Here are some headings from the mockups I’m finishing up for a photography site.  Some of them suck, but that’s what mockups are for.

See Zoe’s work at Flickr or Facebook and soon at zoebrownphotography.com.  She’s very talented and is one of my favorite people ever.  Here’s a couple of Zoe’s photos that I absolutely love:

This is my mom, at my wedding rehearsal.  She’s hates being photographed and is pretty good at blink-sabotaging when I try to sneak photos of her.  A shot of her alone is VERY rare, especially one where she appears to be looking at the camera.

That’s Meredith, my college roommate (and, non-consecutively, my current roommate).  She’s been dancing since she was a little girl; I don’t know how long … since she was an infant or something.

That’s Dan.  He joined the Navy – I’ve been told (perhaps wrongly) that he joined to meet (and presumably bang) girls in foreign countries.

I could pretty much sit here all night and post awesome Zoe photos.  I’m feel exceptionally lucky to be the one to get to develop a website for her to start her photography business full time.

Here’s some art I made for a shirt art contest.

I googled “tentacles” in Google image search to get ideas.  Then I immediately modified my search query to “tentacles -porn.”  Oh Internet, don’t ever change.

About five years ago when I moved out of my parents’ house, I amassed a number of hand-me-downs.  Many of these proved useful enough to figure in my daily life from then on; others sat untouched in a box and were toted around from apartment to apartment in each subsequent move.  I insisted to myself that eventually they would prove useful.  Some did.

I nearly bought this lamp from West Elm before realizing that buying lamps is stupid since I had a handful of unboxed hand-me-down lamps stashed in my slowly-shrinking collection of unsorted moving boxes:

The trouble with hand-me-downs is they usually never jive with the stuff I pick up for myself.  So, I fixed it.

Here’s the before:

I kind of dug the silhouette of it, but wasn’t into the delicate flowers & brass quite so much.  That’s the original shade on the right.  It’s the kind that clips onto an incandescent bulb, so even if I liked it I wouldn’t be able to use it anymore.

And the after:

The shape is so much more obvious now.

I already had the shade, and the spray paint I bought to paint these shelf supports in my kitchen (and then didn’t):

So instead of buying a new lamp for 60 bucks, I made a new one for nothing.  So, that’s alright.

When we moved in in May:

Now:

This stuff’s been there about a month and none of it’s dead yet.  I’m shocked.

Edited to add: I resized these after adding the text, and didn’t mean for one word to be bigger than the other.  Infuriating.

My rental backyard currently looks like this:

The photo doesn’t show it’s biggest problem – a serious drainage issue that makes walking to that gate nigh-impossible and prompted me to christen the house “SWAMPHOUSE” during the rental process.  The good: income from mud wrestling tournaments.  The bad: best place in town for hot, sexy mosquitos to get it on.

Before the summer has ended (or likely, as the summer ends), I’d much rather it look like this:

It should also feature this:

Tessellating Paving Stone.  Yes.

Tomorrow I paint walls.  This may be getting out of hand.

More fake album covers (see the album cover meme post).

(photo credit)

(photo credit)

(I lost the photo credit for this.  If you know it, let me know).

Here’s a badass footstool I made, just in case you were wondering if footstools could be badass.  I bought the original at the Blacksburg YMCA Thrift Shop for eight bucks.

It was covered in this sort of terrifying orange vinyl with big chunks of gold glitter.  Charming as that is, I thought I’d recover it.

Since this went well I think I’m confident enough to paint and reupholster the five dollar chair I bought at the world’s largest flea market (one of the handful of things I’ll miss about living here).

As for the TERROR COUCH (as seen in the background of the photo above), I think I’ll let a professional do that one.  Maybe after I enter it in the ugly couch contest.

Lazy blog lately.  Here’s a crop of something I made at lunch.  I don’t think it’s finished yet.

I’m trying to break the red/blue color mood I’ve been in lately.

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.