Sunday, September 26, 2010

What I've been doing...

My life is way too boring and uneventful to blog regularly about. I could blog about projects I do, but that would be the extent of my blogging. Between work and soccer, I never do anything. I'm only a little resentful. Anyway.

Everybody I know is incredibly talented. Yes, that means you girls. I hate growing up with such talented people because absolutely none of it rubbed off on me. Unlike most people I know, however, I love working with yarn. I can knit and crochet and I like doing it. I'm working on an baby blanket for a friend of mine, and I'm almost done with it, so I'll post pictures of it as soon as I finish it. Luckily, she just found out she is having a girl. I was hoping that was going to be the case, otherwise the next girlfriend to get knocked up would get it. :o) Back to the topic at hand... I found an amazing new way to make yarn out of those huge piles of t-shirts I have that were destined for Goodwill. I'm really excited about this project. I love large, colorful, bulky and unusual blankets, which is what these yummy balls of yarn are going to be turned into. Aren't they gorgeous??? I apologize for the crappy pictures, but my camera is on the fritz and these were taken on my phone.

I found a sliver of blank wall space that was driving me batty, so I decided to break out the Mod Podge and packing tape to see what I can do with it. I didn't take pictures of how I came up with this, primarily because it was one big, huge accident that turned out fairly well. I had a canvas that I put book pages on. Our library has a section of free books and I grabbed one on Primative Mythology, which is right up my alley (I minored in Mythology in college). I loved the book because the pages were already yellowing and they were actually paper, not glossy magazine pages. One of the pages happened to have a cute sketch on it and I decided to keep it. Because I liked it, that's why. Then I grabbed metallic paints in colors I liked and mixed them half and half with Mod Podge. I did that so it would make the paints translucent and you can still read the pages beneath the paint. I just kinda closed my eyes and let the paint go where it would. Then this is the cool part. Have you ever done the packing tape transfers? I love them, they're awesome. You take packing tape and put it over an image (from a book, newspaper, ink jet printer, whatever). You overlap the tape a little if it's too narrow for your image. Take something straight and make sure there are no wrinkles or air bubbles and to make sure it's on there good. Then soak it in water for five minutes and rub off the paper. Then you get the coolest transparent image. Except for the black outlines, you can see through the whole thing. I chose to do a lobster, again, because I like them. Then I covered the whole thing in Mod Podge and called it done. Cool, no? Now that I have a basic idea of what I'm doing, I plan on doing an African series for my sister for Christmas. She maintains she was born on the wrong continent. Anyway, the lobster one was the one I intended to do, and th other one was a sheet I ripped out to test colors on. I added the elephant just to see how it worked. I love it and it's going up somewhere as well.


And that's all, folks. I could probably eke a little more out of my mundane life to blog about, but I am way too excited about my new yarn to not blog about that. :o) Now I'm after everybody I know for their old t-shirts. They're getting sick of me. And now I'm going to bed. G'night!