Sketchbook ~ The One With Poorly Suited Paper

This sketchbook didn't have good paper for me but I just had to fill it up before I could move on to a new one because I have problems like that.
I decided to spend an afternoon recently filling it up, drawing from magazines and instagram and here are some of those pages.
Now I can use my nice new sketchbook with it's white, smooth, just the right thickness paper. Yay!

The Meadow and Discounts

The weather has gone wrong again today but on Wednesday it was let's go for a walk round the meadow weather which is always good.

The moss in the second photo felt so good. I want a rug made of it.
That last photo includes Will's manky running shoe manky from when he started running in the meadow while it was basically a marsh. Manky.

In other news, a while ago my lovely parents got me a gift subscription to Oh Comely and they've passed on a link for me to pass on. If you use this link to subscribe you'll get a £2 discount www.ohcomely.co.uk/subscribe/ref/2820/1tu which can only be a good thing :)

While I'm at it here's my refer link for Moo as well http://www.moo.com/share/5jcjcz
If you use that link to use Moo for the first time you'll get a 10% discount off your first order :)

Clutter City Spring 2013

Best. Market. Ever.

We had a great day. It was really busy the whole time, we sold lots of stuff and got some really interesting comments from people even if they weren't buying things which is always good.

Excuse the blur, it was pretty dark in there and using my camera in the dark is still a mystery to me.

Week 16

Day 109 - Phone Pouches ready for the market.



Day 110 - All packed and ready to go.



Day 112 - Making replacment gameboy pouches.

Wow that was a bad week for my 365 project. I'm still managing to take a photo every day but I'm not managing to take a good photo very often. Must try harder.

Week 15

Day 99 - Totoros almost finshed.



Day 100 - Finished Totoro seeing where he might hang out at the market on Saturday.



Day 101 - Lightbulb.



Day 102 - A new yokai and a gameboy.



Day 104 - Panda brooches.



Day 105 - The mess that is the market stall at the moment.

I thought it'd be a good idea to set up our table and start putting everything on it as a test and to see what we had. It's good to see what we've got made already and that it's enough to fill a table but I just can't make it look good yet which is a bit stressy. I guess it'll come together when it needs to. (I hope!)

Recent Makes ~ Yokai

I was venturing into a bit of manga with these comics and in one issue (I can't remember which) one of the girls imagined one of the other girls as some sort of wall thing. It completely went over my head, didn't get the reference at all. In the back, luckily, there was a list of things that was basically 'Japanese things mentioned in this story that you might not know about' and the wall thing was in there.



Turns out it was Nurikabe, a yokai (Japanese monster from folklore and the like) that is a wall that turns up in front of you when you're walking in the forest at night and makes you get lost.
I thought it was amazing and decided to do a bit of research into yokai. Turns out there are so many yokai you can just keep clicking on links and reading and being amazed for ages.
I knew I wanted to do something with this new found information and quite quickly settled on the idea of amigurumi yokai. Makes sense I reckon.



I narrowed down the research and made a list of some yokai that I had an instant idea of how I thought they would look and set about figuring out my patterns.

I tried to read about each yokai from as many sources as I could find and then kind of put together my own little version. I hope I've never changed anything to the point of being offensive to a countries folklore but I figured they're made up monster stories that tend to have a lot of variety anyway so I thought I could make them my own.

I have started out with 5 different yokai and I'm quite pleased with them. I've just started my second wave of research to make some more and I'm also pondering the idea of using folklore from other countries and turning that into crochet creatures and maybe even making up some of my own.



I love how some of them are cute and friendly and some of them are just horrifically dark and gruesome. I've found with some things I've made (including these yokai) that people have assumed it's for children when it hadn't occurred to me at all when I was making it that it would be aimed at kids. I'm making them because I'm interested in it and thought they'd be a cool thing to have that other people might find interesting too, not because they're odd looking toys for kids. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, if kids like them too then that's fine by me!) It's made me wary of making the more horrific yokai or including the more unpleasant details with some of the ones I have made. I think I'm going to try and get over that though, the idea of a cute little crochet thing with a scary story attached is quite cool.
It's always really hard to know how people are going to perceive things you've made but then I guess really you should make whatever you feel like making and people are going to think whatever they like. You can't please everyone.



As well as making the amigurumi I've made a tag for each one too with a little illustration on the front and an explanation on the inside about that particular yokai. Making the whole thing from start to finish is really awesome. I get to research something I'm really interested in, come up with a design, figure out how to make it, do the actual crochet and then even get some illustration in there too. (Then there's layout and design type doings with photoshop which I'm not so fond of but I reckon the tags have ended up pretty good so it's worth it.)

Now I just hope other people like them as much as I do so I can fund the habit and keep making more!



From top to bottom the 5 yokai in these photos are Nurikabe, Kodama, Ashinaga Tenaga, Baku and Nurarihyon.

If you know of any good creatures from folklore from anywhere I'd love to know about it.


My shops each have an amigurumi section which is where you can find these guys for sale (here for etsy and here for folksy).

What My Phone Saw ~ Blue Skies and Saftey Eyes

Blue skies and churches.



Crack badger / cute badger



Public toilet mirror shot / I hope safety eyes from the back always makes me laugh.
These 2 photos together also makes me laugh.



Blue sky, orange building / not a good photo, I'm really just showing off that the coleslaw and the tortillas were homemade, by Will and very tasty.



Paint on King Street.



The oddest junk mail yet. I have no idea why this was sent to me.


HUCK FINN!

Recent Photos ~ Light and Dark

Just a few snaps from the last couple of weeks. The drawing is being done by Will.

Week 14

Day 93 - At the right time of the day the suncatcher hanging in my studio window makes the wall at the top of the stairs really pretty.



Day 95 - Printing some more thank you notes to put in with orders.



Day 96 - I'm so glad the weather is finally starting to change. These dog violets (I think) are growing out of our front door step.



Day 98 - I'm looking forward to spending more time in the garden this year. Need to actually keep on top of the gardening for once.

We've never really had to look after a garden. During uni it was always part of the contract that the landlord did the gardening (yeah, like that happened) and then we lived in a flat with a communal garden that was looked after for us so this is only the second year we'll have to do it ourselves and last year we failed miserably.
Hopefully this year we'll keep on top of it. I need to conquer a mixed fear of bugs and being out the front and possibly having to interact with neighbours. We have a pair of blackbirds in our garden that are spending a lot of time throwing the dead leaves out of the flower beds looking for bugs (and then the wind puts the leaves back in the beds and they come back and throw them all out again) we need to figure out how to have the garden nice for us to sit in but not so tidy that that we ruin it for the wildlife, I wouldn't want the birds to hang out somewhere else.

Week 13

Day 86 - At my desk making brooches.



Day 88 - Easter chicks and a drawing.



Day 89 - The Rolling Stones makes washing up more enjoyable.



Day 90 - Hiding eggs for Will to find.



Day 91 - Making badger brooches.

When making the badger brooches I had a bit of a dilemma, I thought the black eyes looked better but thought it might be a problem that they weren't obvious enough so I tried brown which I didn't like as much as the black. I went out this morning to look for black plastic eyes to use instead of sewing them myself which will hopefully solve the problem. We shall see.

Also today we visited an oriental supermarket I found on my way home the other day, even though we wanted everything we tried to be restrained but I'm so looking forward to having rice in miso soup for dinner and then boiling up some rice balls filled with red bean paste. I think I'll have to save up some pennies and next time buy all the snacks. It all looked so good!
(I'll have to try and forget about the smokey plum juice incident when thinking about buying new things to try, "also i had that plum juice from chinatown yesterday. it isn't in anyway plum juice. it's like smoke in liquid form in a box." It really was horrid and I saw cartons of it in the shop today, bleurgh...)