#progress photos and documentation of process for things i've made

[hotasfahrenheit]

cool cool cool cool cool in things i totally don't need right now my primary hard drive may be toast

there's so much stuff on my hard drive

i'm not sure if i'm going to cry or scream but it's like midnight and i need to go to bed because i have work in the morning

(yes, i tried opening my case up and reseating my hard drive. i've been using computers since like 1988 because my dad worked on them, he has been consulted already also despite it being the middle of the night and a different time zone, etc etc etc)

[sheliesshattered]

So it turns out I completely forgot to take any pictures of my last sewing project. Oops. In fairness, it's a gift for my mother, whose birthday is tomorrow, and I didn't want to post any pictures until after it had arrived at her house and been opened. But I still meant to take some pictures, if not of the process at least of the final product. It wasn't until I got home from mailing it that I realized I full on completely forgot to take any photos at all. Oh well. Maybe Mom can snap a picture or two for me since I flat out forgot. Pics of that if/when I actually have them, lol.

But I'm already into my next sewing project, and I've resolved not to make that same mistake again. Which, really, is nearly the same mistake as I made with my fleece dress last month, when I didn't take any pictures at all until all the major seams were sewn. After documenting so much of my sewing throughout 2023, I seem to have completely forgotten all about taking photos of my works-in-progress the last couple of months. I aim to get back on course with this project, though!

The project in question is a hooded wrap sort of thing, made from the black and gray brushed cotton herringbone that I got a bolt of on ebay a couple of weeks back. After washing the bolt, it looks to be about 43" wide and roughly eight and a half yards long. I want to make an overdress for my fleece dress out of it too, but I think this wrap project will only take up about a yard and a half, maybe two, so I should have plenty left for an overdress. And then I can wear the wrap and the overdress together, potentially.

But really the thing I'm sewing this for is my birthday, which is coming up in about seven weeks. I have somehow talked Jack into going to Disneyland and spending all day in the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge area so I can pilot the Millennium Falcon as many times as possible, and doing some original costuming "Batuu-bounding" while we're there, too. Because I am nothing if not a costume nerd, and my life-long love for Star Wars has recently been reignited, so what better way to spend my birthday than dressed up in one of the best examples of 360 degree set building that I've ever seen.

After combining a bunch of pieces from my closet and my costume boxes, I've come up with an outfit that I like the look of, for a general purpose Force-sensitive smuggler pilot: my every-day tall Doc Martens with wraps over them, leather-look leggings, the vest from my Moment cosplay, and various accessories from my pirate-core and Wasteland days. I may need a better shirt to go with it, but I'm hoping to hit up Goodwill at least once or twice between now and then and see what I can find. The final choice will depend on a bit on the weather that week, which in late February in southern California can be literally anything from the cusp of freezing to 80 degrees, sunny or rainy or windy or some combination of all of them. I won't really know until the weekend beforehand.

Besides a shirt, the last piece I really want to add is this hooded wrap, both for practicality -- warmth in the morning and the evening, and keeping the sun off my head at midday without messing up my hair too much -- and for just the drama of a big hood and drapey wrap. I based the hood pattern on the hooded Vuvalini jacket I made for Wasteland Weekend way back in 2016, but took it in a bit both in width and depth (since I'm not trying to catch the wind with this one, and won't be wearing a fluffy scarf with it).

Over the weekend I drafted a pattern and made a mock-up, but the mock-up is really kinda ugly, since I used left over fabric and made a part of it significantly smaller just to save on fabric, so it's one of those mock-ups where you have to squint and imagine what the final product will look like. Not going to bother taking pictures of that. But it did serve the purpose of clarifying some design elements and finalizing fit, so still worthwhile.

With the hood pattern drafted and tested, and measurements for the long wrap bits figured out, I went ahead and cut it out of the herringbone fabric. Here it is all cut out, three pieces for the hood and two pieces for the back:

I'm doing french seams on this project, both to combat the fabric's tendency to fray, and to keep all the inner seams looking pretty when the hood is down, etc. Tonight I sewed up the first set of seams on the center back of the wrap, and all three hood pieces (as modeled by my sewing ham):

Tomorrow I'll press those narrow seams flat, and then sew each of them again a bit further in to completely encase the raw edges (ie a classic french seam). Next step after that will be attaching the hood to the right angle formed by the wrap pieces coming together in the center back. I did this, with shorter and narrower pieces, in my mock-up, and it's a little bit fiddly but not too bad. I didn't french seam the mock-up though, so we'll see if that adds any headaches to this.

Once both stages of the neck seam are done and the hood is attached, the last step will be hemming! And it's a lot of hemming, lol. The shorter edges of the wrap (starting from the top of the center back, where it meets the hood) are each 48" long and 18" wide. I actually haven't measured the outer, longer edge, nor done the math to figure out what it must be given that the center back is cut on a 45 degree bias, but let's just say it's a lot of inches. And then there's the hood opening too, which was cut to have a generous drape. Many many inches of hemming, really probably better measured in yards.

I need to play around with a couple of options, see if I like the look of top stitching or if I want to do the whole thing by hand with invisible stitches, but right now my assumption is that I'll end up doing this by hand. I actually enjoy handsewing hems, so that's not the worst thing in the world, and I've got plenty of time to get this finished before I plan to wear it at the end of February. I do have at least one other sewing project I'd like to tackle for our Star Wars Batuu-bounding day, and I'd like to leave room for other things to come up at the last minute too, so I'm going to keep buzzing through this just as quickly as I can. More pictures tomorrow, in all likelihood.

After I call my mom of course, and wish her a happy birthday. And beg her for photos of that thing I made for her, lol.

[joannaliangart]

There Are Good Things Yet To Bury (2024) 7.5 x 9 in Case bound book, 84 pages. Photography and poetry.

There Are Good Things Yet To Bury features photos of community gardens and poems on climate grief, gardening, and the purpose of hope. Physically cut into many of the pages are windows, enabling fragments of images and text on the previous and following pages to be reactivated and recontextualized. The book reflects on how gardens nurture during crises, and the futures that hope can bring us.

---

Final project for my VAST class this semester! Agh I really think it’s my new favourite…!!

I was actually struggling with this one for a while, I just couldn’t seem to clarify the concept in my mind clearly enough. I think it was writing the rainbow poem when things really started to pull together, which was tricky as hell making sure it was still coherent through all 7 ‘window’ pages AS WELL AS a full spread! But I truly had SO much fun writing all the poems in this book it was such a joy :’) 

This is a project that I would love love love to be made into multiples and distributed in some capacity... I don't know if traditional publishing would ever take something like this on with how many window cuts there are haha, not that I know how complicated or uncomplicated it would be (but certainly more than if 0 windows lol). The profs on my panel review mentioned that I could look into getting a grant to make multiples but hoo that still sounds kinda spooky to me awaaa

But!! Ever since my Sunlight is moonlight book with that one window cut at the end I've wanted to do more with cutting into the page and having whatever is visible through the window be recontextualized with the flip of a page AH it's so fun and so much potential for poetic play!!!

process photos/more thoughts:

These documentation photos were kinda a pain btw lmao (i mean when are they not) i'm struggle so much with themm.. I'm also trying to be more aware of how much of a poem I'm showing in these photos as I recently learned that most literary magazines etc won't accept submissions if that piece of writing is posted (ie published) online already. I think small excerpts might be okay as long as it's not the full piece???? awagh I don't know I'm still learning AND I don't even know how focused I want to be on submitting poems to magazines... But I figured probably better to keep more options open for future-me just in case...

My mid-term presentation of the project! featuring:

wip mid-term artist statement

hastily printed out photos I was thinking of using in the final book

big bunch of poems to potentially use in the final book that I picked from my poem drafts that I keep in my notes app

that red book with a circle window I made for another class (just to practice case bookbinding) as an example of a window cut into the cover

lil white book in the back that was our class' "Seeded Notebook" assignment which was essentially a moodboard for our project

a mockup that had the idea for a hidden accordion fold page (the concept being that it would spill out of the book unexpectedly while you were flipping through it)!! kinda sad I didn't have time to add that into the final but boy o boy did I run out of time lol

Did u know I was gonna put illustrations!! into the final book as well! and while I had some fun making them and using my ipad as a makeshift light table and using my new fountain pen (oough don't get me started I've been on a fountain pen kick lately)... Ultimately I felt I 1. didn't have time to include them in a resolved enough way and 2. they felt kinda outta place from the photos and poems

Some inspirations during my researchy/brainstorming phase that I got from my school's artist's book collection!:

the cover of Water, Gold, Soil by Sayler/Morris, which got me hooked on the idea of putting a photo slightly embedded into the cover (doesn't it look so good on that book!!??)

Aunt Sallie's Lament by Margaret Kaufman, featuring these wild progression of increasingly smaller pages that change how you read the poem; nothing specific I took from this book tbh but was cool to look at lol

And you know I gotta look at Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer for a book with window cuts!! I soon realized It's only printed one-sided, which meant they didn't have to worry about how it would affect any text on the verso page. Which is like, fair enough for them they had a whole NOVEL of words to deal with lmao

I made my own book cloth for this project!! sort of!! I feel like I was doing something wrong, the interfacing I got wasn't really sticking to the fabric very well at times ????? Was kinda finicky not sure if I was doing something wrong during ironing... But I got to go into the fabric store and find the exact shade of pink I wanted for the cover C:

Did 3 small cover tests too (as per assignment requirements lol but also they were kinda helpful). Takeaway was that I didn't like how test 2 and 3 looked lol

AND HERE'S ME TRYING TO FIGURE OUT AND GET IDEAS FOR WINDOW CUTS. THIS PHASE WAS ACTUALLY EXTREMELY HELFUL because at the time i was SO stuck for ideas I'm not kidding I'm was STRUGGLING throughout this entire project from a conceptual standpoint. For some reason the thesis, the bones just weren't solidified in my head, and it kinda stayed that way until almost the very end when I was formatting the poems esp the rainbow poem. But I think it clarified completely once I thought of the title, which just kinda stepped into my brain after writing one of the poems (which has the line "there are good things yet to come") and then I was like I need a book title... and my brain did a few hops and there it was LOL and I'm so happy with the title :') it captures the main theme with a lot of nuance in a pretty simple phrase which is HOO boy chefs kiss and hard to come by haha I felt very lucky

Printing was also a pain because the print techs at my school misunderstood what I was trying to do (and I'm extra salty because I was right in the first place and they made me second guess myself cause they said they needed it formatted a different way!!! But in the end I was right the first time!!!) Siigh whateevsss the silver lining was that I did notice some things I needed to fix before printing anyways... Anyways I was trying to format it their way and I fucked it all up lol I was printing a b/w mockup on my own and despairing cause I thought I was gonna have to redo all my formatting (which, with WINDOW cuts which makes every page before/after matter a LOT felt like a nightmare)

But again I was right the first time lol so crisis averteddd just a lil spike in stress levels lol

Used the digital stack cutter on my own for the first time and ohh my goodness... I love my old manual big guillotine cutter but this guy. this guy was pretty cool look at his cool line of light that tells you where the blade is gonna hit

After agonizing so much over the concept and content I was sooo happy to just be Physcially Putting The Book Together, a real turn my brain off and just do him activity yaaay

This was my fun lil set up, I was recently given this bright light stand thingy which was actually so helpful lol; I like my dim cozy room light but it's not the best for Seeing what you're doing for art stuff

So much window cutting... Yes I just freehanded all round edges lol verryy carefully.. Some alignement issues but minor enough to not affect readability ^^

For example in these first two images with the star, I just ended up cutting off the misaligned cut-lines which made the star a lil bigger lol; was trickier with a star shape like that vs like a rectangle though because of how many vertices it had, aka more opportunities to fuck up the shape

Binding time!! look at that satisfying stack oouh yummy.. Also featuring my big slab of marble that's very heavy and works great to weigh down during drying lol. Also yes I put ziplog bags between the end pages and book block to protect against glue dampness because I've gotten spooked by how damp my Hazelnuts Grow on Trees book got when clamping it lmao

Some page alignment issues with the windows after binding but nothing major :)

[danielle-summer-internship]

Journal 8: (July 23rd - 28th)

We have reached the point of the summer now where the time goes by incredibly quick but also quite slow. It feels like the past week lasted for two weeks, but if you blinked, you'd missed it all. Like I expected, this week proved itself to be challenging in its own ways. First and foremost, we had no agents or volunteers on camp to assist in tending to the kids. We as a camp had to come together to look out for each other, and help where we could. This often meant we needed to do tasks we otherwise wouldn't do very often. For me and a few other staff, we were pulled to work in our camp store, which is where the kids will come and get their afternoon snacks and such. It's also the place that the kids can pick up various camp souvenirs, like stuffed animals, shirts, hats and more. We had different jobs as part of store time, which involved marking off the campers money cards, grabbing the items they wanted, or even restocking. The majority of us who helped with this part also had classes to return to after working one, like I did on Monday. I also had the chance this week to work a different night activity than I normally do. Typically, I run camp fires on Monday and Tuesday nights for smores, but this past week, I did something different on Tuesday night. On Tuesday night, I ran the slip and slide for our older groups. We have a few basic rules for our slip and slide, mostly being no feet on the tarp (as in their flat feet), and only starting on their front. What they did after was up to them. It was fun for me to do something different, but it was also really enjoyable to see how much the kids loved having the ability to let out some steam. While the rest of the week stayed relatively similar to previous, it was more an more obvious this week that we were struggling to hold our barrings at all times. We now only have a small handful of days before I'm able to go home and rest before coming back up to school this fall. In all my time out here, I've had plenty of fun, but the friends I have made this summer will last me the longest. I have met many people this summer, and I've managed to find the ones that really look out for everyone, and not just themselves. We are able to seek shelter in one another, and celebrate each other. I'm sad to see the summer come to a close, but also excited to see where this last week will take us. This coming week will be about the same size as this past week; however, we will have agents this week to help support us. This week, we will also be doing a great deal of clean up, and tear down all the parts of the camp that are not used after the summer is over. That means Archery, the horse barn, canoes, a d more will all need to be cleaned up this Friday after the campers leave. I'm looking forward to seeing the summer out with my face towards the sun, and sad to see the shadows I'm leaving behind.

On the bright side though, since I have been taking weekly journals, I have been able to document different things that have happened here at camp, and not have all my memories lump together like they have before. I'm proud of how far I've come this summer, and excited to share my progress and process with others too.

And these are all some photos I've collected either this week, or previous weeks, of some of the various activities I do here. ��😄

[disruptioncamouflage]

Ghillie Poster idea development

To progress my idea I wanted to change a few things:

Changed the printing from landscape to portrait, I did this to simulate how the poster would look when made in a larger scale. My intention for the final outcome will be a landscape print, but the cutouts will be presented in this horizontal style. Plus this was a good opportunity to see (in a smaller scale) if my idea would look right.

Changed the ghillie cut pattern to the pattern used on my original poster for April seminar. I stated in my previous poster development post that I thought the ghillie cutting pattern used on the suits I've been wearing seems to best suit material.

I was starting to see how I can play around with the 'Mona Lisa effect', leaving more white on the top layer to act as the iris. I was also thinking about how I could best use the gradient effect I had used in my last attempt. With this version I was seeing if I could make the eyes into more or creatures than static eyes.

I replaced the gradients that I used for the back side of the cut layer, and the base layer with my own imagery. For the imagery I was playing around with how I could layer some of the sequence photos I had taken on my documentation of wearing the ghillie suit. For the back of the cut layer, I was again just trying a layering, this time layering the process of making one of my first mask works. I chose to use this specific graphic due to the amount of colour, and also the lines that were created by the cutting board. As a back layer I think it provides a good contrast with the eye top layer.

Thoughts after printing/cutting of moch up poster:

The colours didn't come out as bright as expected, but I'm not to worried as it was printed at home not by a professional printer. I think it could be important to think about the CMYK colour print when producing my next version, as I'm not sure if some of the more vibrant colours can be effectively printed the way I want them to be.

The cutting and folding process was A LOT easier, so for future prints I will definitely be the pattern used. I also think that it more effectively gives space for each eye, and also adds a lot to the interesting wave optical illusion effect the the cutting style creates.

I think the bottom layer and the back of the cut out layer work really well to contrast the eyes on the top, the gritty look of the base layer works really well, and although not as effective as I wanted it to be due to colour works quite well.

Defiantly think that for these smaller moch ups printing and building in a portrait format is the way to go, I haven't tried hanging this moch up on the wall yet, but that's definitely something I need to try to make sure it works the way I want it to.

Thinking for my next poster:

Id like to try just having eyes on the top layer, no extra colour, and I also want to try using the whole eye. For future works I think it could be interesting to capture images of peoples eyes, rather than use PNG's that I've found, more diversity, and more interactive with my practice. For now I think my next version will just use an eye I find on the internet though.

For the bottom of the cut layer I want to try putting words or letters on this layer, rather than just a image. I think it will make the work much more interactive, and also work better as a form of lenticular lens.

Keeping to dark colours or gritty texture for the bottom layer works really well, it accentuates the top layers, but I want to play around with how the bottom layer can interact more with the layers above.

If I'm going to use full eyes, then I will need to reshape the oval I'm using at the moment, stretch it, making it longer, allowing more room so the actual eye doesn't get folded. I think even folding on the eye could be interesting to test too.

Eye direction is also something that I want to look at, do two eyes create a face when see from the side? how does rotating eyes effect the outcome? and can I also have eyes on the bottom layer of the cut out?

This was just something that was made by accident when joining the shapes on the bottom layer of the cut layer together. Though id just add it in because I found it interesting. Whether I actually use this ore not I'm not sure.