if you click through to Flickr there’s a quick summary of what materials are in each one.

Anyway, here’s the thing.  I made these to make them because I like to make things.  But I don’t want them.  Do you want them? I’m thinking $25 each (which includes shipping) to take these dang things off my hands.  Each one took about a complete day of work to put together, so that’s a stupid good deal. No takers and I’ll toss them up on Etsy.

Update: The feather one is called for!
Update 2: The magnifying one is called for!  Do not be sad, I will hopefully have two more by the end of the month!

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

This month is my birthday month, so the focus is going to be something I am so all about: nails.

Sometime between 2006-ish, when I was still scared of the makeup aisle and spent evenings pretending I wasn’t following white rabbit hyperlinks about drag, false lashes, makeup and hair falls to the summer of 2009 when I started painting my nails about once a week (though I didn’t start doing it regularly each week for a while), I got over it. “It” being my gender presentation and self-perception. Which is so complicated and all I want to do is explain why getting my nails did is so important to me. Like, Jo’s hair in Little Women important. It’s the thing I’m vain about.

Anyway. I like bling. I like shiny things and the LA look and the crumbs of makeup that I still carried from the mandatory girl-kit of my late teens included a pair of silver false lashes. This month is about nails, not lashes, I know, stay with me. Lashes and nail polish both are something that complete a character, when you’re acting or in an editorial. They’re more decidedly costume and they can be fabulous. And I figured out I could do fabulous. That wasn’t girly, when I still cared about if something was girly, it was just fancy.

I literally dipped my finger into painting my nails. I used to use a little mobile internet thing and grew out the nail on my index finger a bit so I didn’t have to use the stylus. The rest of my nails I kept very short. I started painting just the longer nail, for strength and because it was fancy.  Sometimes I would do them up a little more for events.

Early summer 2009 Chase and I were in a new apartment, a place with no memory of former roommates, I was figuring some stuff out myself and part of that was a style direction that sort of wove the sunshine fashion of 1980s Miami with the rather sick street looks of LA. I found a blog called The Boobs (now over at The Boobs LA) that would post image dumps of hella nails did, with 3D pieces and sick bling. A couple months later, I was already starting to amass a collection of polish. It helps that Chase is a total enabler.

And now, almost two years later, I’ve been doing my nails every week. I’ve grown them out crazy long on my non-dominant hand, learned to square a femme habit with the rest of me and fallen in love with the tiny canvases that adorn my hands. I have dozens of nail polish colours, an airbrush and a legit obsession. My nails may now be trimmed down now for boxing, but they’re still fab.

So. This month I’m focusing just on the thing that I think I love the most. I want to do at least four different sets of art nails on acrylic tips and get shots of them, like extreme versions of ones I’ve done for friends.

I have a nerdy thing I do where I screenshot nails in a film and then try to replicate them. I’ve already done Ginger’s nails in Casino and I’ve got a file of stills of Nomi’s nails in Showgirls that I need to delve into. Any tips as to other notable movie nails would be awesome.

Other than that it’s kind of up in the air. It’s gonna rock. Local friends who’ve been wanting their nails did should shoot me a line for surely.

Now for the kind of impressive grid o’ nails did from my Flickr:

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

So, I did not miraculously turn our apartment into a perfect, finished home in one month. I AM NOT MAGIC. All I have been told are lies.

However, it is pretty much at a point where people I know and love can come over and I know they aren’t judging me. I am not where I could host, like, craft night or something yet because I was raised a certain way. And that way means that a house with a pile of unshelved books and not enough hangers for the coats so a bunch are still in a box or whatever is something that you should be ashamed of. Ongoing house goal is to get it where I can have a birthday party. The Ikea trip for a million bookshelves will happen by then.

But! I sewed the things I bought the fabric for!! Which is awesome. I did not meet some of my secondary sewing goals, but one of the whole points of this damned focus month exercise is to remind myself that I am not a machine. Just because I have more time in my day from not commuting does not mean every minute must be spent doing. I just sat and watched a show yesterday afternoon. On my day off! I wasn’t even like, sewing buttons at the same time.

ANYWAY. The house. The first room done was the bathroom, because a lot of time is spent in there and you are a captive audience for all the little things that are yet undone. (all these pictures click through to Flickr, where there are notes and more commentary and more images).

Then I sewed and installed the curtains. Which? Made all the difference in the living room. I like my curtains. They are sexy. Do not mock me.

The kitchen is what I focused on next, since I realised the living room still had a ways to go. I like our kitchen a lot. I’ve been cooking in there like a person in a movie. Being in the kitchen does not fill me with hatred because there is no space!

So, things I didn’t get to, and will be poking at as I go over the next month:

• Linen napkins, but not my fault, they were out of the fabric I ordered!
• Reupholstering chairs, for both time reasons and because I keep losing my hammer.
• Drapery over the bed, because we will have a princess bed, dammit, but I’m waffling over approach.
• A holder thing for arm warmers. I have a lot of arm warmers.

So, really, I did good! I’ll post tomorrow with April’s focus. So excited.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.