This is a MAGICAL AND BEAUTIFUL AND EXCITING picture that my friend Trisa and I made when we were in like... I dunno, 4th grade? SO GOOD. It's beautiful and I love it. The fact that she had it/found it again makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.
Those are horses playing in the hills... playing soccer. Ya know. I think that we did it by mostly tracing little bitty horse erasers that looked like this. Though it looks like at least one of them was hand drawn. The dinosaur looking one. CHILDHOOD WAS SO FUN.
Again, I'd like to reiterate that I like ceramics but am not a champion of them. That being said, I recently made this awesome mug at a crafty birthday party for my dear friends Sean and Audrey!
IT IS A MONSTER.
Normally it would have been a lie to say 'monsters in my coffee' like I did in the title (which I did because of the song "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon... 'clouds in my coffee' and all that), but I just got a french press and now I can make it! Success!
Anyway, it was a really fun party where we got to pick and paint our own pottery at The Little Shop of Crafts... so I naturally made a mug even though there is no room for any more mugs in my cabinet. Smart! It was great fun, regardless, with birthday shenanigans and wine and karaoke afterwards. The wine part may have effected my mug-painting skill set but how much is hard to say. Ceramic panting is tricky at the best of times - the paint doesn't look the color it will eventually turn out to be when you put it on, colors all look the same once their laid on the pottery, and there is no going back once it's done. YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH THE CHOICES YOU MADE, LAURA. That is unless you have a lot of time on your hands and are crafty about fixing it. Which I didn't and wasn't.
But my mug is a mug and it's pretty nice and I like it and I had a good 'ol time doing it with these monsters:
My roommate and I recently had a True Blood themed party which was really fun! It gave everyone a chance to dress up as who they liked best (I was Pam) and me an opportunity to wear a zebra striped, sequined, puffy one shoulder number that I could never wear in the real world for fear of looking like a damn fool. And I'm just slightly too practical for that.
In getting ready for it, my roommate thought that it would be fun to make posters of ourselves like the character posters that HBO did for the show to put on facebook, so she did hers on an older paintshop program and then tried to do one for me... but my skin is too ghostly white to look like anything and I just looked like a giant squid eye when she was done. So that we could match I had to take matters into my own photoshopy hands...
I was only going to work on it for, like, 15 minutes. I swear. And then suddenly it was an hour and a half later and I was still trying to adjust things until I went, "wait a minute - what the hell am I doing here still?" and stopped.
But in the end it kept making me laugh so I'm putting it on here for the world to enjoy:
Mine.
Not mine.
I'm not sure that this one really counts as art, but I made it on photoshop, so it probably does.
Plus during the party there was (among other things) a fun black light that made everything white, including my snazzy dress, glow in the dark!
I feel as though I should preface this post by saying that in my apartment a lot of singing and dancing occurs, but not like GOOD singing and dancing. Let's be clear - between the three of us living here there totally could be some good singing/dancing, it's just that usually there isn't. That is how we roll.
For example, there are dances done for the express purpose to creep me out and songs are based on the fact that any one of us is excited about the food we are eating/TV or movie we just watched. Childhood advertising jingles fall into play somewhere too.
That being said, I bet that just about anyone who lived through the 90's remembers this special song:
For some reason my roommate Sean was singing this song (not as strange an occurrence as you'd think) while I was reading The Hunger Games for the first time. We had already been discussing the merits of marrying someone who is an accomplished bread/cake maker (I have yet to see the downside), how the name Peeta was also bread (win), and one thing lead to another - taking this Bagel Bites song to a whole new level of AWESOME/TERRIFYING while swapping just one little word. Pizza for Peeta. Try it. Try it now.
The song stuck.
I've been singing it for months.
Which lead to:
Yup. I had to.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to draw a bagel? BECAUSE NOW I DO. Who would think that I little circle of bread would be such a pain in my ass...
I wasn't feeling my all time best yesterday, but I still managed to whip up this little gem. I sat at my computer coughing quietly to myself for about an hour for the express purpose that the rest of the world had a chance to laugh at what I laugh at on a regular basis. And to embarrass Sean. A whole lot of the reason that this exists is to embarrass Sean.
I hopefully haven't ruined books, song, pizza, TV, art, bagels, or Peeta for anyone. But if I did... whatever. I regret nothing.
I can't help but want to share this picture of my cat doing the classic "RAWWWWR,I'ma get chuu!" Halloween pose. She was *very* little here, but let me tell you something - she is still a monster. Don't you forget it. Meow.
I recently watched an old History Channel special on the history of Halloween and how it progressed through the ages. It went a little something like this:
Serious business with the Pagans and Druid priests → serious business adapting the Pagan/Druid rituals for Christianity → less serious, more fun times and parties and beginnings of costumes → serious business making it seeming less 'witchy' with those costumes for the church; slightly less serious business for the rest of the people still celebrating it. This happens for a while in Europe, while the Puritans head over to North America and take the fun out of everything → later, the masses immigrating from Europe (see also: Ireland, land of awesome Druid lore) start bringing the life of the party back to October 31st in America → things are fun for a while, still a mostly adult holiday, but teens start taking it to the streets and putting the 'trick' into trick-or-treat. And by trick mean fire → in order to not have people killed, Halloween is put fourth as a holiday where kids are really excited and cute and parade around in bumblebee/Buzz Lightyear/princess/Elmo/ Frida Kahlo/witch costumes and beg for candy. Halloween is no longer life threatening (except for that whole razor blades in apples scare in the 70s... but that was found to be mostly untrue) → those kids who grew up in Halloween-fun-era dress up their kids and take them out... but also want to go out themselves and pretend to be something their not. Like a raccoon. And the cycle continues.
Which brings us to this:
Some of us may be more excited than others to be dressed up. But only some
of us are raccoons. Suffer with that one pissed-off-cat-man... and sorry I tried to bite you.
Again.
EDIT: I had forgotten how very different it is for trick-or-treaters in the city versus upstate. Personally, I had the classic 'you dress up and your parents take you from house to house' or if I was lucky, I had the 'you dress up and your parents stand in the road so you can go up to the house alone'. My sister and I would take pillowcases as bags and tromp around with friends and neighbors, working our way through the town for maximum candy ownage. Here in the city though, people seem to either trick-or-treat strictly within their buildings (weird) or at businesses in their neighborhood (weirder). I mean, I suppose it's not REALLY that weird, but it is weird to me. Either way, I'm sure they make bank on candy. There are way more places/people around here then in my hometown.
Yesterday, before we knew that there was going to be an epically cold rainstorm/snowstorm, my friend Audrey and I were hired to make some costumes for a couple going out to a Halloween party. They wanted to be Infinity Nets by the artist Yayoi Kusama. They come in a variety of colors and styles, but we were working to make them look something like this:
Infinity Net, Yayoi Kusama
We used some metallic fabric paint and small brushes to essentially paint what would be the negative space in the paintings. We set up on the floor, mixed our paints, and went to work. The goal: paint one silk dress and one velvet suit jacket. I got the jacket, while Audrey worked on the dress.
I'm not going to lie: fabric painting on velvet is NOT THE FUNNEST TIME. You have to apply and reapply it as it sucks the paint in and THEN deal with all of the weird furry edges that are still left. All that we could really think about while painting this was how it kinda ended up looking like the SVA flower....
Audrey worked diligently with the dress, which was turning out really shiny and awesome. It also kinda looked like a stained glass window... and then an elephant. And then a fancy ball gown. And then mosaic tiles. We saw all kinds of patterns as the blue one went along.
FINALLY, about 7 and 1/2 hours later we had reached this point ↑ here. And that was where we stopped. It took so much longer to do than any of us thought it would, and they needed to wear them that evening, so we worked until it made sense to stop and still looked good, blow dried them, and called it a night. I think that they look pretty snazzy. And I never could have gotten it done without Audrey... not in a million years. THANKS GUY~!! We always go for the win.
