So, I sell a few t-shirts through a site called redbubble.com. It's not anything like a profitable venture since I'm going through a middleman that I think is based in England; but it's a good bookmark until I release my first impending, independent tee line. It'll likely be a collaborative effort, so stay tuned for that.

The designs on redbubble are freaking random. That's because for the most part, the only things I end up making for t-shirt designs are either esoteric images that make me titter, or requests I get from friends wanting to sport a certain something. Surprisingly, the appeal is more universal than I thought. Particularly my design Karl's Animal which has, for some reason, become the most popular of my redbubble wearables.

Not many besides those who follow the adventures of Karl Pilkington will know his reasons behind creating this staring, feathered oddity of an animal. But he was right about one thing: the owl head looks nice to humans. It also looks nice on humans; a perfect example of which is my new friend Ashley, whose fiery, ginger glamour is giving my shirt FEVER.

I met Ashley through the infinite networking prowess of my friend Shonna, and I came to adore her very quickly. She's a fancy, real-life blogger whose adventures you can view here and get obsessed with. After spying on her infinitely excellent example of what proper bloggers do, I was inspired to emulate her and resuscitate my own flaccid web log. Shut up! Even the road to hell is paved with good intentions! Plus, I need somewhere to post these pictures of her making my shirt awesome.

Yes, this lady is a tall drink of lovely, but don't worry. Randomness looks good on everybody! Work it, hermano!

Jónsi>Sleep>Sense

Sooo, a million years ago, my trusty associate Keith and I decided to attend the Jónsi show in Oakland. Hah, "decided"! More like, "compelled against all odds" -which we truly must've been, because the show was most wretchedly scheduled for a Tuesday night. It's amazing how minimal such details can seem when you're lost in the ecstasy of booking tickets. The anticipation of concert pilgrimage is top-notch at banishing all thoughts of logistics from my mind. But when the date creeps up and you only feel right in wrangling one midweek day out of the office, desperate measures are necessitated. We were able to spend one day running around San Francisco before the show, and then booked a hotel for a quick 40 winks before rising at 4 a.m. to get me back into the office by 9. Go do, indeed! Keith had dragged a perfectly lovely but perhaps unwitting friend into the wakeful whirlwind of our trip (poor Nick!); and the pair of them armed themselves with their fancy, smart cameras and expertly documented most of our ramblings. I have no idea how they managed to do this, since I seemed to have had a wad of chewed-up gum in my skull instead of a brain for the better half of this trip. Sleeplessness is a hell of a drug!

As are Keith's videos! Take me higher, homage:

{song: Tornado by Jónsi}

I've been experimenting with making jewelry lately. There are a hell of a lot of trinkets out there, and the possibilities for pretty adornments are endless.

I buy a lot of stuff on ebay. It's almost a problem; I have established systems and everything. Oh well, I'll just write a book on my strategies someday, and my habit will be legitimized. But seriously people, ebay is legit. You can find literally anything you want if you know how to look.

Take the spy camera, for example. I'm obsessed with spies, and so naturally I really wanted a tiny camera to play with. I think you can get mini digital cameras shaped like those espionage staples of yore, but no, I wanted a REAL one that used film and belonged in the gloved hands and trench coat pockets of an old-school spy. Yep, I'm insane. But ebay doesn't discriminate; it yields its varied bounty to the sound and unsound of mind alike. I found a genuine toy spy camera from the 1950s, which was in working condition if one could find the archaic toy film that it requires to produce pictures of indeterminate blobs. I wasn't one who could find it. But I didn't mind much, because ebay also coughed up a great, bunchy chain to string the camera on, and one of my favorite necklaces was born. If you can't use it, wear it!

Painting the inside of a chunky, filagreed locket seemed natural, so I did it. Plus, hearts are so boring, I always feel like they need to be dressed up somehow. Some sciencey how.

I'm a big fan of charms, so my talisman design gets a lot of use in repetition. It strings charms and jewels together on braided leathers and natural cords. You can variate almost endlessly within this idea, but I've only made three so far.

antique carved-bone rose and lion:

spider quartz:

another heart diagram:

butcher shoes

At some point, these shoes of mine got a curious, rusty stain on them -like a drop of blood right on the top of the tongue. I liked the way it looked, and although I realize the paint-splattered-chuck-taylor look is anything but innovative, attacking my shoes with a brush filled exclusively with crime-scene-red felt fresh. Fresh as a cut of meat!

I like to wear these with preppy clothes. Tennis skirts, polo shirts, stripes, collars, etc. We can call this look "sinister picnic" because doesn't that sound fun? More fun than "cattle rapist" anyway!

Leeching

Hey, throw that boring t-shirt away right now. Just rip it off your body and fling it from you without another thought because you know what you can do? With just a few tools and some patience, you can make amazing, permanent designs on cotton garments in what basically amounts to reverse-dye ghetto screen printing. I (rather pretentiously) call it leeching, as the essential part of what you are doing is pulling the dye out of natural fabrics to make designs. I love modifying stuff, and this technique works brilliantly on t-shirts old and new. Here is what you need:

- a cotton garment

- dye leecher

- freezer paper (this is what you will use to make your stencil. You can buy this at the grocery store; it's just a paper that is waxy on one side. You need this because the waxy side will be what holds your stencil to your garment)

- an x-acto knife

- a paintbrush or q-tips

- an iron

Recently, my sister, my forever-associate Keith and I decided to pool our attention spans and make some shirts. We all had design ideas in mind, and they all turned out more or less successful. Keith is the one who originally tracked this process down and mastered it; his shirts always turn out a lot neater than mine. I like to have him around on a leeching project, he reminds me that you have to be exacting in this process. It's easy, but a bit tedious. Keith makes things fun with videos, too.

It's For The Neighborhood: from Keith M on Vimeo.

So, to make your own leeched tee, here is what you do:

Step 1: decide what you want your design to be. When I was in Italy, one of the kids at the camp where we taught was wearing this great sweater: it was just a simple ribcage on black. I liked it because it was a knit, and the handmade look made it very charming to me. It turned out that she had gotten it at an H&M kid's store in Rome. Yes, I take fashion cues from Italian children! Sometimes. Definitely in this case; I wanted that sweater! But H&M has no online outlets, and even though I accosted the one in San Francisco the morning after my plane landed, it was not to be mine. I grieved a bit, and then decided to make my own. It wouldn't be a knit, but I could put it on a sweatshirt and I warmed rapidly to the idea as I realized that the one-of-a-kind look would carry over even better with this technique. ANYWAY

Step 2: you can either create your design in photoshop, or pull a graphic off the internet and print it on your stencil paper. This isn't hard to do -just cut the paper down to the appropriate size and make sure that your design prints on the non-waxy side. Or you can just draw your design directly onto the stencil paper. For the skeleton, I had to draw my design because I needed it to be bigger than the printer could print.

Step 3: Cut out your stencil. Do it carfeully, being aware of the positive and negative space you need, especially with letters. Since Annie's was all text, she had to pay special attention to how she cut out the letters. Keith's design was intricate as all hell. He had done it beforehand.

Step 4: Align your stencil where you want it to go on your garment, with the waxy side facing the fabric. When the placement is right, iron the stencil down. The waxy side will make it stick to the fabric, and your stencil will have nice, sharp edges.

Step 5: Apply the dye leecher to the fabric inside your stencil. The chemical will pull the dye out of the garment after it dries and heat is applied. But it will only leech dye out of natural fabrics like cotton, so leave the American Apparel 50/50 blend tee on the rack.

Step 6: When the stenciled area is dry (leave it in the sun for quicker results), start running a hot iron over the design. The dye will begin to leech out of the fabric. The heated leecher smells sort of horrible unfortunately, but you'll be rewarded with the sight of your design beginning to lighten. Keep applying heat to the design. Don't press the iron down like a damn waffle maker, but the more heat you gently apply, the more dye leeches out.

Step 7: Peel off the stencil. Check out your design. Have the treated areas lightened enough for you? Are there any bare spots? Sometimes a little more heat will lighten the design further still, and you can always go back and touch up under-treated spots with more dye leecher.

Yay! You made yourself an original shirt! Annie and I have already worn ours a little ragged.

Oh, and another cool thing about the leeching process is this: you can use it to pull dye out of a shirt with screen printing already on it, but the dye leecher won't affect the screen print. The upshot of this fact is that you can basically make designs under screen printing, like this:

That one was fun. I've always loved this Loomstate tee, so I'm glad this design turned out well on it. Can you see what the screen print is of? Not everyone agrees!

beautiful objects

The Science of Sleep is a lovely movie. The thing I like best about it is all the random items that feature throughout.



The image of the felt telephone and typewriter impressed themselves upon me the most, and I made one for myself.

It's not an exact replica. I just kind of allowed myself to piece it together without any kind of pattern (since I don't really know a thing about using patterns anyway). I just sewed it together with scraps of felt as needed. Frankenphone it is. Usually it makes me think "cozy Tim Burton-esque", but when Gemini poses with it, I get a distinct Dr. Seuss vibe.

Give me glamour, kitteh!

Shredding

Shredding garments is about the most fun thing you can do if you're both DIY and OCD. So, oh god I love it. This video is the first thing I stumbled upon when looking for instruction on how to get the effect. I don't know why, but I have a total voice crush on this girl. Know what I mean? When someone's voice is just, ooh...nice? I have crippling voice crushes on H Jon Benjamin, and Will Arnett. Their voices just feel like being drunk and slipping into a hot bath made of cashmere and baby skin. Delish. This lady is not quite like that, but there IS something about her voice that makes my eyes close a little. And plus, she shows us how to shred a shirt! Let's watch:



So naturally, I went crazy with these instructions and shredded a bunch of things. The first success I had came after several repurposings. Which is why it ended up as an indeterminate hood thing. But I still end up wearing it an awful lot, despite its very Padmé Amidala overtones.

After awhile, I got the hang of things and I started to apply the shredding technique to existing shirts of mine that I liked, but were too ill-fitting to be among my favorites. Shredding makes things bigger, so regular-fitting tees become more draped. The overall look is elegant and ragged with a sort of apocalyptic flavor -especially if you wear a bunch of shredded pieces together. Here are front and back views of three pieces I've finished:

The Hansel Funeral Shirt

You know that scene in Zoolander where everyone attends the funeral of Derek's unfortunate roommates, and Hansel walks in with the usual scratch beat and entourage? And the COOLEST SHIRT/JACKET thing ever?? Yes, funeralgoers, stop and pay attention you should! It was amazing; it was a black shirt or jacket of some kind, with crude, white stitching running down the chest. It gives me skeleton/native american vibes, So, yes please.



My brother Stephen loved the shirt too. He kept suggesting we make them ourselves. The difficulty factor seemed minimal, so after like a million years, we finally sat down one weekend, watched a stack of movies, and made them. It got kind of time-intensive when I insisted that we use this shredding process I'd just discovered to make the white parts, but I think it was the best choice. The effect is surprisingly wearable; particularly when the wind blows. SO HOT RIGHT NOW.