Scribble Nation

U is for Unconditional Love

Last night:

Scott: My feet are really thick, don't you think?
Mary: Yup. You got that right.
Scott: Do you think they're too thick? Like they're freakishly thick?
Mary: Yeah, it's like someone took a normal sized foot and then squished it down.
Scott: Wha?!!
Mary: Condensed foot.
Scott: Mah! Fah! Gah! I can't believe you! Are you serious?
Mary: Yeah, it's like what they used to do to ancient Chinese women.
Scott: ...grumble grumble ...
Mary: Foot binding!
Scott: I hate you.
Mary: HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH MWA!!A! AHHAHAHAHAHH

Being in love means being brutally honest, right? Or at least exaggerating your partners short comings for laughs.

T is for Tuesday

Tuesday is lots of things. For one, it is the name of a new blog I like to lurk at: Done By Tuesday. It is also the day I usually go for drinks and crafting with my girls from the Scissor Squad. Tuesday is also the day I go to the farmer's market (if I go) and get yummies like local honey, fresh veggies and bread. Tuesday is one of the nicer days of the week since it is not so bleak as Monday, but not so hyper as Friday. Some people take pictures of themselves on Tuesday. [Insert snappy closing line here.]

S is for Swap!

And this rant is about swaps. :)

OK, so as you may or may not know, I've had some bad past swap luck. This bad luck has been pretty much continuing recently. I don't think that the particular folks I am implicating are going to read my blog, so I'm going to go ahead and rant. First of all, you remember the Fosters swap Coco I made? And the pin cushion and dog coat... Well, my partner sent without a DCN# and now the package has mysteriously vanished in transit. Yup - that's my luck! I spent hours and hours on that swap. But what can you do - art is about the process, right? Not the result.

Next was the feminist swap. This was really a challenge. I didn't have a whole lot of info on my partner. She didn't have a blog, her answers to the swap questionaire were very concise, and she wasn't very communicative. So I did the best I could to try and make things I thought she might, personally, enjoy. The requirement was pretty big - 1 large item, 1 medium sized item, and 2 small items. Here is what I made her:

For a small item I made her a two disc mix of female musicians. I also put it in this swanky, quilted CD case. She loves Leonard Cohen, Ani Difranco and the Indigo Girls so I made a nice chunky granola, hairy legged woman mix with plenty of Cohen covers. Vienna Teng, Brandi Carlisle, Tori and more!

The second small item was a set of note cards, monogrammed and fitted with feminist quotes:

For a medium item I made her this "stone cold fox". She has a little Venus symbol on her scarf and since my partner was into organic gardening, I glitzed the piece up with some vintage floral jewelry.

I was really stuck for the large item. I ended up using a piece of embroidery that I had made some time ago. I added a feminist quote, cut it out, made a handbag, and appliqued it to the bag.

Phew! I wonder what I'll get?

This arrived on Thursday. It is a small wooden box, painted gold. There are sticky rhinestones on the top. (half of which fell off on the way here since they aren't even glued down)

The inside has fuzzy leopard foam placed inside it as a lining (I say "placed" because this is not attached either) It was filled with tampons and a bar of lush soap.

I'm thinking that this might constitute a flake - don't you think? We were supposed to make four crafted items, not one. And to boot, she had my stuff for over a week without ever saying a word. I finally emailed her to ask her if everything had arrived. Then she said yes and thanked me, but still never posted on the boards or ever took a picture! WTF?

ANYWAY, I was beginning to think that my swapping days were over. Obviously I am swap cursed and should just get over that fact and stop doing these stupid things. I was almost at that point when I saw Mary Frances's package in my mailbox. During this swap I asked specifically to be set up with another adult. I felt kind of like a jerk doing that, but I figured it might up my chances of not getting swap-screwed. No offense to 16-year-old America intended, but I REMEMBER being 16 and let me tell ya, I was not reliable. I was also not the crafter I was at 16. My skills are much improved. I know there must be legions of 16 year old craft prodigies out there - I don't mean you guys! But the rest of your age group don't make great swap partners, sorry.

But back to the point! My swap partner for the pin cushion swap has totally redeemed swapping for me by sending me this AMAZING pin cushion. Mary (her name is Mary too) actually went to my blog, learned about me, wrote to me, and thought about me when she made this project!! AND the project she made is so skillfully crafted and so creative that I am just totally and completely blown away. I was kissing it in the car on the way to the Scissor Squad's annual yarn swap. I showed every girl there my lovey little octi. They all agreed he was the bee's knees!

The detail on this piece is awesome! Mary even made custom pins from shrinky dink - 4 little Beatles faces, a blue meanie, a yellow Beatles character and a pretty sparrow!

And check out the suction cups!

Thank you SO much Mary!! You made my day and made up for lots of bad swaps all at once! This little guy is so thoughtful and well made, I love love love him!!

R is for the Return of The Daughter of Rocket Babe

The Tea Towel Swap continues and I again, found myself stitching one of my pin ups! I think that this one translated a little better than Suzy Submarine did. What do you think? Am I getting any better? The eyes are still a bit out of control. Third times a charm, right?

Here she is in her original picture form:

Here she is in stitches:

Q is for Questions

Thought I was done with this alphabet nonsense, didn't you? No such luck. We still have 9 more letters to go after this!

Anyway, Q is for questions. Any and all questions. Relevant, irrelevant, cheeky, silly, serious or just plain sick. I'm an open door, and someone lost the key a while back. I'd like to invite any and all guests, lurkers or passers-by to ask me a question. I'll do my best to answer anything you come up with. PLUS - I'll go to your blog (if you have one) and ask you a question of my own. So come on! Let's play tag!

P is for Phone Books

An open letter to the phone book companies:

Dear Phone Book Giver-Outer,

Please stop leaving piles of phone books on my door step. It's not that I don't appreciate your generosity. I know it takes a lot of care and hard work to create the endless listings that compose a phone book. To repeat the process six more times just so that I could be sure of having at least one phone book for every room in the house? What thankless generosity!

But seriously, this has got to stop. To be honest, I don't really ever use phone books. If I need a phone number I just  Google the damned thing. Believe it or not, it's actually QUICKER than: locating which of the 6 books is most likely to have the correct information, figuring out which room that particular book is in (remember we are supposed to have one book for every room in the house), thumbing through the book looking for the applicable category, THEN sliding my finger down the neatly alphabetized list until I reach the actual number. I realize that there are plenty of people who prefer phone books or do not have online access. That's all well and good for them, but why not limit your phone book patrol to those residents? Or leave a pile at the grocery store for willing people to pick them up? Why leave piles of phone books on every porch in the world every single year only to have them all discarded one year later? (IF they make it that long?) It seems awfully wasteful to me.

Phone Book Giver-Outer, I'm beginning to think you have an ulterior motive. Could it be that you are wasting the trees, energy, space and time of the world only to make a quick buck on advertising? Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for quick bucks, money-making schemes, and good honest business, but consider this:

-On average, 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees
-One phone book weighs about 5 pounds. I received 5 books this year, totaling 16 pounds of book.
-In my small town, the population in 2006 was: 26,985 - Lets assume that an average home has 3 people.
-That would give Newtown, CT about 8,995 homes.
-This would mean that 143, 920 pounds of phone books were delivered in one town alone, this year.
-That's almost 72 tons of paper equaling 864 trees.

The massive amount of resources that go into leaving PILES of phone books on EVERY porch in my small town alone is just ridiculous. Imagine these numbers on a city scale? And remember, this happens EVERY year. Seeing the giant dumpsters overflowing with phone books from the previous year just makes me sick. There is no reason that a company that has everyone's phone number can't take a telephone poll for people who WANT a phone book. Or, as I suggested earlier, phone books could be made available in grocery stores or libraries for people to pick up. It is completely sick for massive resources to be spent on the creation and destruction of obsolete telephone directories on a yearly basis. And every year the number of phone books that they send gets higher!! How many blasted phone books does one home need? I can't imagine that the number of phone books in a household has any reason to exceed the number of people!

Stop sending me phone books!

Yours Truly,
Mary Helen

O is for OMG!

We are mooooooooooving! It's Official. S. Bobleo and I will be moving out of crap palace and into fancy new digs in nearby, Woodbury, in less than a month! For those of you who don't know about our sad living situation, the house we are in now is so poorly maintained that the windows have actually begun falling out. This is just the icing on a gigantic cake of problems this place has. I won't go on and on, rather I'll just sum it up with a neat bullet list.

• Uninvited creatures of the mammal and insect variety
• Unidentified odors which cannot EVER be eliminated
• An astounding variety of molds and fungi that could no-doubt entertain a science team for decades
• Zero insulation in walls, ceilings or floors
• Lead paint
• Holes in fireplace mortar
• See-through hardwood floors
• Peeling ceilings
• Disturbing crumbling and scurrying noises 
• Shower with an inconvenient habit of pouring water into kitchen ceiling light

In other words, this place sucks!! It seemed like Shangri-freaking-lah to the 21 year old me who took this as her first "on my own" home. Five years later the rustic charm has worn off and I can see that I am living in a crap hole. The trouble is that we haven't been able to find anything cheaper for the past couple of years. The prospect of facing another freezing winter in this shack seemed inescapable. That is, until we found out about what will hopefully be our new home! A friend of Bobleo's owns the duplex and is giving us a deal on rent for the empty side. It has three bedrooms, insulation, new windows and an acre of shared lawn that connects to several hiking trails in the back yard! We're tre tre excited. It's just a matter of working out the logistics and POOF! We're out of here!

So... moving isn't just about packing boxes and lifting furniture. It is also a great excuse to REDECORATE!! I have my eye on the whole place, but I'll introduce them to you all one at a time. My very first project, since it will be the easiest, is addressing the bathroom. Our current bathroom is streamline teal! S. Bobleo did the paint job just a few months ago. Our new bathroom will be lemon chiffon YELLOW. I'm talking walls, tiles, fixtures, EVERYTHING. It is like walking into a sponge cake. Our bathroom currently hosts my collection of cool rubber ducks. (Including two vintage ducks and one over-sized gigantic duck)  As much as I love my little feathered buddies I think that putting them into a yellow bathroom would just be insane. Yellow OVERLOAD. My plan is to use artwork, bath accessories and towels to provide accent colors that will hopefully draw the attention away from ALL THAT YELLOW. Here are the three schemes I've come up with so far. And btw there is a reason I didn't use lilac or purple - that would make me barf.

While I am leaning toward the Motor Home scheme, I have to tell you - our living room will already look a lot like that. Now that I see number two, Country Cottage, I'm inclined to point out that the red and pink would be used very very carefully. They would likely show up in small doses (on prints or something). Green would be the main player there. As far as Bamboo Chic goes, I would plan on scouring Ebay and some local thrift joints to find some 60's oriental kitsch with which to decorate this room. Maybe some bobble headed Siamese cats? Let me know what you think everybody!!

N is for Never

Never is what was
Not what cannot ever be
There is no such thing

M is for MARY!!

Helen, that is. That's my name, folks, DON't wear it out. It just happens to have been (is that grammatically correct? Happens to have? Hmmm.) my Grandmother's name and my Great Grandmother's name before her! It's a good solid name. It was the most popular name for almost 60 years before the hippies swooped in introducing names like Sarah and Sunbeam and what not. Mary got knocked down pretty quickly once free love and open mindedness came into fashion. But I'm still up there in the top 100. AND I've been reproduced in more ways than most other names. Maria, Miriam, Margaret... the list goes ON and ON. But nothing beats the orignal. MARY, bitches! Spell that shit out - it just gets hotter! M! (woooo eeeee!) A! (Damn!) R (R you serious?!?!) Y (Because I kick ass, that's why!)

L is for Licking Ice Cream Cones

S. Bobleo and I were eating our evening ice cream cones on Friday night and LOOK what happened!!

He was just licking away like usual when he saw this happy little face. I rushed him into the photo cube ASAP. Poor Bobleo soon began regretting telling me about this magic moment. He was forbidden to lick until I could get a nice shot. These two came out pretty well. He's had a knack for spotting nice images in everyday moments lately. I have to raid his camera phone for more examples.

I have been feeling rather lazy and listless this weekend. I spent a good deal of time doing nothing, but looking back, I actually did get a good deal accomplished. Scott and I picked up a couple of beat up from the feet up antique dressers this morning. I have my work cut out for me with these two pieces. They have gorgeous curved fronts, but they are scratched horribly and missing several handles. I'm planning on sanding them down to bare wood. After that I can see how the wood's grain looks and decide whether to paint them white and replace my headboard OR to stain them to match the color of my headboard. Or, I may just do one or the other and replace the headboard. I have big bedroom decorating dreams. I'll post my dreamy plans soon.

On top of our pickup, I have managed to keep the house clean all weekend, and even did  most of the laundry. Phew.  And believe it or not, I even got some crafting done! Seventeen new pairs of earrings will be going up into the shop over the next week or so.

I also made some headway on a super secret project for my feminist swap and finished a little art plaque I made a while ago. Originally the big space in the middle was blank. I never put it up for sale because I felt like it needed something. Last night something finally popped in to fill the void!

"A dream is a wish your heart makes." This manifested itself in my noggin while I was listening to Anya Marina's cover of Someday my Prince Will Come. Anya is one of many musical ladies I have been listening to lately. One in particular that I am really enthralled with is Priscilla Ahn. Only a short EP is available on Itunes, but I have totally fallen in love with it. I'll have to hit up a music shop and see if I can find more music in hard copy. "Dream" and "Rain" are my favorite songs on the EP. You know when a song just hits you in your gut the first time you hear it? I can't get enough. :P