I finally got an iPhone, so consider this the first of many postings of crappy low-res photos taken with it.

Here are some gifts I sent to friends & relatives, some grossly overdue (better late than never, right guys?)

Almost forgot about this …

I also made my dad this planter pot for his birthday (his and my mom’s are within a week of each other).

He likes to grow stuff.

Process photos of this and the bread & bed from the last post are on my flickr photostream.

I sat on this draft for a long time, and am only now publishing it weeks later.  I am a lazy, lazy blogger.

Until recently, the only successful screen print I’d made was this one, which was made over a year ago:

Sparky and I made this using the photo-emulsion method.  Our original intent was to put it on a t-shirt, but the print area came out a little too large.  I guess it could have worked for the back of a shirt, but the design (lol hardly) doesn’t say “back of shirt” to me.  We did a test print on some (old, contextually inappropriate) fabric and never revisited the project.

The whole photo-emulsion process was sort of a pain.  We ruined a couple screens due to under- and or overexposure, and dropped a fairly significant amount of cash on the photo-emulsion chemicals.  Basically I abandoned screen printing as a project I’d have to try again once I had a studio.

Then I got Printing by Hand by Lena Corwin for my birthday last December, and thought I’d try out the drawing fluid/screen filler method described therein.  I’d never heard of this method before, so I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, but it worked very well.

I made this thing below using this method.  Originally I did the sketch of this pattern on a post-it note, and I wasn’t particularly happy with how it scaled.  It looked a lot cooler when it was only three inches wide.  I wasn’t sure how detailed I could be just painting on the screen.  Now that I’ve done it, I know that I could have put a lot more detail into the pattern (and in the future I will do so).

Anyway, this is a puppy bed I made for my mom, who trains service dogs.  She’s getting an English Shepherd (as a personal pet, not a service animal) sometime soon, and I thought a washable pillow might be better than the big expensive pet beds they sell at pet stores.

The color didn’t really come out like I wanted it to.  I was afraid the ink would look black on the dark fabric.  The fabric is an old twin sheet that I was never going to use for anything else, and the actual pillow on the inside is a 28″ square pillow form from a craft store.  I’m not sure why the color looks so electric in the photo – in real life it’s a little more subdued … a little.

I also made my mom some bread, because she likes bread.

I had never made bread before (except for biscuits) so this was my test loaf.  It was actually pretty easy, and I’m not much of a recipe reader.  Usually I just like to glance at the ingredients and then start throwing things together.

This is the bread wrapped up in some paper I made.  The sticker is an e-card I ripped off from someecards.com (thanks Meredith) and printed on sticker paper.  It says “You’re obliged to love what I made you,” which I think is an appropriate sentiment to attach to a bunch of gifts I hand made for a parent.  This was basically the evolved version of me giving her construction paper and glued macaroni.

I don’t think my mom reads my blog – but if she does – HI MAMA, happy late birthday (again).

ANYWAY

I plan to try the drawing fluid method again with more detail, and I’ll post photos of that likely disaster when I do it.

I’ve ordered a ton of gifts from various online stores recently, and package tracking has become my new obsession.  Yesterday evening I checked the status on some stuff from Newegg and Barnes & Noble and the status said “delivered.”  There was a poster from amazon in an awesome triangular prism box waiting for me when I got home at 6:00 that afternoon, but definitely no other packages.

So my first worry was that they delivered the packages to the wrong address.  I verified that they didn’t, and then decided to check the front door since we never use it.  No packages.

I’d been home all evening, and I’d even opened the side door at some point during the night (while watching House, I think, which means it was between 8 and 9), to hang a bell on it (holiday cheer ftw).  There hadn’t been any packages then, either.

I said, “there’s no way there are any packages at the side door,” but checked anyway just to prove it.  And there they were.

wtf?

The details on the Newegg status said “Met Cust. Man” – which seems to imply that the delivery person encountered a man made out of custard, or a mystery dude under our carport, or both.  I was alone during the times the packages could have been delivered, and am neither man nor custard, so I’m pretty creeped out by this.

Since I was sitting in the front room that the side door opens to, these things confuse me:

• Why didn’t I hear the delivery person knock (or ring the bell)?
• Why didn’t I hear the massive UPS truck coming up the (steep, gravel) road?
• How did I not see the delivery person or the truck through one of the three gigantic unshaded windows that look out onto the area in question?
• Who/what is the custard/customer man and why is he hanging out under our carport, acknowledging our deliveries?

Seriously, wtf?