Comic Art Battle at Pistol Bazaar

Comic Art Battle at Pistol Bazaar

So last night was Ezra Clayton Daniels famous Comic Art Battle. He and Heather Kortan own and run a really cool, concept greeting cards company called Loaded Blanks. They get local artists to create pictures and cartoons for cards and then leave the bubbles blank so you can fill them in as you wish. You can get a look at the cards on their Etsy site. (They are good to stockpile and use as needed;) ) The Comic Art Battle was held at Pistol Bazaar, a vintage clothing shop owned by two lovely ladies whom I am proud to call friends, Lana McAllister and Michelle DeLeone. ( 1717 W Chicago Ave, open 12-7 everyday selling vintage, vinyl and independent art. fabulous dress collection and the owners are drop dead gorgeous!)

Aaron and Ezra

Anywho, apparently one of the Comic Contenders was a no show to this rather densely populated art and fashion affair. So Ezra asked me quickly if I would be the fill in. The couple of glasses of sangria in me told him, "Yes I would". I immediately gulped down some more liquid courage and wrangled my nerves into a skittish but workable union. The first round was to draw from life. Someone with some acting humor posed and one person from each team had 5 minutes to draw her.

Posing karate-style for Round 1, Nate drawing her

There were two teams: Team Fashion (Yes!) and Team Comics. I was on Team Fashion with a dapper fellow named Steve and an illustrater named Richard. The other team consisted of Nate, Grant and Aaron, all artists themselves. Round 2 consisted of the audience calling out a noun, a verb, and an adjective. It was like ad-lib pictionary on stage. Our clues were Creamy (adjective), Fig Newtons (noun), and Spraying(verb). Yes, it was challenging, yes it was super funny, and no I did not win this round. My take on it was U.F.O's attacking our cities with creamed fig newtons.

Team Fashion (me, Richard, Steve)

Mind you,we had five minutes, a sharpie and some newsprint to render this with. My opponent drew a guy biting into a fig newton and it bursting and splooging up into his eye with some other wacky stuff going on in the background. It was a really good drawing and hilarious. I wish there was a picture of it!

U.F.O.'s spraying cream fig newton

Round 3 was also the result of an audience generated clue. I believe it was Fashion for a Fornication Occasion.

Fashion for Fornication Occasion

You can imagine how that one went! Eruptions of laughter from the crowd mixed with nervous twitters and wise-cracks from friends. The two drawings rendered were completely different but equally hilarious.

Richard

The 4th Round was Winner Takes All! All six of us had to share battle on one page of newsprint. Our theme was, of course, Fashion against Comics. More specifically, the fashion time period Regency against newspaper comic classics. It was a clusterfuck of scribbles, sharpie squeaks, laughter and battle cries. I kept drawing wigs and ruffs on cartoon characters and Aaron kept drawing Calvin and Hobbes characters taking the wigs off!

Aaron and Grant

All trying to draw at once!

It was a super fun event! I have to give Ezra credit here, because if he hadn't asked me to do it, I would have never volunteered! And I really makes me want to draw more, and participate more, and involve the arts more. I have incredible stage-fright and that could have been a problem but for a) Sangria and b) a really cool and kind audience. Lana and Michelle are great hosts and hopefully they made some sales! I met new cool people (Bridget and Alicia) and had a great talk with an old friend (Heather - I'm totally jealous of that bike, Lady!). Thanks to Nate Beaty for these awesome pictures! He is a great artist and photographer!

Not so busy anymore...

Haven't written in a while. Things slowed right down after that busy week. Luckily I worked all weekend at the bar, but didn't make as much money total what I would normally make on a Friday. It was a bummer. I'm trying to keep a calm head about my money issues. In fact, it would seem on the outside that I might not be giving it a thought at all but trust me, I'm just bottling it up inside. I had a great interview on Friday for a great job at a great restaurant. This place is right up my alley: 150 bottle wine list, rotating menu, vegetarian friendly, recycling program, and best of all, using foods and goods from local farmers. I'm crossing my fingers so hard my hands are cramping. I have a second interview on Wednesday. I really want this job. Even if I had to leave Subterranean, which I love. I hope I'm not jinxing it because I'm talking about it.

Baloo Bear will do anything for attention.

I broke down and bought my first pattern the other day. It was $5.50 and I used my savings to stymie the guilt. It is the Wicked sweater pattern from Zephyr Style. It's really cute, short sleeves and a kangaroo pocket. I have a bright teal Patons merino wool that I'm using. I started to make my swatch today and I think my gauge is too loose. Which means I need to go down a needle size, which means I have to go out and purchase the right size needle. Ugh! It never ends! So, instead I started to work on Adrienne's Snake Scarf. I made one for Mickey (which the dogs are modeling) and my Mom (his grandma) showed it around. Adrienne is due this week for her fourth child and wants a snake scarf for her 4 year old. She's a really cool girl so I have no problem making her one but I told my mom in no uncertain terms not to take orders. I'm not fiddling away my time making her clients snake scarfs! No matter how cute their own grand babies may be!

I also made a round dishcloth to teach myself short rows. I learned the wrap-and-turn method. It's embarrassingly easy. I was worried that they'd be hard. I now want to learn the Japanese method. It might be a cleaner look. The dishcloth turned out huge. Again, my loose knitting gauge. I swear, it just haunts me.

So really, that's all I have this week. Pretty boring.

JamPackedBusyWeek!

It is going to be and already has been a busy week! I finally finished the mittens for my Mom that match the hat I made her for Solstice. I made her the Sugar on Snow hat/neck-warmer. I made the mittens out of the same yarn, using the same baby cable rib on the wrists and then mitered the tops. This being my first pair of mittens, I used the Bernhard Ullman pattern and then adapted it for aesthetic reasons. The yarn knitted up into a very nice dense fabric and should really keep her hands warm. As I was finishing the second mitten, Gabe and I were on the couch and he was napping on my shoulder. It was very sweet so I didn't want to disturb him. But because of that, the second mitten is one or two rows longer than the first since it wasn't near enough so I could count the rows. Oh well, you can't really tell. All in all I really like how the turned out.

Yesterday, though, I decided to take a break from knitting mittens and knit something for myself! I haven't done that for awhile, so I grabbed some really cool yarn that my sister had sent me and quickly knit up Insaknitty's Wham Bam Thank You Lamb neck-warmer! I used size 13 needles and some bright green Thick & Quick with a strand of some bright pink Caron acrylic. The effect is pretty cool. Talk about immediate gratification! And of course, today it was a bea-uutiful 60 degree day! I'm out riding around on my bike (shopping for Gabes B-day!) and I totally didn't need the neck-warmer!

But here's the best news! At work on Friday, I was talking to Roger the cigarette guy. You know, the guy that goes around giving out free packs of cigarettes? He told me that he quit the smoke job to start working full time at his store.

"Like, a brick and mortar?" I asked him. He said yes, that it was downtown. (Downtown! What?!) And that he and his friends owned it. It's called Jugrnaut and it's 'lifestyle' store, full of clothes and accessories and shoes. It is a cute place! Roger noticed I was knitting (I always knit behind the bar) and we started to talk about cool knitwear. And we decided that I should knit up some wristbands and things with their logo on them. It's a relatively straightforward logo so knitting it into a wristband or a glove would be easy. So I'm making up prototypes this week! I have some tricks and ideas up my sleeve so hopefully this goes somewhere! In the meantime, check out their Myspace page - myspace.com/jugrnautchicago

And as I mentioned earlier, its Gabe's birthday coming up. It's two days after valentines day! Luckily we don't get giddy about that Hallmark holiday so it's nothing to worry about. But! What to get, what to get! I think he wants a wristband which is easy peasy but what else! I have very little time and even less money! Can't afford the big wowza and don't have time for hand-knit socks! I have 5 days to figure it out!

The Imposition

Last night I had a friend over to watch t.v. and knit. She’s been having a rough time lately and needed some TLC.

She lives, I swear, at a house that should be on reality t.v. Gossip Girl pales in comparison to the amount of drama that goes on in that house. It’s a 3-flat and all the tenants are friends. Or siblings. Or in relationships with each other. And they aren’t necessarily roommates. It’s like a knotted snarl of personal connections. The amount of arguing, arm yanking, side taking, texting, frustrated head-holding, storming, and door slamming is unheard of. She, being newest to the building, was at one time neutral. But when her own best friend and roommate suddenly moved back to Ohio, her flat became the central council for the rest of the flats inhabitants. Soon her apartment door was left unlocked so that the dramatists could make their way in and out unhindered. Pets were left to her care on a smile and an IOU. Conferences of crying and scheming and consoling were held into the wee hours of the morning. Her flat rang with the tinny music of Guitar Hero, the stomping upstairs, the muffled hip-hop wafting up from downstairs, the yipping of small dogs and the intermittent vvvvring of her cell phone vibrating on a wooden floor. It wasn’t long before the one or the other of the buildings owners, both tenants themselves, moved in to her recently vacated extra bedroom. And the mental headache isn’t the only injury she’s gotten from this. Lack of sleep due to a constant barrage of house guests has left her exhausted. Her foot was run over, literally run over, by a taxi cab when she escorted one belligerently sad tenent home from the bar. And finally, while walking with crutches home from the train in a blissful moment of solitude and relative city silence, she was mugged.

So, naturally, I had my friend over for a cup of calm and spot of quiet.

I had relatively recently taught her just the knit stitch and she was making, therefore, a garter stitch scarf. The mistake I made was to teach her how to knit lefthanded. Truly left handed, not Continentally, which in the long run can be quite a pain in the ass. Last night I was trying to get her to want to learn to purl. And then I decided that if she was going to advance any further, she needed to learn to knit the English way. I kept putting down my knitting to show her how to purl, and then how to knit in the English way. She would just quietly nod and return to her awkward and crippled looking way of holding the needles and yarn and knit her scarf. Before long, as I was clicking away, totally immersed in Law & Order: CI, she went back to furiously texting and sighing and promptly made her exit. I was shocked at the abruptness of her departure and sat wondering for awhile why she had left so suddenly, if I had offended her or if I was that incredibly boring.

Today it occurred to me it was just a matter of different preference of atmosphere. What is wonderful to me, a night of knitting and tea or maybe wine, with the background of either NPR or Law & Order was probably a nightmare to her. Some people thrive on chaos. Maybe her environment provides enough of a distraction that lets her mind work out its kinks subconciously. Maybe the concentrated quiet that I crave, stymies her mental energy. And probably, my pressuring her to knit a certain way left her feeling more uncomfortable than when various household inhabitants impose on her space and time.

In the end I find it’s pretty interesting that one persons ‘bananas’ is anothers mental stimulation and in the same vein, one persons pleasant contentment is the others sheer and unadulterated boredom. And I suppose the moral of this story is not to assume that what works for yourself will automatically work for others. Imposition bothersome in all it’s forms, loud or quiet.

Punk Rock Knitting!

The Sunday before Superbowl was a blast! Gabe picked me up from Noble Square Stitch 'n Bitch and took me to his band practice space. Along the way we picked up Willie, their lead singer. Now, I am not a musician, but they sat me down at the drum kit and let me bang my heart out. (I will say that it took a rapidly drunk beer to get me there!) So, after awhile I became more comfortable and started to be able to keep time to Gabe's guitar strummings. In an enthusiastic moment, I asked Willie to sing a song about knitting!
"Knitting? uh, ok, one, two, three, four!" And we were off! It was a fast paced, unintelligible, punk rock song about knitting! Awesome! It was awesome. It still makes me smile to think about it!

Last week was one of those weeks where nothing goes exactly wrong but nothing feels right either. So it was rather a long week, dour and uneventful. But one afternoon, though I'm really not in a place to spend money on frivolous treats like large Chai Lattes and loaded, cream cheesey bagels, I spent most of the daylight hours in a coffee shop working on Conrad's Bootie. I have knit most of it and worked through and wrote down the pattern as I went. It will be too small for him after I felt it but I believe the right shape is there and I can easily adapt the pattern to a larger size. I now need to finish the shaping for the back of the ankle and up the leg and then make 3 more. I'll felt them, do some finishing that will aide in the longevity of the booties and give them to a small dog that I know. I also have to make the right size for Conrad! His poor tooties!










One of the reasons this has been postponed is that I'm also working on my first pair of socks. I thought it was important to learn short rows and shaping before I tackled dog booties. When I started, I didn't pay attention to my gauge so these socks are actually too big and baggy for me but may just fit my sister. So they are going to her in the mail in the next few days. I have just the ball of the foot and the toes to finish on the second sock and I'm done! They were a lot easier than I thought they'd be!







Remember what the dogs did to my oh-so-lovely Shibui Knits mohair/silk? Well, I sat down in the morning sunshine the other day and spent nearly 4 hours untangling it. It only broke once so it's in two 'balls' now. I actually wrapped them around nearly empty spools of thread. Even though it's hurts to look at that fluffy tangle, isn't it pretty in the glass vase? My mom got me that vase for Solstice this year and it happens to match my yarn. Hmm.