Yesterday's Jam

I really enjoyed The IT Crowd. It was a really great, geeky, show, and had a few really terrific moments. One of the most memorable is the scene about 'Yesterday's Jam'. So I took it, and made it into a t-shirt design:

There are many references to the show packed into this little design: The 8-bit opening credit sequence is referenced in the lines, colours, and square 'half-tone dots'; the logo is 'The Internet', the 'Red door' of the jam (do you see the shape/colour of the jam and also the doorknob?), and the company name; and lastly the best before date is the emergency number.

I'm very happy with how this guy turned out! Head over to RedBubble to get a shirt or iPhone case.

And We Shall Call It This Land

I suddenly realized that I haven't posted about the t-shirt designs I've done over the past couple of... years. Years! So, I'm going to begin a series of posts covering all the designs, because some of them are really good, and I want to share them.

This is a reference to one of my favourite TV show, Firefly. It's from the very first scene, one of the funniest moments in the show. I decided to make it into a Soviet-style propoganda poster, which included having to make the font. Right now it's just in Photoshop, but I might look into getting a program to make it a real font. I'm happiest with how the dinosaurs and half-tone dots came out on this, it really worked well.

Head over to Redbubble to get a t-shirt (or hoodie, or iPhone case).
 

Moroccan Tiles Fabric - Times Two

This fabric design (designs, if you could colour variations) came from a very real need for curtains for my bedroom! I'm sure the neighbours will appreciate it. Here's a photo of my very cool new bedroom in the old house I'm slowly restoring (the colours area  little dark, sorry):

Pay special attention to the stained floor pattern! I did that to excuse the crappy wood planks that are in the middle and are meant to be covered with an area rug. All the rooms are like that, it's pretty common in older houses, in order to save money on flooring. It probably made a lot of sense back in the day when the new area rugs were probably part of the overall house budget. Moving into a house that needs six or seven large rugs (including a custom shape in this one)... a little harder to figure out how to afford them. So, I stained a pattern on them instead. It looks really awesome and is my favourite part of the rooms I've finished.

Point is, it's a Moroccan pattern, and the room has a lot of colour in it, so I decided to come up with a very subtle Moroccan tile pattern for the curtains:

 

But to keep it interesting, I made a colour version as well, and that will be the bottom border, and I'll use a copper ribbon between the two in order to finish everything off.

The cream and white fabric turned out so much better than I ever expected! It's phenomenal in real life! The colour one looks great too, but the different off-white colours really suprised me.

I'll post photos of the finished product as soon as I find my sewing machine and the right ribbon.

Head over to Spoonflower to take a look at and purchase the fabric:

Moroccan Tiles in White

 Moroccan Tiles in Colour

New Honeycomb Fabrics

It has been a really really long time since I've been able to do anything creative (I moved and bought an old house that needs a lot of work, and I don't want to flood this blog with photos. Yet), but a few months ago I was in Winnipeg on course, and so I had spare time in the evenings to work on a few designs. I drove the person sitting beside me a little crazy doodling honey combs all week. The results are really nice, though!

I set myself the challenge of using a honeycomb pattern and the Pantone 2014 colours, and here is the result:

But all the doodling (and just the way I happened to make the pattern in Photoshop, which lent itself to some playing around) also led to this pattern, which uses one of the colours from the first design, Dazzling Blue.

Today they finally arrived, and here are the test swatches. They look terrific, especially the small honeycomb pattern. Well, and the blue is really rich and lovely as well. I'm very happy with them! These are on cotton-silk, and the fabric is really nice. I'm going to experiment with making them into book-cloth someday.

Both patterns are available at Spoonflower:

Honeycomb Pantone Rainbow

Honeycomb in Dazzling Blue

Doctor Frankenstein's Monster Book: Finished

My monster book is finished, and if I'm allowed a small self-congratulatory moment, looks pretty terrific! It takes an astonishing amount of pressure to sew the leather onto the cover, so if I ever do it again I'd definitely try simply sewing it to the paper, and then just glueing the paper to the cover, but I'm not sure how to get the placement exact enough to make that work. This way I was able to stretch the leather a little bit, and it fits very nicely over the book.

Here are a couple shots of the terrific paper I used for the endpaper. The anatomy poster looks great, but it was pretty thin, so I had to glue it to another sheet of paper before I used it, or ever single bump from the stitches would have shown through. I put the page at the back sideways because I wanted to continue the whole 'random recycled parts, use what's available' theme, a little like the way Doctor Frankenstein made his monster.

Doctor Frankenstein's Monster Book

I decided that the first thing I wanted to make in my new studio was a book. Just something small, to get back into creating things. 

I've had an idea in mind for a Hallowe'en themed book for a couple of years now, for the BEST Hallowe'en Contest, and I finally had some time to make it. I want it to look a little like a twisted journal, with scraps of leather sewn together like Frankenstein's skin, to form the cover:

I tore up random scraps of paper for the book block. Considering all the different papers, and how I was none to careful tearing it up, it came out surprisingly uniform:

I was originally going to bind it with a Raven's Claw binding, because it will be open and visible, but then I realized that if I want this to follow the Frankenstein theme, it should look like the binding was unintentionally left open. I used a French stitch instead, and it actually looks a little like stitches:

I'm quite happy with it, and I'm looking forward to finishing soon.

New Studio

I have excellent news! I finally have my own studio here in Winnipeg. It's not much, but it's got plenty of room for all my toys, and more importantly, it's a place for me to work. I've hardly done anything in the past few months, between being in school and having no proper space to use. BUT that should change very soon, because now I have a dedicated spot, and need to justify the rent. So new projects/old projects I haven't worked on in a long time should be coming up soon!