luxe

i had coffee and then packed orders and wound sock yarn, which i so hate doing, and suck at. amy hung out with me while i sighed and bitched about it. does anyone have any sock yarn winding tips?it is always mayhem when i do it. and takes an hour. or more.

this guy is listed on my www.luxe.etsy.com store…it is collage and acrylic and sealant on cork…

i read about this book on this amazing blog of a wonderful artist from glasgow, scotland. i immediately jetted over to amazon and to my surprise it was .53 cents. new. plus shipping of 4 bucks. are you kidding me? and there are more for cheap. she has more photos from inside of it on her flickr account, in addition to other gorgeous things. this is one of those people who i wish i was more like. regina is another one, she is like my overachieving sister i never had. one of those people that could do anything that they wanted to do. crochet michaelangelo’s david. or a princess leia punkin. whatever. amazing. and people that can design stuff…like thissy here chicky who sent me the gray ghost pattern! i am afraid to jack it up. although, i could just not tell her i was working on it until it was done. and acceptable. but i am a sloppy knitter. i am a sloppy everything-er. it is part of my charm(?).

what else, i followed a link from somewhere to someone’s blog who has a super-edgy kind of vibe to it, bitchy, i guess. and i have always considered myself to be really critical, but it is easy to be critical when you don’t know people or what goes into their work. and i found myself not thinking it was funny and being a bit upset by it. the girl is in college, i think, and i know it is just silliness, but i see her and other people cutting on knitty.com, virtually every single pattern or other places that provide free patterns and articles and a forum for knitters and more, and some people who i am blog friends with that are so awesome and creative and prolific and they do it for FREE. they have full-time jobs and do it because they love it. and i feel like even if you don’t like the patterns, don’t be evil. i have been known to be evil, but the knitting, spinning, dyeing, crafting, art community has been so remarkably supportive and kind to me, and have been the making of who i am today, and it offends me when people feel like it is ok to semi-publicly be cruel to them. if i buy a book and it utterly sucks…i may feel that i have a bit more of a right to bitch, although, i wouldn’t go that in-depth to cut them apart, especially not on my public blog. but these people work so hard…i dunno. i guess to me, it is like me giving you a gift, and you blogging “how it sucks hard in many different ways”. and let me say, it is her blog, she completely has the right to say whatever she wants about whoever she wants and i can just not read it, and i won’t, because while it is funny in some places, it is funny at other people’s expense, all the way through. rather than her letting her natural funniness just be about her life and what she is doing, it is just mean. i left a comment not on her blog, because as i said, it is her blog, i have no right to say anything negative to her, but another blog talked about it and i left a comment there, saying this, but way less, and i thought, “oh shite, i shouldn’t say anything.” but you know, she maybe really doesn’t know how hurtful these things are and that in a close knitting blog community, loads of people may just hate her guts, even though she may just be joking. you can’t unsay things. maybe it will never matter. and please, do not take this as me saying i don’t say mean things, i totally can be a bitch. but, there are cases when there is someone that i totally can’t stand online, that are just suck incarnate. and you know what? i don’t blog about them. maybe on a private blog i would, but not here. not where they could google and find it.

i got a bunch of stuff in the mail that i had ordered, which i will post pics of to-morrow. i am too lazy to do it now. sorry. some of it was vintage ephemera (otherwise known as old, dusty, musty paper and stuff) and there was so much of it that i was so excited that i was breathing fast maybe and my asthma always picks up around old stuff (a curse! i love old stuff and it makes me unable to breathe!) so by the time i got through all of it, my hands and arms and face were itching and i had that pre-asthma attack feeling in my chest. but there is some awesome stuff in there, which i will photograph and post. i swear. and origami paper that is so gorgeous. sigh.

the strange thing about the asthma is that as a kid, i don’t think i had it. i was a whimp, pussy, baby…you know the sort, afeared of hurting myself (my hands), a ball magnet of amazing proportions, breaking my arm around a caught kickball, and a nose on a non-caught dodgeball. it wasn’t the pain that bothered me, i am rather tough around pain, it was the broken bone and blood in front of everyone. the humiliation. broken nose=more blood than you imagined you had+snot!! wooo hooo! and! if a ball is near, it will come at me, and likely hit me. i could probably cause sports games to end differently just by being in the audience. although, people would figure out what was going on after spotting me in the crowd, getting beamed by a football/soccerball/baseball/golfball/etc.

i didn’t rollerskate, iceskate, ride a bike, or really anything else that regular kids did. in fact, i had decided that i didn’t even want to. my family isn’t exactly what you would call active. my older brother grew up to run marathons and be fit, due to his wife’s love of that sort of thing, but the rest of us…well on the fialkov side, anyway.

where is this going? well, i think that the chemicals i used in my art adventures probably caused it. fiberglass resin is cool! the make submarine windows out of it. you can make fabric as hard as a rock, it killed eva hesse. badass! respirators are for dummies. and the particles are so fine that they can actually penetrate your skin through the air. yum! and photography chemicals, i know of several people that sued my college for serious health problems from the studio. and i was a sculpture major. when not making things out of paper, fabric and resin, i mixed my own clay. and as i said, respirators are for pussies!

i showed all of you how tough i am! especially by telling you i can’t rollerskate or ride a bike. and i had a good friend that was on full scholarship for violin and had one of those terrible insane lives that he beat the odds to get where he got and then whilst riding a bike past cmu…you know where the steps are between the light and the bus stop, there was an uneven sidewalk (gentle reader, you may want to skip the next few lines) and he went over the handlebars and his wrists touched the ground in front of his hands. that is to say that he damaged his tendons so badly, not to mention crushed and shattered bones, that he never played violin again, certainly not first chair as he had before, and last i heard of him, did telemarketing and didn’t talk about his days as a concert violinist. and he lost the scholarship, obviously. and you aren’t supposed to ride your bike on the sidewalk, so he couldn’t sue, either. it is true. so, in case i thought about learning to ride a bike, that vision haunts me. i would need to splint my hands and arms in order to learn. just in case. and then i worry that it will be a self-fullfilling prophecy.

you other art school nerds tell me if you have ever accidentally eaten oil paint whilst attempting to paint and eat at the same time…healthy stuff! lead poisoning anyone? nah, not many paints have lead in them anymore, but still, fairly poisonous stuff. acrylic paint you can eat though. no worries. which is why acrylic paint is for pussies. kidding. just kidding. or am i? or making prints…how many printmaking profs do you know that quit because they had brain cancer or some other strange and terrible malady?

so i decided at one point to go into art restoration…i have a strange knowledge and memory of art history, despite my horrible memory (a mental disorder i have heard of called CRS “can’t remember shite” i heard that on vh1) and pretty good art skills. i won’t go into all the other stuff required to even get into a program, but it does include organic chemistry…’nuff said. anyway, i was doing an internship to rack up brownie points to attempt to get into school at the heinz history center in pgh, the ketchup peeps, a really cool museum, and we used ether to clean stuff, and that was on the mild end of things. in an enclosed space, full of dusty, moldy, dirty stuff, and i realized really quickly that through a bad combination of things, i couldn’t do it. physically. ether makes the head feel really fuzzy and bad. don’t sniff it. anyway, i was sad to quit, i think amy was even sadder. i got to donn the white gloves(they really wear white gloves!)…they were artifacts! shoes too tiny for even ME to wear, that were adults, before they made separate left and right shoes…and like an inch wide. crazy stuff. so gorgeous. trunks and trunks of clothing and shoes and everything you can imagine. and they had a WAREHOUSE full of old stuff. if i had stayed, i would have been too tempted to pilfer stuff. there was sooo much stuff that tons of trunks of amazing stuff from attics that hadn’t even been opened in 100 years, sometimes more. wedding dresses from 200 years ago, when people didn’t wear white because they only had one or two dresses, so many of them were plaid! how cool is that?

oh! also, there was a special freight elevator behind a velvet rope that i got to take. i loved going in there and out. i saw how important you feel when you work in a museum. it didn’t last long, but it was a really amazing experience. they let me in there like i was a pro. too bad i didn’t have a digital camera back then.

onto yarn news, i spun up a big fatty bobbin of some of the gorgeous merino i dyed the other day and i think some of you that like the less intense colors will go mad over this stuff. i am ordering sock yarn to-morrow and hopefully some superwash roving soon, and some other yarns, and am really eager to dye them in these colors.
i bet you can’t wait to see them! i bet! you will, you will, don’t worry.

ok, blah blah blah, you probably didn’t even make it to the end of the post. if you did, smoooooch! off to do some work before sleep.

xo,
n.