Frustrating Monday

Walnut's Monday face.

I really thought that not working would mean Mondays were just like any other day -- no students grumpy about coming back to school after the weekend, no walking into the classroom to find my desks and chairs inexplicably rearranged by the football team using it as a lunchroom before the Saturday night game, no early morning meeting where the principal reads to us from a powerpoint instead of just sending out a memo -- but no, Mondays are Mondays are Mondays.

Here's a list of things that went wrong:

1. Ants invaded the apartment, again. We have a count going on our house whiteboard, like the kind they have at construction sites saying "days without an accident," and our board has been at zero since Friday. I spent all morning and a good part of the afternoon killing, cleaning up after, rediscovering, killing, and cleaning up again. 
2. When I finally got to sit down at my machine, I discovered that the tension is still messed up. The original repair cost almost as much as the original machine, and now I have another week of no sewing. 
3. I started making proofs of my linocuts, but as soon as I spread out the fabric paint, Walnut jumped up onto the desk. This meant cat hair in all of my subsequent prints. At least his dainty cat feet just missed landing in the paint, so no cat-paw printed carpet. 
4. The brayer I have isn't working for fabric printing, so I need to get a new one. 
5. After cleaning up the printing, I got to sit through an hour of traffic (to travel three miles!) to get to campus for a Joint Ventures barbeque. 

Monday wasn't all bad though; my husband was super sweet, and Walnut is super cute. The proofs turned out okay, considering I had the wrong brayer.

First try: not so good, especially on the larger mushroom block.

It's tricky to get the whole block printed evenly.

Getting better at it.

Started running out of paint when I got to the ship.

Geek Indulgence #3: Geeking Out (and more on printmaking)

I went so far as to buy vintage chem textbooks for pictures like this.

As far as I can tell, geeking out seems to be fairly common among geeks. That is, you find a new hobby/interest/obsession, then spend as much time as possible reading about it, researching, adding to one's knowledge/skills compendium, and possibly spending a lot of money on it (as budgets allow). This is what happened to me with sewing, with Dungeons and Dragons, with drawing manga, even with teaching chemistry. And it looks like the same thing is happening to me with linocuts, as I type.

After trying potato printing and realizing that it is amazing to be able to make the same image appear over and over, I decided I wanted to do something a little more permanent. After a couple days in the fridge, even tightly plastic-wrapped, my potato stamps were looking a little worse for wear, so I started poking around the web to figure out what the next level of obsession step up in fabric-printing is. Turns out it's linocuts, which I had actually done before for letterpressing. It's been a while, though, since I used my linocutting tools, so I had to dig around all my art boxes to find everything. I cut up the two blocks I had leftover, and the whole thing was so therapeutic that I immediately rushed out to the nearest Utrecht art store and bought a whole bunch of new blocks. And spend two days carving them all. And spend two evenings reading all about printing with them. And spent two nights dreaming about making new blocks. Kind of crazy, but it was so fun and actually very typical of me. Anyway, here are the results of the last three days of work!

A bacteriophage, an amoeba, and a squid.

A beaker, a distilling flask, and an Erlenmeyer flask.

A jumping/flying cat, fungi, and a sitting cat.

I have yet to make any prints with these blocks, but that's because I was waiting for my husband to put money on my laundry card (as a spouse of, and not an actual UCLA student, I can't do it myself, which is kind of annoying) so that I could wash the sheets I picked up at the thrift store for printing. But hopefully I'll get to that soon! In the meantime, here's how I cut these blocks.

1. Start with a linoleum block. They come in all different sizes, mounted and unmounted, and are pretty inexpensive (this tiny 2"x3" one was just a dollar!). I've seen them at Dick Blick and at Utrecht, but (at least here) they're cheaper at Utrecht. You'll also need a linocutting tool; I have this set from Speedball that has a handle with interchangeable tips.

Blank canvas and some ideas, sketched on fluorescent pink post-its.

The linocutting handle and tips.

2. Sketch your drawing onto the block in pencil, or if it's a more complicated design you can print it out and use carbon paper to transfer it. Just remember that the image will print backwards. Since all of my drawings are just pictures, and not words, it didn't really matter to me; all of mine were just drawn straight onto the block.

Pencil erases (and smudges) pretty well on these blocks.

3. If the linoleum is the really stiff kind, you'll need to warm it up before cutting into it.* Since it's still really warm in SoCal, I just put mine on the windowsill. I've also heard my letterpressing teacher say that she's put them in her car to bake, or just sat on them.

Like this, but the blocks are much sharper at the corners.

4. Start cutting! I like to use the tiniest tip to carve grooves right around the lines I want, then I use progressively larger tips to remove excess material.

Be careful as you're cutting -- if the lino's not warm enough, it's easy for the tool to slip and you can give yourself a nasty cut. Not that I would know...

Scraps from one block. I did a lot of vaccuumming with my tiny dustbuster.

5. After cleaning up all the scraps and brushing all the little flecks from my blocks, I tested them with a stamp pad. Note that the stiff linoleum isn't really meant to be used with a cheap little dollar store rubber stamp pad, so these prints are more just to see if the image is more or less right; it shows where you need to carve away more material to make the empty spaces or which lines are too thick.

*Note that the squid is carved in EasyCut linoleum, which is much softer and floppier, more like a rubber stamp. It is much easier to carve and doesn't require warming, but it is also much harder to do details and much easier to accidentally cut off bits you didn't mean to cut.

 
Next week: I promise I will actually make prints. On real fabric.

Geek Indulgence #2: Books

I have moved almost every year for the last ten years. It's a pain every time, to go through all of my belongings and wonder how I ever accumulated so much, sort and pack, and then load into some type of vehicle for transport, then unload at new residence and unpack, resort, and put away. Goodness, it makes me tired just thinking about it. But through it all, despite the hassle, I've adamantly kept and added to my collection of very heavy books. My husband may protest (but I tell him he has no grounds since I deal with all of the boxes of books myself), our movers may secretly hate me, and others may just plain not understand, but I love my books.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning said it best:
"No man can be called friendless who has God
and the companionship of good books."

I was a little offended by the new iPad commercials (despite my actually owning one) that talk about how much better an iPad is because you can fit so many, still bookmark and highlight, search, etc...but one thing the iPad can't do is replicate the smell of books, the texture of the pages, and the impressive display that they make on a bookcase. I love being able to look over at my 5x5 Expedit and see all my books out; it's like looking through a photo album of one's dear friends. Wow, I sound like a geek.

No, but seriously, my books are indeed my friends. When I was in elementary school, I had a significant lack of like-minded friends. Sure, I had friends who I would hang out with on the playground, but it was only because they had no other friends either. And being friends because no one else wants to be around you does not a strong friendship make. So eventually I figured this out (and also got over my feeling that I should be like everyone else and run around the yard) and began bringing books out with me during recess. In middle school, I would scarf down my lunch so that I could go back up to Mrs. Allen's room to read in the back. In high school, during my free mods I would go to the library and hang out there with a book (the Lowell library has the best old book smell, hands down). When I was lonely every time I moved to a new place, I would reread my favorites, and coming upon familiar passages brought the same rush of joy that comes with seeing a familiar face.

Beautiful embroidery by Crafster PirateColey.

When I'm out of sorts and I feel like I need a good cry, I pull out my guaranteed tear-jerkers (the end of The Time-Traveller's Wife or Where the Red Fern Grows, the part in Deathly Hallows when Snape says "Always," when Lyra leaves Pantalaimon in The Amber Spyglass; I know, I'm such a sucker for these types of scenes). One of my big dilemmas is always whether I should reread an old favorite, or venture into the unknown to discover a new one.


I really have my dad to thank for my love of books; every night, growing up, he would read to us from our actually fairly significant library of kids books. I still associate the hardcover Disney Cinderella book with him, and he says that he even began calling me Cindy because I loved that book so much. We were fortunate that the library was walking distance from our house, because that meant that as soon as we were old enough to cross the street on our own, we could trek to the library and bring back the maximum, twenty-one books. I guess my dad knew what he was doing, since a library trip pretty much guaranteed absolute quiet in the house for at least two days. Unfortunately, it also guaranteed no chores being done and staying up late under the covers with a flashlight. If he wanted to run errands quickly and didn't want to find someone to watch us, he'd drop us off at the bookstore so that the newest arrivals could babysit us. The worst threat was always "Or else no more reading!" This obsession with reading led to the three major blots on my pre-high school academic career -- an F on a spelling test in third grade (I didn't even realize a test was going on because I was reading a book about pirates) and my only two detentions in middle school (both times I was reading a book under my desk instead of paying attention).

One of my favorite things about moving is getting to go through my bookcase and look at each book, remembering what I loved about it, when I first read it, and what significant life events are connected to it. A new apartment never feels like home until my books are back in their rightful places in the bookcase. I love our current apartment partly because its layout means that my books are prominently on display, as opposed to tucked in a corner. Inspired by GeekDad Jonathan Liu's map of his bookcases, here's mine:

Some of these cubbies are almost primarily gifted by friends, some are thrift store and library sale acquisitions, and a few are the actual books that I carried around with me as a nine year old.

 My husband knows that if he wants to never hear from me again, he just needs to drop me off in a bookstore. I think he's more or less resigned to finding books in random places -- not just my nightstand or the coffee table, but also on top of the microwave (so that I can maximize time and stir risotto while reading) and taking up valuable real estate around our tiny sink (toothbrushing time is prime reading time!). Hopefully, when we have kids, I can inspire this same love of reading as my dad did for me. Although I promise not to confuse a bookstore with a babysitter.

Geek Indulgence #1: Apparel

According to the Speak Out With Your Geek Out, there are some things you can do to SOWYGO when you're offline, too -- among them being to wear something geeky from your closet. I love this, since one of my favorite things about being a science teacher is getting to wear all manner of science-y tee-shirts. I have quite a collection, which may not be helpful for my closet, but makes me happy and certainly does start conversations when I wear them out into the real world. Here they are!

From Threadless:

"Planetary Status"

"Lab Partners"

"Tasty Table"

"We Are Made of Carbon"

From ThinkGeek:

"Sweetheart"

"Mordorable"(Okay, this is LOTR geekdom, not science, but still!)

"The Solution"

 From Six Dollar Shirts:

I always have to explain that I'm a chemistry teacher, and not a terrorist.

I love this because I actually love learning about gold rush era diseases (epidemiology geek!) more than Oregon Trail.

And from The Nerdiest Shirts:

LOL-catted Schrodinger's cat, which incidentally always makes me a little sad because the cat might be dead :(

When the amazing Casey Brown of Casey's Elegant Musings did a series on people's cherished collections, I remember thinking that I didn't really have any good collections. Well, now I realize I do; it's just not particularly vintage! On the sad, sad day when I'm too old to wear screen-print tees (is there such an age?) I will make these into a cherished tee-shirt quilt.

Speak Out With Your Geek Out

With my sewing machine in for repairs this week (I don't get it back until Friday afternoon, waaah!), it's pretty much the perfect time for Speak Out With Your Geek Out week. I can talk about geeky things without being distracted by *gasp* actually doing my geeky hobbies. As described on the SOWYGO website:

Take a stance against baiting nerd rage and stereotypes of geeks. Post about how much you love your geeky hobbies or vocation from Monday, September 12th, 2011 to Friday, September 16th on your blog, website, social media account or in a forum somewhere...Let's show the world why we're awesome and why there is nothing wrong with being a geek.

Let me just say that I really, really, really, really, really love how it is now so much more okay to be a geek than when I was growing up. Teh interwebs is an amazing thing, you know, what with being able to Google and Wikipedia anything, and Facebook nullifying high school reunions and all, but my favorite thing about it is how it brings together people who thought they were the only one into [fill in the blank with your particular interest/hobby]. I think of my elementary school years, and contrast it with this story, and it gives me warm fuzzies to know that the internet can foster things other than creepers, stalkers, spammers, and dwindling attention spans.

I've said before that I have a lot of very specific interests, and they're not always ones that other people understand. As a kid, my love for dinosaurs, Star Wars, and Legos didn't necessarily match up with my classmates' views on "suitable" interests for girls. As an adult, things are better, but there are still plenty of people in my life who are perplexed by or even contemptuous of my desire to sew my own clothes, dress up as various characters when it's not Halloween, and learn all about the Civil War. But that's okay, though, because I love being a geek. It's also totally worth it to be able to answer random questions when they happen to come up in normal conversation (like "What is a carpetbagger anyway?" albeit at the risk of sounding a little too much like young, know-it-all Hermione).

My idea, not his!

I must confess, too, that I love the feeling of breaking people's female stereotypes when they ask whether my husband got me into playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I get to tell them that no, I got him into it. 

Some cynical people think that teachers become teachers so that they can relive their high school glory days, or maybe get back at all the students that made their own school career miserable. That's probably slightly true, to some extent, for every teacher. Well, one of my favorite things about being a teacher is getting to foster an interest in learning (I know, how cliché), but especially in the kids who are on the fringe because the school, ironically enough, emphasizes sports over academics.

I know that as a nerdy kid, I truly appreciated the teachers who gave me a haven during recess/lunch and encouraged me to read as much as I could, instead of learning to throw a koosh ball or dribble a basketball. At my last school, which was seriously almost like a caricature in its obsession with football, I loved being able to pass on the favor and open my classroom during lunch to the geeky/nerdy kids who actually cared about learning and asking questions, or even just geekier entertainment like playing MTG and watching The Big Bang Theory.

Bacteria RPG, anyone?

It made me so happy when kids said that they knew my classroom was a safe place to play Pokemon cards, or that I was the teacher who would lend them a copy of Ender's Game, or that it was totally okay to use my board to map out a potential new app or RPG they wanted to develop. When I left the school to move to LA, these kids (also on the newspaper staff, of course) warmed my heart still further with their tribute.

I know these kids are going to go on to do great things in the fields of physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, and music one day, and I'm thrilled that I had the privilege of playing just a small part in encouraging them and letting them know it's okay to be a geek.

Potato Printing Is Addicting!

I seriously want to potato print everything now! It's amazing what you can do with a 59¢ giant russet! The design possibilities are unlimited! Okay I'll stop using exclamation points now.

Here's how I made my potato print fabrics.

1. Get a potato. Also come up with some tentative designs.

2. Cut the potato in half. Sketch your design onto the cut end with a pen (I used a rollerball ink pen to get it to show up on the juicy potato).

Note where I started drawing the ear, then decided that was too low.

3. Humiliate your expensive knives still further by using them to carve around your shape. (Oh, the continued ignominy!) I found it easiest to cut around the shape, then insert my knife into the potato at a quarter inch depth or so, and use it as a second class lever (the potato edge being the fulcrum) to fling potato pieces off. I though briefly about using goggles after I squirted myself in the eye with potato juice (I tell you, these were exceedingly juicy potatoes!), but decided that it's not like it's hydrochloric acid or anything. Although I guess potatoes do contain relatively large amounts of catalase.

I just used my fingernail to gouge out the stripes.

Here's my other stamp.

4.Test your potatoes out by stamping them on paper a couple times.

It took a couple of tries to get my ink spread evenly. Then it turned out not to matter since I liked the variance in texture.

5. Set up your printing station. I used an old plastic cutting board and a Speedball rubber brayer to spread out and apply the Tulip brand Matte Soft Fabric Paint in ebony. Since the fabric I was printing was pretty thin, I put wrapping paper underneath to protect my table.

Also pictured: laptop to play music and East of Eden as...inspiration?

6. Stamp away! Besides using the potatoes, I also used the non-writing end of a pen to add clusters of dots to one of my fabrics.

Here are the potatoes post-printing. I wrapped them in cling film and put them in the fridge to see if I can maybe squeeze another use out of them. No idea how they'll hold up, though.

I hung up the fabrics to dry. They need to wait 72 hours before laundering, but they don't require any heat-setting with an iron or anything. I kind of want to iron them anyway, just to be sure. Then I'll hem the edges and turn them into lovely gauzy hipster scarves. You know, the pretentious kind where you're wearing a t-shirt and sandals but also a scarf. Also giant hipster glasses. 

Every time I look at my fabric it makes me so happy! Cats everywhere! In other news, my sewing machine seems to have rebelled and started wonking up the tension on everything, so it looks like I need to take it in for a check-up. Boo. I guess it's time to start cutting everything in preparation for having it back.

The Hazards of Haphazard Sewing

Vincent Van Gogh, Drawing of a Woman Sewing

I think I know, now, why quilts are supposed to be these year(s)-long labours of love, involving many hours of sewing by the fire on the prairie while wolves howl outside your log cabin. I'm already getting sick of trying to applique my birds onto my quilt, and I'm not even stitching by hand! Trying to sew around all the curves and corners is definitely more time-consuming than I thought, and Walnut is not helping. He will insist on sitting on the rest of the quilt the minute I turn away, rendering it incapable of turning and rotating.

I am also learning why doing some research and planning before attempting projects might be a good idea. In the past, I've always just started on projects with minimal prep, and it usually more or less works out in the end. Well, apparently quilting doesn't work that way. The IKEA bedsheet I chose as the base (top?) of my quilt is extremely thin, almost sheer, which in itself is not a problem, except that it also has really loose weave. It reminds me almost of cheesecloth. So, all in all, not the sturdiest fabric to be zig-zag stitching all over; it's stretching and bubbling and getting relatively enormous holes in it as the thread pulls. I think it's still workable, especially since I'm of the "it's not a flaw, it's just character!" school of thought, but a little more foresight on my part would've prevented this unnecessary character. Also, I realized that I have no clue what kind of design to use for the actual quilting part.

I've been doing a lot of research on the amazing Leah Day's site, The Free Motion Quilting Project, and sadly just now realizing what an amazing, intense, creative art quilting actually is. I had no idea that quilts could be that cool! This makes me want to go to quilting shows and get quilting books and subscribe to quilting blogs and generally learn everything I can about it, but I do not need another hobby! So I'm going to learn what I can for now, just to finish off this quilt and my t-shirt quilt, and I'll try not to be tempted by this hmmm-that-looks-pretty-easy cat quilt.

After I finish the applique-ing, I think I'll take a break from this quilt and work on something for this week's Sew Weekly challenge: working with dyes, fabric markers, and paints! I have enough leftover from this IKEA bedsheet to make a fantastic light, gauzy scarf, which I want to stamp all over with cats, kind of like this example one. Because, you know, I'm not enough of a crazy cat lady as it is.

Only 485 pounds!

Speaking of cats in fashion, though, I came across these awesome cat flats that are, unfortunately, not that cute and ultra-expensive. I'm wondering if I might not be able to get some cheap black imitation-suede flats from Target or Payless (I'm sorry, but wearing thrifted shoes just feels squicky to me) and just embroider on a cuter cat face in gold thread myself. Gaaah too many ideas, too little time! Also, too many things to learn, as I've no clue how to embroider.