A Very Merry UnBirthday!

My 28th birthday came and went last month. Despite my lack of chatter about it here, it was pretty well spent. I recieved some wonderful gifts, impecably chosen for me. My favorite new toy is my Speedball Screenprinting kit gifted to me by the Mister. Ah, he knows me so well! I’d been wanting to try screenprinting for a very long time and had experimented with some diy methods, but was never able to get the results that I had hoped for.

The kit comes with two basic methods for creating the screen. The first is the screen-filler method. You paint a plasticizing chemical onto all of the areas where you do not want the ink to transfer through the screen to the material. This is the simplest, easiest, quickest method to prepare your screen, but the second is much more fun. The second method is called photo-emulsion. With this method, you coat the screen with a light-sensitive chemical, then you place a graphic that has been printed or drawn onto acetate or tracing paper between the screen and a light source. All of the places where the light reaches the chemical on the screen (i.e. all of the places that aren’t blocked by the graphic) harden and become plasticky, the rest of the areas (the graphic) are washed out so that the ink penetrates the screen.

Okay, that’s a rushed and super-simplified explanation of the screen printing process. If anybody cares, I can do a more detailed post in the future, but there are already some great resources out there for those of you who are interested in doing this yourself, in particular this MAKE and this Threadbanger video.

All of that was just so that I could show off my first semi-success:

This is my Set of Numbers Matrioshki print. It’s a math joke. Let me explain: The font was a little bit too fine to print well, but you can sort of make it out. The smallest matrioshka is N, the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3…). The second smallest is Z, the integers (-1, 0, 1, 2…). Maybe you remember from math class that all natural numbers are integers. We say that the set Z contains the set N. Do you see the joke now? As we move further to the right we have the quotients, which contains the integers, the reals contain the quotients, and finally the complex numbers contain the reals. It’s nerdy, I know.

This image has been floating around in my head for years and I’m so excited to see it finally come to life. Even though the screen isn’t perfect, I think I’m going to make myself a t-shirt. I don’t think that I have the patience to try the same graphic twice. There are too many things to make and only so much time!

 

Infinitely Dense

One of my favorite diversions is Brown Sharpie, a webcomic full of math-wit drawn by Courtney Gibbons with, you guessed it, a brown sharpie*. Three times a week, I find myself thinking, “Now that would make a great embroidery to nerdify my home.” (Yes, nerdifying my home is a goal of mine.) Yesterday, I finally set out to make one of these embroideries. I chose this Bananananana… Bread comic from February, because isn’t that perfect for a tea towel?

Unfortunately, I had a difficult time transferring the image to this natural linen, despite using the sunniest window in the house as a light-source. I ended up freehanding the text and the result is… well, you can see how bad that text looks. Rather than ripping it out, I’m just going to get some white linen and re-do the whole thing. Maybe I’ll do this one next.

Thanks, Courtney, for giving me permission to copy your work and share it here!

* Well, it’s now a brown-sharpie-like tool in whichever drawing program she uses with her pen-tablet.

 

Productivity, Yes!

Yesterday, I sewed up a quick and simple skirt using Amy Butler’s Midwest Modern 2 fabrics. At the time, I was in a summery mood, dreaming about wearing my new skirt to the market. We had blue skies and warm temperatures. Yesterday, that was. Today is much cooler, wetter, and gray. Not that I don’t appreciate this weather as well, but it is such a 180 from yesterday. Ah, thus is spring in Seattle!

In lieu of my summer skirt, I thought that I’d share with you a taste of what I am up to. Today, I’m working on an apron for a contest at my local fabric (and everything creative) store, more details to come next week. I also just downloaded and printed off that adorable little Sarah Golden print from Feed Your Soul project. To the right you can see my next projects creeping in, the Sew Mama Sew Spring Clean Your Sewing Room checklist and a magnetic sheet that will be handy in an upcoming meal planning center for my kitchen.

I’m feeling very productive, but now I think that I’ll curl up on the couch with a good cup of coffee and a book or three.

 

A Message From Esther

The idea for this has been bouncing around my head for months now and in typical AJ-fashion I am just now getting around to making it. I was actually going to paint this on a large canvas, but I think it looks better this way. And yes, that is Esther’s silhouette up there, complete with crooked little tail.

 

Quilting Away

Thursday, I went into my local fabric shop (lfs?) in search fabric for the quilt-along. An hour and some change later, I emerged with more questions than answers. I needed to get twelve fat quarters that divided into two categories, be it dark vs. light, print vs. plain, or some other distinctions. Beyond that, I was lost. I left with twelve fabrics, but knew that the issue was yet to be settled. At home, I played around with the fabrics that I had chosen and some fabrics from my stash. It wasn’t until I sat down to start writing a post about what a pain it was to choose fabric that I realized something: I have an inordinate amount of polka dots in my stash. Eureka!

And so we have polka dots and floral/scroll-y fabrics and blocks A and B complete. I’ve just begun block C and it’s definitely giving me a lot of trouble in the squaring up stage. I’m heading out now in search of some freezer paper to try Elizabeth’s trick. Wish me luck!