Journal of a Something or Other

Even though we’re no-grain there’s a jar of white flour in the cupboard. It’s a vital part of a lot of my crafting, mostly in flour glue for papier mâché. What I forgot that it’s great for, until recently, was salt dough.

I used to sculpt a lot, with polymer clay. I still have a good bunch of polymer clay, but most of it is old and pretty much useless (the problem with an attic being your studio, there’s a lot of extreme temperatures). So when I got the bug to sculpt some things some months ago, conditioning clay that had a 50% chance of turning into a texture I liked wasn’t really something I wanted to do. So I checked the proportions (1 part salt to 2 parts flour, enough water to make it a “dough”) and made a batch.

It’s fabulous stuff to work with, silky but with a good body, sticks to itself with water, the only draw back is how it takes FOREVER to dry, in or out of the oven. From some of the feedback my snaps on Instagram got I gathered that a lot of folks must have played with it growing up.

One of the reasons I got into papier mâché was that it was a media that didn’t cost anything. I needed to make “art” for school, there are copious free weeklies around a campus and I was baking bread so there was always flour (which is stupid cheap in bulk, anyway). I’ve spent maybe 15 years just collecting junk to make things with, the home craft media of papier mâché and salt dough fit perfectly into my world-view of making things out of what you’ve got (sewing is where this breaks down for me, ohhhh fabrics and notions, you dirty temptresses).

I miss sculpture a lot, it’s what I relate most media to, from sewing to painting. Which, I guess that’s obvious in how a lot of my sculpts turn out. I pretty rarely start with a plan, it’s all enjoying the process of making something.

Anyway, my point is this. I’ve never seen anyone waste their time playing with clay. I’ve seen fabulously ugly beasts formed lovingly, shapes built and destroyed in endless cycles, the surprising genesis of something amazing. But always there’s something, never nothing, even if you junk it all at the end.

If you’ve got a free evening and a bit of flour and salt on hand (ideally at least a quarter cup of flour), give it a try. The worst thing that could happen is you add too much water and end up with soup. But if you only add a little water at a time you’ll be fine. I mean, if you’re doing this in your home, nobody will see the stupid stuff you make. You don’t have to prove skills to anyone, just let yourself play.

I tend to feel like I don’t make enough or do enough creative work. Compared to the output I used to do, I don’t. I try to remind myself that it’s okay! I work a fulfilling, creative job and sleep more and am pretty much happy. But it bums me out, especially since so many folks I know are constantly pumping out notable, awesome work. So when I sat down with my Flickr archive for this year (because Flickr has been my memory bank for years now), I didn’t expect much. This was the year I stopped doing focus months, I mean, how much could I have done?

Turns out? A decent amount.

January
Focus month: Branding Ma-Mé. I built and did the branding work for a friend’s site. It was super fun and I got paid for it! I like making other people’s ideas because I just like making stuff more than thinking of what to make.

Non-focus things made:
• I painted a painting that I then slid behind a bookcase, because I couldn’t throw it away, but why keep it?
• A TARDIS piñata for a dear friend. This has been re-Pinned on Pinterest about a million times.

February
Focus month: Airbrush! I have an airbrush and love it, but spent this month really learning it.

Non-focus things made:
• Rebuilt arbour in yard.
• Murder-wall anniversary present for Chase.

March
Focus month: Mending & old work. Cleaned a bunch of stuff, got rid of a bunch of stuff, a really great feeling.

Non-focus things made:
• I did get a wig that is now my web avatar wig. God, I love this fake hair.
• Wrote a short-short.
• Finished serialising the first draft of The Audacity Gambit.

April
Focus month: Chase’s show production, in which I showed you nothing.

Non-focus things made:
• Nothin. But I did start using Instagram.

May
Focus month: Embroidery. Which was fun, but not a lot produced.

Non-focus things made:
• Taught myself eggshell veneer.

June
Focus Month: Another writing month. Editing The Audacity Gambit and working on the second book!

Non-focus things made:
• Made a sky bison costume for a cat.
• Shot a cover for TAG’s Draft 2 Lulu print.

July
Focus month: Animatic. Which got extended, due to summer fun.

Non-focus things made:
• Swatched my insane nail polish collection.
• Helped manage my workplace’s move to a new place.
• Made Chase a hell of a cake for his birthday.

August
Focus month: Animatic, still. Which didn’t end how I expected. I decided to stop doing focus months.

Non-focus things made:
• Research for a friend’s Halloween costume.
• Ridiculous Adventure Time/Breaking Bad drawing.
• Modified a department store ball-jointed doll into a dryad.

September
•We bought a car, wtf.
• Built rig for San’s cape from Princess Mononoke.
• Wrote lots of TAG book 2

October
• Got my first hand tattoos
• Made Princess Mononoke costume.

November
• Worked on a thing I hope to show you guys soon.
• Made a ridiculous cake

December
• Shot photos of cats in both old west and Avedon’s In the American West styles as presents.

So, a decent amount of things, I think? And through all of it, trying to keep my nails sick.

Not a bad 2012, let’s hope for more in 2013!

Oop, it’s been a bit. Without the monthly focuses to keep me shame-tied to blogging, I’ve forgotten the habit. Though, to be fair, I’d been out of the proper habit for a while (which is true of most folks, it seems). What have I been doing. Hmm.

A big chunk of October was spent making San’s mask and cape (from Princess Mononoke) for a friend. I am a huge costume nerd and since they never drew San’s cape as actually attached in any way, that’s how I made it. It took an interior frame and counterweights, but it can be worn comfortably and easily, without exterior rigging, and look just like it does in the movie.

I wrote, but not as much as I should.

I got new tattoos, as part of a slow process in making my hands look amazing (nail art and tattoos are probably the best combo) and myself less employable outside the west coast.

That was a good night. I got ink, some froyo then Chase and I went to see a pick-up (I mean, exhibition) Blazer game. That’s what we did instead of listen to the last debate, because that shit is easier to read about after. I like the crime-solving kind of forensics, not the speech ones.

Internet life has been a little weird because first an act of God ruined my mobile,

Then Chase’s, which I switched to (as he uses his phone mostly) decided to up and die. At the same time, The Old Reader happened. Google Reader was super important to me and I keep poking around The Old Reader feeling the same kind of discomfort as visiting the place you grew up in—it is very similar but not the same, the same people are there, but not all of them and the dynamic is just a bit different

Plus my computer is shittier and The Old Reader is slower, so the 70-100 posts I’d see in a day is too much for me keep up with. I want this part of my online life back pretty badly, but there are some trust issues.

But at least I started reading again. Weird that I even stopped for like, months, right? I used to read a book or two a week. Honest books too, not just pulp. But writing while reading is hard and I was reading articles and doing crosswords and I don’t know. It got weird. But then the wonderful Jon Morris of Oh That Paperback (and like, one million other things) sent me a box of beautiful mass markets and a handful of 1970s’ Analogs. And you can’t turn that down, not an addict like me.

From here it gets less fun and less pictures.

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And with that, we went and bought something fancier than we imagined we could.  And got a hell of a deal.

It’s the 2013 Veloster. VELOSTER. From the first time I saw a picture of its stupid face I was taken. Then Chase showed me this banned Dutch commercial:

Yep, it’s got three doors. To fuck with Death.

Somehow, we thought the price we were looking at was for the base model. But it turned out that the car we were looking at online actually had a fancy package that added a crazy nice stereo and a sunroof. And leatherette seats. So we ended up with a car that gets at least 40 miles per gallon on the highway, in a low-moderate price range, that feels like a luxury car inside. And looks like a space ship, a little.

Oh, and there is a touch screen inside?

We named him Jeff.

Our beloved car, Patrick (named after the best mixture of feminine and masculine ever) is getting old and sick and our crazy long-term life plans, along with Chase’s hardcore commute, mean that we need a vehicle with good gas mileage. Something new(er) than our gorgeous 1991 Mercedes Benz.

There is something particularly wonderful about driving the last generation’s luxury cars. Patrick has a leather interior, wood panelling, seats that work for both Chase and I (two very different sized people)—he reminds you, even with his heavy wear and age, that you are in a very smartly designed and very expensive vehicle.

Having both grown up in different kinds of isolation, in the era that we did, Chase and I are both part of the dying car culture. We go on drives for pleasure, he has to drive for work, when we think of trips they’re all centered around the journey, eating miles and feeling the wind in your hair (no car we’ve owned has ever had a working cooling system).

So, we’ve been discussing buying a new car. Like, a brand new car. The possible miles per gallon are becoming amazing because of new laws, we are reaching a place where we can afford one. Most importantly, we want to let Patrick rest until we can afford to give him a new engine, transmission, all the other things that could get another 100,000 out of a vehicle we love that deserves a few more years.

We have a lot of friends who are not part of car culture. But we are. In the three years we’ve had Patrick we’ve put 72,000 miles on him. We could have driven from one coast to the other and back again, with miles to spare. A lot of that was driving into the sunset, along the ocean, across the West.

We figure that in ten more years car culture will be dead and we want to use that time while we can. I personally want a diesel, so that we can convert it when petrol is no longer an option.

So we went to go look at a smart little number today. We knew what to expect going in. Chase dosed himself with kava and I love power games, so we were pretty comfortable with the traditional car sales situation. The car drove well, reminding me of the BMW sporty car we used to have. It also reminded me that Patrick is so much better than anything we could afford new. It could have been a good match.

When we sat down to talk numbers I didn’t expect to learn that, though I feel like we comfortably tread the normal, square life—with my 401k and salary and our pretty modest lifestyle—we are still not actually “normal”. First time car buyers at 29 With “only a couple” credit cards (of Chase’s, I’ve had none) on the credit history. There was much tongue clicking and uncertainty. The kind of people they want to give good financing to live lives I can’t understand.

After burning up a younger guy with questions and smiles that didn’t reach the eyes, we ended the afternoon with a wonderful older lady who had just the right amount of fucks to give. And we smiled, shook hands, and left without a car, getting an email from her not much later reassuring us that the price we’d discussed wouldn’t change, if we decided to come back.

Chase summed up the experience pretty well as we drove away in our sadly clicking, beautiful and old car. “If I was a more skeezy person, I would have told them that the car is great, but I’m not hard.”