Inspiration Friday!

Let's start the weekend off right:

awesome puppy hat
Originally uploaded by .elsie*cake.

Aw, yeah. Interestingly, this inspired me to create a crocheted hat for Buster, which he stubbornly would not wear, and I have no photos of. Great. But I do have a picture of Topanga in a similar hat I made just for her:


☆ Over at The Bloggess, a true story about trying to sell a camera on Ebay.



As seen on the Dooce Daily Style site, Obsessive Consumption!
Which is a blog!
And a really neat looking book that went straight to my wish list. This book combines so many of my favorites: line drawings, obsessive recording, and shopping.

☆ And speaking of obsessive consumption, http://www.jumblebag.com/ is offering $5 bags of...mystery. I'm intrigued, and a little scared. What good can come out of a $5 bag? I'm also fool enough to try it. Although I haven't (yet).

I don't even have words for this:

Hand embroidered Robert Smith pillow
Originally uploaded by Giggly Mama & Fam

Okay, I have a few words. Awesome. I want!

Have a great weekend, everyone! Go forth and make stuff!

Maker Faire Recap Part Two: The Goods

If you're not into caffeine and sleep deprived indie consumerism, you may just want to skip to something else. Like...this photo! Of a pug in a hat! Aw, cute.

Okay, onto the scores.
There was SO MUCH good stuff this time around!

From the Plush Team table, I snagged my very own Moon Buns! I have been wanting one for soooooo long. Why did I wait? They are wonderful, people. And as you can see:
They make very nice Chickenpants companions.

Also from the Plush Team, I got my very own ZFLA creation. It is possibly the world's cutest cashmere bunny:

Forgive my crummy photo of it. I seem to be photographically challenged today.

I won't even show you the photo I tried to take of the brand new Ryan Berkley portraits. It simply does not do them justice.
So check out this one from his Etsy shop:

This, sadly, is not one of the ones I picked up, though I certainly would have, had I seen it. I did snag a brand new, not even on Etsy yet portrait of two kittens in 70's tshirts.
I met David Malki of Wondermark, and he happened to be offering $1 sketches. How can someone pass up something like that? I certainly couldn't:

Pollyanna Cowgirl, one of my very favorite jewelry designers, was there with a table full of goodies like this:

How did I miss this piece? That's what happens when you zoom around in a sleep deprived haze.

I met the folks behind (ha. ha.) Bunny Butt Apothecary, too. For the record, they are super sweet and charming. But. Their stuff. Oh my gosh, I'm in love. I am a lip balm snob. I have really, really dry lips, and sadly a lot of lip balms just make things worse. Not so with Bunny Butt! It actually hydrates! And you don't need to reapply it every hour. Nice.

They also have a non Etsy store, if you prefer. **Non Maker Faire related question: what would you think of a Non-Etsy Chickenpants shop? Leave a comment below!**

And finally (though I know I am forgetting many, many awesome things and talented people, and I am sorry!), the most awesome thing ever:

THAT, my friends, is an Amy Sedaris Cross Stitch pattern. Oh yes.

Maker Faire 2010 recap

Annnd I'm back. Maker Faire was great this year! (Of course, it's always great!) It was wonderful to meet so many of you in person, and to meet a whole bunch of new folks.
It was a different sort of experience for me this year, as I was helping out with the giant Plush Team booth, instead of manning my own table:

And boy, was it fun!
I didn't get a chance to take a whole lot of photos, but here's a few highlights.
There was an amazing little steampunk carnival, with hysterical games.

The above picture is of the post-apocalyptic rifle game.

There were art cars! Like this one:


New this year was this giant 1930's B movie style rocket. So cool.


If you're so inclined, there are plenty more photos on my Flickr page. And even a video of a freaky, freaky creature.

Chickenpants at Maker Faire THIS WEEKEND!

I'll be there, Chickenpants in tow, as part of the Plush Team booth! If you're anywhere near Northern California, I heartily encourage you to come by. It's a really amazing fair. And, since I am lazy, here's what I posted on http://theneedle.org:


In case you didn't already have a good enough reason to head to San Mateo this weekend, how does this sound?

• Ongoing FREE plush making classes taught by pros!



• Shop the plush goodies of 30 incredible creators in one spot!



• Meet 8 amazing plushiers in person! Not holograms!

And it's all happening THIS WEEKEND, May 22 & 23rd at the San Mateo Fairgrounds.



For details about the classes and other stuff, visit the Plush Team's own site.

For details on Maker Faire (hours, location, etc.), visit Maker Faire's site.

Be there or be square! And not in a cute squishy way.

LOST Chickenpants...part two!

I'm never one to leave well enough alone. A second batch of LOST Chickenpants simply had to happen. After all, there was no Desmond! No Claire! No Sun or Jin! How could I live with that? So I had to remedy the situation. And here they are!
Click on their names to find out more about them.

Hurley! Again! Yes!


Mister Eko!



Desmond, all cleaned up.


And Desmond, all scruffy and sleep deprived.



Aaron! And Claire!


Walt! He is tiny!



Sun and Jin.

I couldn't bear to break these two up, so they're a set.

Another set! This time it's the Man In Black(pants) and the Smoke Monster.



Can't have dark without light, or vice versa, so here's Jacob.


Sayid, gone dark!


Miles!


Libby!



And finally:

Oh yes, Jim LaFleur.

Floundering.

Hello, hello!
It seems like all I do on this blog lately is apologize for the lack of consistent posts, so I'm going to take a break from that today.
(sorry!)
So close.

I'm working on a few different projects right now, and Maker Faire is this weekend. (Yay!)
I'm creatively shifting gears, and good dog almighty, is it ever time consuming.

I read somewhere that in order to be a good comics artist, you needed to create 500 pages of pure drivel first. This really freaked me out. I always held in my mind the idea of someday, maybe drawing comics. But 500 pages of garbage just to get started? Yikes! That would take forever.
At the San Francisco Zine Fest, I talked with many real comic artists. I confided my 500 pages fear to one of them. He said "Oh, no. 50 pages of crap should do it."
So that's where I am. Churning out 50 pages of crap.
Are they comics? No, not really. Maybe. Sort of. I don't know yet.

The point to this self indulgent post is: indulge me. Bear with me, and hopefully I'll have something neat to show you in about 40 pages or so.

Inspiration Friday!

Here's a dollhouse version of Bilbo Baggins's hobbit hole:

You can check out the details & backstory here. And I suggest you do. Because: it's ah-maze-zing!

In other tiny, amazing news, check out this environment made by the famous Elsita:

You really need to click over there and check it out. Each piece was made by her, and oh! the tiny details! It truly is a work of art.

This culinary gem comes courtesy of the delightful Bumblesweet on Flickr:

If putting sprinkles on something unexpected isn't inspiring, I don't know what is! (Although, it may just be inspiring me to eat more sugary treats...)

Have a great weekend, everyone!

In which there are distractions

You may have guessed by the lack of recent posts that I am Up To Something.
Or maybe you interpreted the lack of posts as Procrastinating About Something.
Both theories are right.

Yes, I am Working On Something I Can't Tell You About Yet, Because If I Do It May Not Happen. It is time consuming, and it's the blog that suffers. Among other things.

Also, I've had a husband home sick from work for the past two days, and if that's not distracting, I don't know what is.

In lieu of a closing paragraph that ties this whole post together, allow me to offer you the following:

I drew it. For you! (Or for my own amusement. Who can say?)

The LOST Chickenpants

Just in case you haven't seen them already:
I finally completed my Lost project! I wanted to make a tribute to the show that's chewed up so many hours of my life:

I took them all to a local park for a photo shoot. It's as close to an island as we're going to get over here.

I carefully picked the fabric and accents for each individual Chickenpants to best capture the spirit of that character. I then carefully applied "dirt" to each one (not real dirt, just pastels), because we hardly ever see these guys clean and tidy unless it's one of those sideways flashes which I wish they would hurry up and do something with, already.

Actually, J.J. Abramspants and Richart Alpertpants do not have any dirt on them. Why? Because J.J. Abrams doesn't strike me as the sort to get dirty. And Richard Alpert always seems fairly tidy and well kept, too. What's with that?
In total, I made 11 characters. There are so many more I'd like to do, though!


You can see a meeelion more photos of them in their very own Flickr set.

Inspiration Friday!

I've been a bad blogger lately. What is it about coming back from a vacation? Seems like you need twice as long as you were gone to get back to normal.
Anyway: Inspiration Friday!

As many of you know, I have both a tortoise and a hare living with me. I've been asked on occasion: "Do you race them?" Sometimes I'd like to. I wonder how they'd react to each other. It probably wouldn't be as cute as this:

Image via Cute Overload!

An adorable little distraction: Kawaii Not. It's a webcomic of "cute gone bad". It's pretty cute. I'd embed one here to show you, but she doesn't offer that. And I'm too lazy to do it the other way right now.

The newspaper blackout poems of Austin Kleon are fantastic! He recently published a book of them which I am dying to get my mitts on. Check out his blog for a healthy swig of word goodness.

Can this count as our hilarious video of the week?

You can make your own! That makes this inspiration, yes?

She was a showgirl...

Apologies for the complete and utter lack of posts this week. I'm not sure if it's allergies or what my problem is, but I feel like I've been run over by a bus that was carrying sleeping pills instead of humans. Good times.
Anyway!
I recently completed a custom Chickenpants, and I think you might enjoy her. Behold the splendor that is
CHICKITA MIRANDA CHICKENPANTS!

Making her involved lots of glue gun seared finger tips, but it was so worth it.

She's number 347! We're getting perilously close to 350 Chickenpants, people.


Scandalous!