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Archive for September, 2009

assembling elephants, chairs, shelves

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Yesterday was my first day of work from home. Everything went well, I was able to connect to the network, do some training, install some software, handle things that happened in the office, and even field calls from co-workers. I felt very accomplished, and worked through the time that I would have been driving. The one drawback was the gigantic pain in my back at the end of the day.

People who have visited the tower know that I enjoy backless chairs. I used to sit on a Rubbermaid tub full of fabric scraps and yarn. I upgraded to an ottoman with three inches of foam on the top. It obviously isn’t made from the correct foam, because it obviously didn’t keep up with my support needs.

So today is a day for putting things together! I bought a computer chair, some shelves for extending the life of our garden plants, and some parts to finish up the elephant/Chinese dragon for Conway ArtsFest.

Here is my TODO pile:



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For the elephant, I’ve got to connect the ears to the head. The body is a long piece of fabric. That’s got to be assembled, and I purchased irrigation tubing to create hoops under the fabric. I am going to use this hoop tutorial to create the hoops. The instructions suggest 1 or 3/4 inch tubing, but Lowe’s and Home Depot only had 1/2 inch tubing. At Lowe’s I met a really friendly guy working there with a sort of notorious Confederate General/KKK Grand Dragon name. We talked about how I got to the south and how I’m liking it. I told him I loved the growing season and the football, but I could do without the dry counties. He proceeded to apologize for the roots of his name (white supremacy, confederate generals), and everything responsible for making Faulkner, Conway, and Cleburne counties dry counties. He was intrigued about using hula hoop instructions on irrigation tubing, and he was super friendly!

This week, I used fabric stiffener on the elephant head. The product I used had an embarrassing name.



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Right now I’m trying to figure out how the head will be worn by a real person (probably me). The options below show the head with and without my arms inside of it. I’m also trying to figure out how to get some trunk mobility, and in a dream last night I had an excellent idea about water noodles! The noodle should take care of the weird kink in the nasal bridge.



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Ok, off to get things done!

Posted in Amigurumi, crochet, domestic maintenance craft, The South | 1 Comment »

Oxford American welcomes Jack Pendarvis

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Last week Mary Ruth and Jeff Marotte hosted Oxford American’s party to welcome new columnist Jack Pendarvis to the fold. I don’t often get good pictures at readings because I sit too far away!



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This case was no exception! It was a great party complete with pizza, cookies, a poetry reading, and Jack Pendarvis doing an impression of Truman Capote reciting Johnny Cash.

The Oxford American offered a few unpublished and published poems up for the night, read by members of the Arkansas Shakespeare Festival.

Now I’m not a real writer or from the south, but Oxford American events are always a good time and I always meet so many interesting people. I’m also equally amazed by how entertaining the people I already know get at these parties! Need an example? My friend Robin, out of the blue, decided to buy me a “I +heart+ Kris Allen” shirt, and bring it to the party. See…even Kris Allen was at this party, complete with grayed 5 o’clock shadow….at least on my shirt.



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Posted in book club, englishy, The South | Comments Off

Crafty Books: 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

I’ve been posting so much about fiction writers and poetry writers, that I almost forgot this is first and foremost a craft blog!

I’m super excited about my fellow former Nebraskan crafter Garth Johnson’s new book 100 Ideas for Creative Reuse, due out in November.




He’s the author of the Extreme Craft blog, and posted today that he received his copy of the book.

I zipped over to amazon.com to see if any of my projects made the cover, or if I made it into the first few pages browsable by Amazon’s Look Inside! feature. After a few clicks on the Surprise Me! feature, and there is one of my projects at #242!

One of my favorite things about this book is that it has a single picture of each creative reuse project. There are no patterns and no instructions. It is a book of ideas, but it is also a fantastic book of possibilities for people who consider crafting as interesting and as engaging as solving puzzles or gigantic systems of equations. The picture of the finished item is proof that the puzzle can be solved, or that a solution exists. As a crafter, you can infer a few things from each picture, but the path you take in utilizing the creative reuse idea is completely up to you!

Earlier today at my new job, I had to fill out a section of my Corporate Resume about my published works and publications. I wonder if they’ll let me add my recycled sweater coozie to that list? I’ll post a little about my job this weekend.

Posted in activist craft, book club, cooking, felted coozie, football, recycle | Comments Off

Edible Exquisite Corpse with Andrei Codrescu

Monday, September 21st, 2009

A few weeks ago writer and NPR personality Andrei Codrescu came to town. He read from his new book The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess.



It was a great reading, followed by a Q&A and a super fun Exquisite Corpse Dada Exercise at the end. Then the oranges, melons, and sharpie markers came out! The entire audience was encouraged to write lines on the fruit to create a poem. People marched up with their fruits and read the lines everyone had written. After all of the oranges and melons were read, they were cut and eaten. We had a great time!



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Our friend Mark Spitzer, the managing editor of the Exquisite Corpse Annual sold quite a few copies of the first edition at the reading too! They’re still taking submissions for the next edition!

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Arkansas Vacation Part III: Labor Day Weekend with Dave and Neal

Monday, September 21st, 2009

If you’ve ever wanted to visit us down in Arkansas on the weekend, and it’s already Wednesday, just give us a call. That’s what Dave and Neal did, and we had a great time!

Like most of our guests, we took them on a tour of Lake Conway.



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They also got the special bonus tour of our nearest border liquor store, Lake Liquor. Included was the unexpected bonus of the bulk ice machine. Dave said he would blog about it, but he hasn’t yet.


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While the guys were down here, Ty let them know about his aspirations to purchase a boat. They were nothing but encouraging.

We ended up going to downtown Little Rock on Sunday. The Clinton Library was open, but not much else was open downtown on a Sunday.



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Neal and Dave smuggled me back to Nebraska in their trunk, but we made one stop along the way. We stopped at the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, MO. We had no idea about the museum component and spent much more than the allotted 30 minute side-trip we had provisioned.



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We had a great time in all of the gift shops, with the cement statues, and seeing all of the doe-eyed child figurine history of Sam Butcher. I didn’t realize how Japanese Anime inspired the drawings and figures were, and it was very interesting to find out.

Posted in The South, travel | Comments Off

Arkansas Vacation Part II: Aunt Carol, Mom, and Jen

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

When we get visitors, we love taking them out to see the bald cypress trees growing out of Lake Conway. Even though the trees are conifers, they loose their leaves during the winter making them look even creepier.



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Jen had poison ivy, so she rigged up some cut socks and leggings to keep her from itching.

Another Arkansas highlight is the River Market in Little Rock. Right next to that is the Clinton Library. We should probably just get lifetime memberships, because that is the first place people know they want to see in Little Rock.


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A new attraction in Little Rock is the Heifer International Heifer Village. I like the purpose of Heifer International, but it is so much fun to bring people to the educational center and show them how Heifer is helping people. My favorite is the rolling water container. As a child, I had to bring 5 gallon buckets of water to the hogs in our lot. At eight pounds per gallon, I carried just under 40 gallons of water as a child. The rolling container lets you leave much of that weight on the ground. This is water people need every day for drinking and cooking!

Aunt Carol really liked it. She liked it so much, she got us this awesome recycled candy wrapper dish at the Heifer International shop.



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We also like to take people on the Little Rock trolley system. If they’re crafty, we stop off in Argenta for the art galleries or the bead store.

If you’re planning on visiting us or Little Rock anytime soon, you should make sure to visit between Sept 25 and July 5, 2010 for The World of the Pharaohs at the Arkansas Arts Center.

Finally, if you visit us in Conway, we’ll take you to one of the clubs in town. We have to go to a club because Conway is located in Faulkner County, a dry county. In the heart of it all is Toad Suck Square.



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Posted in The South, travel | Comments Off

Poetry and Pachyderm Update

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

I have loads of blog posts to get too. In a little while I will be able to explain the backlog.

Our friends Dave and Neal came down to visit Labor day and took me back to Nebraska with them. I have some great pictures of the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, MO to post. This week, our friend Zachary Schomburg visited us while working the Hendrix-Murphy Progam’s Shop Talk series.

He’s put out two books of poetry. His debut The Man Suit is filled with concrete whimsy. His latest book Scary, No Scary came out two weeks ago!



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I’ve also been working on my crocheted elephant. I got my friend Sam to model the head sans ears for me.



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Posted in book club, crochet, englishy, husband | Comments Off

Mixtape is a masterpiece

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I love mix tapes. Over the years it has evolved into the mix CD, and then the mp3 CD, and now the mp3 DVD. You need an mp3 DVD to contain my current favorite. Lux and Ivy’s Favorites Volumes 1-13 are currently available from the WFMU.org website.

Lux Interior and Poison Ivy were the husband and wife team fronting the band The Cramps. They really loved music and collected the best on vinyl. My first exposure to The Cramps and these songs dates back to my last band, Mister Baby. The lead singer Kristen was in the process of organizing an all girl band. Before we even started playing together, we had a meeting about what we would wear, and Kristen brought us each a tape of influences. Fifty percent of the songs on the tape were from Lux and Ivy’s Favorites. My favorite song is “The Blob” by The Five Blobs on Volume 2.

The songs range from creepy step cousins of “The Flying Purple People Eater” as exemplified in Bob McFadden’s “I’m a Mummy”, to southern twang and soul like Wayne Williams’ faux Elvis “Red Hot Mama”. The collection was years ahead of Ghost World featuring the hip shaking Bollywood hit, Mohammed Rafi’s “Jaan Pehechaan Ho”. The collection is really wonderful, and so far I’ve only been raving about Volumes 2 & 3.

Right now I’m really digging The Collins Kids, a brother and sister hiccup vocal duo out of Oklahoma. I can’t stop listening to the simple chords, and really happy and fun people playing and singing music. If you despise auto-tune and smile at the thought of listening to mp3s ripped from super rare records complete with the warm hisses and pops, you should download this today.

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Posted in other artists, The South | 1 Comment »