Yay! I just had a phone call from the lovely people at the Pine Street Creative Arts Centre to let me know that they’ve added another Beginners Ceramics course this term. And since I’m on the waiting list, I get first dibs at the class! So I booked in. Starting next Wednesday, I’ll be learning “wheel forming” for nine weeks. I haven’t made anything with clay since, like, the third grade. This should be fun!
Category: Crafts
Craft projects of mine
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SSK Blog
Thanks to the efforts of Mary-Helen, the Sydney Sity Klickers have a new blog!
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Insufferable Know-It-Alls I Have Dealt With Today
- The woman who interrupted me while helping a customer select a pattern size and then blatantly contradicted my advice. The customer then turned to her as the authority, and I’m like, “SHE DOESN’T EVEN WORK HERE.” I finally had to actually shoo her away from the counter.
- The woman who interrupted while Michelle and I were discussing with another customer about former employee Mel and whether she’d had her baby yet. The Know-It-All was actually claiming that she remembered the baby’s due date better than the people who worked with Mel.
- The old biddy who actually chastised another woman’s children in the shop. I KNOW! Granted, the little brats were running all over the place and it was during the lunchtime rush, so patience was low all around. But she suddenly bursts out in her loud, bossy voice: “Children, I need you to be quiet and stop running around!” I was like, “Oh noooo she DI’INT!” It’s pretty much a cardinal rule that you don’t chastise somebody else’s kids, right? Especially when the mother is there? Because what you’re really saying is, “You’re a bad mom and you can’t control your rugrats.” I was so hoping she’d get a punch in the nose.
- The woman who interrupted me while telling the Knitting Clinic ladies about the prizes we’re going to sponsor at next year’s Easter Show, interjecting that she could tell me all the deadlines and who to get in contact with. I’m like, “I’m already in contact with them. From months ago. You know-it-all cow.”
- The woman who watched me doing an expense on our point-of-sale system and told me I was doing it wrong, that I needed to staple a bunch of receipts to the report slip. I love it when non-employees lecture me on store procedure! “Well, I’m the one that does the banking,” I retorted, “and I DON’T CARE if they’re on there, SO I’M NOT PUTTING THEM THERE.” And then I tore them up and put them in the trash. Yeah, I’d reached the end of my tether at that point.
And you know the best part? IT WAS ALL THE SAME WOMAN. (I’m sure some of you can guess. She’s my nemesis. But do not speak her name, for I fear her minions…)
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Star Wars Fabric
Oh hey, I just found the company that makes the Star Wars fabric Mom used in our quilt. Turns out they make quite a few other designs. Ours is called (appropriately enough) “Vader’s Revenge”.
Incidentally, we had a long chat Friday night about the whole licensing issue thing. Mom was admonishing me for even mentioning selling the quilt because the fabric had apparently come with a big warning that you weren’t allowed to use it in products for resale. That sent Rodd off into a tangent about end-user license agreements and whether they’re valid if you don’t sign anything (which of course Mom hadn’t). I said that I thought you were allowed to sell derivative works, like collages that included copyrighted pictures. (Turns out I was wrong.) So it looks like selling it would be out of the question in terms of legality. It just seems really odd to think that I have a personal possession that I wouldn’t be allowed to sell in a garage sale (or on eBay). But wait – I didn’t make the quilt. It was gifted to me. So I should be able to sell it, right? I didn’t “manufacture” any products “for resale.” (Just to clarify, I wouldn’t dream of selling it. This is just an interesting thought exercise.) I wonder if anybody’s contested this one in court yet…
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Episode III – Revenge of the Amish
Okay, so my mom’s been a quilter for a long time, and now that she’s not working full-time she’s had time to start cranking out quilts for everyone in the family. She told me a while ago that she was planning to make a wedding quilt for Rodd and me. About six months ago we had the following phone conversation.
Mom: Joe [her husband] and I were having an argument about your quilt the other day.
Me: Really? How weird. [Joe’s not a quilter.] What about?
Mom: Well, I had planned on making you a traditional-style quilt. But then we saw some Star Wars fabric in a store and he thinks you guys might like that better.
Me: [I can’t figure out what to do! I mean, DUDE, a Star Wars quilt? How cool would that be? But I don’t want to disappoint Mom. So instead I just hyperventilate into the phone.]
Mom: So I’m guessing you want the Star Wars thing then.
Me: Welllll… What if you used the Star Wars fabric but still did a traditional design? That would rock!
Mom: Yeah, that’s what I was thinkin’.So she started the quilt. I didn’t hear much about it except for the occasional disturbing “I don’t know if you guys are gonna like this…” comment. Apparently she spent the past few weeks pulling out all the stops to get it finished in time to personally deliver it on this trip. Last Friday as soon as we got them and their suitcases unloaded into the apartment, out came the quilt. Quite frankly, we were speechless.
Isn’t that the coolest, evillest patchwork quilt you’ve ever seen? The fabric was apparently printed as a tie-in for Revenge of the Sith, though what they thought people would do with it, I can’t imagine. I took more pictures.Here’s a side view. According to Mom, she hand-pieced the entire quilt top and then used her long-arm sewing machine to do the actual quilting.
This is a close-up of the central star motif. As you can see, she “fancy cut” all of the pieces to center the printed designs within them. (She also said this was a total bitch to do because the fabric wasn’t printed evenly.)
Here is a close-up of the “Vader helmet” pieces. You can clearly see the quilting lines looping all around the printed designs. (I can only imagine how time-consuming that was.) The orange sections are even more heavily-quilted, though I couldn’t get them to photograph very well. She said she used several thousand yards of thread on the thing.
And here are the pieces with the scary, glowing red eyes. It took me about ten minutes to realize that the word “REVENGE” also appears beneath the gothic “Vader.” I told Rodd that every morning when we wake up under this thing, we have to enact the “Noooooo!” scene from when Vader wakes up at the end.
Mom also likes to personalize her quilts in very subtle ways. In this corner, she’s actually worked “Love, Mom 2006” into the actual stitching. Can you see it? Another corner has our names.
All in all, I can see where you’d think the quilt was kind of, uh, disturbing. Me, I love it. Mom wasn’t a huge fan though, so she decided to make the backing fabric something completely different (so that we could turn it over if we were entertaining someone who wouldn’t find a Star Wars Darth Vader “flames of hell” revenge-themed quilt as cool as we do). So she used a really neat print of Chinese cranes against a black background. Also, for the bottom thread of the quilting she used a metallic gold thread that goes really nicely with the cranes.
I think Mom was well into the construction of the quilt before she started poking around on eBay and realized just how much Star Wars items go for. (I discovered this when she stopped complaining about the non-traditional-ness of it and started casually mentioning how many hundreds of dollars people would pay for “this stuff.”) But there’s no way we’re selling this beauty. I’m sure she’d be interested in hearing from anybody seriously interested in commissioning one though, so drop me an e-mail if you want.
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Tank Cozy
A Knitted Tank Cozy. Sheesh. That’s a lot of knitting. I need to get some Finished Objects happening myself!
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Rogue
Rogue sleeves are off the needles! I repeat, they are off the needles! Now I just need to block the damn things, supposedly.
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Creative Empowerment
I feel a surge of creative empowerment. The Pine Street Creative Arts Centre is just around the corner from my house and I’ve been thinking of doing one of their courses for ages. Anybody else interested in doing the Thursday night pottery wheel class with me?
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The Treesweater
The Treesweater. Awww, that really is sorta cute (in a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree kinda way).