Archive for the 'baby projects' Category

Raindrop Mobile

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

About a week ago I had an idea for a mobile and became obsessed with the idea of a New Project. This often happens when I have other projects in the works, usually unfinished. In this case I had two unfinished projects taking up all the space on my work desk. But, this new project was bright and shiny and I was terribly excited about it so I cleared a couple of square feet on my desk and went out shopping for my materials.

Often it is the idea of shopping for new materials that inspires a new project.

[The butterfly tin is one of the things I picked out from my grandmother’s house when she died to keep as a reminder of her; it was packed with a snarl of embroidery floss—floss, incidentally, that happened to be the same color palette as the felt I had used.]

My plan was to make ten mobile cosas—raindrops in this case—out of colored wool felt (oooooo!) to attach to the mobile skeleton that hangs over Ronin’s cradle (the one that held Joshua’s Expired Credit). Ronin and I skipped on down to the local yarn/Crafty McCrafterson shop on Burnside and I spent an hour poring over the many beautiful colors. I desperately wanted one of each color but limited myself to shades of blue and green.

I decided to make them double-sided (twice the work of course, because I am a crazy person) so that when they spun, they would be nice from both sides, and I cut out twenty different drop-like shapes. Then I cut out 49,577,601 various oblong and wobbly littler shapes out of the felt and neurotically pieced them together on the drops to make pretty topographies.

I think it turned out pretty cool. Ronin likes it too. But then she is equally impressed by a slotted spoon.


Expired Credit

Monday, June 16th, 2008

I’ve embarked on an art installation project intended for education and enlightenment. My first work in this series, “Expired Credit”, opened on April 19th. Critics were struck dumb, opening and closing their mouths without sound and feebly pawing the air.

[flash /images/0806/expired_credit.flv w=400 h=300 f={autostart=false}]

Artist Statement: Here the credit cards are dangling just out of reach. A tribute to the tantalizing nature of consumer culture. From the lofty Fordian goal of paying workers enough to afford the products of their own labor to the Keynesian ideal world economy driven by consumers consuming products they will never need and services they’d be better off without. Soaking up the surplus capital, and exploiting resources to extinction. The cards circle endlessly like debt-ridden martyrs borrowing against their own uncertain futures.


Onesies and Booties!

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

A few months before Ronin was born, I got bit with the crafty bug. You probably saw the baby quilt I made but it didn’t end there. Using bits of left-over quilt fabric in addition to other pieces from various projects I have made over the years, I made some baby booties, a little hat, and then Joshua and I stenciled a slew of onesies.

I didn’t post them right away because the majority of them were gifts for friends who were expecting babies. And then I continued not to post them because I’m a lamer.

***

First off, Baby Booties! Unable to resist such cuteness, I searched out simple patterns online and found some good ones. Of course, the ones I wanted to make I couldn’t find a pattern for so I downloaded a similar pattern and adapted it.

These are made from an old cashmere sweater of Joshua’s that met with foul play (a washing machine incident that totally wasn’t my fault) and got used to make a whole bunch of different things. I had some scraps left still and made this little teeny hat and booties to match (the booties are made from the pattern above, mostly). I was going to make them as gifts but they turned out so wonky that I had to keep them for myself. And then the wonkiness grew on me and I embroidered (if you can call it that) a twee heart on the sole to make it that much more knock-you-down adorable. Ronin wore the hat (the booties were way big) home from the hospital.

Of course, I was still short a bunch of gifts for friends. Onward!

The following are adapted from the pattern linked above:

These are made from scraps of wool, silk, and cotton, with flannel lining on the inside.

Last but not least: the onesies!

“Lefnut” was for our friend Kurt, named after his skateboard in college. “Riot” is a graffiti we saw in Barcelona in 2003.

Both the dummy (pacifier) and the chair are from graffitis we liked in Barcelona. The dummy was one of the most prolific graffiti tags in the city; this guy painted these things everywhere, elaborate ones with multiple colors, plain ones just black and white, and we saw them in other towns: Valencia, Sitges, Tarragona, etc. The chair was a simple stencil that we found in a few places around town; it was one of my favorites for some reason.

This is just a design I made up. I had to go and make it all complicated with three different overlaid stencils (the branches, the flowers, and the flower centers), which of course required multiple paint applications (with dry time between). Whew. Turned out pretty awesome I think though, as modeled by Celine here. I had to go out and buy pink paint for this (alas, no other color would do for the cherry blossoms), which undermined my War on Pink for the most part. I further rebelled in irony by also painting the Dummy above pink.


Baby Quilt

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Baby Quilt

I finished my baby quilt and it looks pretty damned good I think. I started out with an old robe that has a somewhat Japanesey print thinking I would just supplement with a few other patterns. I ordered a few pieces of material from a cool site in Japan that has all these neat kimono fabrics and then decided that my robe didn’t really match after all. Another time. The shiny greenish fabric border is Vietnamese silk, the edging and back are navy-colored flannel, dimensions are 42×52 inches.

[Just some close-ups so you can see the fabric patterns better.]

I started out also with a “simple” sketch of randomly sized blocks that I thought would make things easy and give me a wide margin of error. But somehow it ended up involving all sorts of math and precise measurements and a LOT of little rectangles. Here is the original sketch and subsequent notation as I progressed.

The Insanity


Cheyenne Weil, Joshua Coxwell