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Stop Driving Us Crazy

Posted on by Anna

One of my Christmas presents last year was Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation by Amid Amidi. I finally gave it a good thumbing through last week, and after seeing so many fun and interesting stills from mid-century experimental animations, I was eager to find what was available on Youtube.

Happily, one of the more obscure-seeming mentions from the book was an easy find. I encourage you to watch at least part of this strange and wonderful 1959 animation made for the temperance board of the Methodist Church, of all things. It’s about the dangers of driving recklessly, it stars an alien who resembles a stylized automobile (or maybe Rainycloud, even), and it’s truly fascinating in its modern design and incorporation of jazz music with the moving images.

To Oklahoma!

Posted on by Anna

Unlike my other trips, this time lots of toys are coming with me! Including this work in progress, who will be making a Mochimochi Land debut sometime this spring.

luggagetoy

Update: I made it to Tulsa, but unfortunately my little WIP guy did not, along with the rest of my checked baggage. Let’s hear it for carry-ons.

Another Update: My bag is here, only 34 hours late! Let’s hear it for wearing your own underwear again.

Jean on Jean

Posted on by Anna

You might be familiar with Molly Schnick from her craft posts on the Purl Bee, the blog of New York’s Purl stores (favorites of mine and anyone else who has ever visited.) You might not have known that Molly is an accomplished musician as well!

jeanonjeanAfter playing with the indie electronic band Out Hud earlier this decade, Molly released her own album under the name Jean on Jean last year. Also titled Jean on Jean, the album is nostalgic, a bit girly, and has gorgeous instrumentation—it’s more or less the musical equivalent to her style of unassumingly beautiful crafts.

Here is a video she recently released for the first track, titled “Tonight.”

Cross-Stitched Tin House

Posted on by Anna

I just yesterday got around to picking up the latest Tin House, in preparation for a trip next week to Oklahoma.

At first I thought the cover looked really blurry, then I realized it was cross-stitched!

tinhouse_emb

I’ll admit that I originally started reading Tin House because of a neat cover. Waiting until the plane ride to see how the fiction, essays, etc. on the inside are.

Pieces of a Cardboard Sky

Posted on by Anna

About a month ago John and I decided that it was a puzzle kind of Sunday, so we trekked out to FAO Schwarz and got the most fun-looking jigsaw puzzle they had to offer. They didn’t have a very wide selection.

The castle ended up giving us hours of entertainment—hours and hours more than we were expecting, and at some point it seemed more like work than entertainment. (The myriad foliage was way harder than the plain blue sky.)

Finally we finished it. We don’t have the wall space for a framed generic-looking puzzle, so our accomplishment sat in the middle of our living room floor for a week or so. Then we had guests coming over, but instead of taking it apart and shelving it, we did the obvious thing and carefully pushed the whole thing up against a wall in our bedroom.

That was weeks ago, and I finally gave it a good stepping on last night by accident.

skypieces

As cool as this looks, it’s now time to put the puzzle away.

Brief Notes

Posted on by Anna

Some ideas just won’t leave you alone until you’ve found a way to make them work. I’ve tried making a knitted eighth note before, but didn’t like the results, so recently I tried making a mini sixteenth-note version with sock yarn.

sixteenthnotes

I actually think they’re pretty cute, but the pattern isn’t very much fun, since you have to knit the two notes separately and join them with two I-cords, which are a pain to sew onto both notes. (I also tried picking up the stitches for one side, but that was even less fun than seaming.)

Maybe returning to worsted-weight yarn will help make this a better knit, so I’ll probably give that another try someday. But for now, I want to move on to something else!

Stackable Cats Cross-Stitch

Posted on by Anna

It’s finally done!

stackablecats_stitch2

I hope it’s obvious that the stuff at bottom are two tangled balls of yarn? That’s the only thing I am a little unsure of.

I’ve never designed a cross-stitch pattern before, but I’m planning to create the printable pattern, probably using Illustrator. Any preference between a chart with squares filled in with colors or a chart with symbols in lieu of colors?

Fun with Illustrator

Posted on by Anna

I started taking a class in Illustrator a few weeks back, just because it was something I had wanted to learn for a while, especially after getting to know designers and professional illustrators who use it all the time.

I’m slowly grasping how it works and how to use some of the tools, and for practice the other night, I made these Boos!

illustratorboos

The wings maybe could use a little work, but I’m happy with it as a beginner’s Illustrator illustration.

I don’t know if I would want to use Illustrator as a way to sketch out ideas from scratch, but it’s certainly a lot of fun to play around with manipulating basic shapes.