I’m still working on the animals I was talking about a while back.  There has been more unnecessary law & order watching than sewing, but there is some progress. I’ve never actually drafted a pattern for one of my toys before and it’s pretty time consuming–especially when you have an anal retentive side.  I wanted the elephant to have a big head gusset that would extend down to his trunk and I couldn’t just whip this up.  This is my first attempt and though it looked the way I imagined, his trunk stuck out straight–Pinocchio style–when I stuffed him.  I made a few more and could have kept on making a little muslin menagerie, but I’m trying to make my toys less straight and narrow and more folky and improvised (strangely it’s the latter that needs a pattern).

So I cut into this amazing sparkley striped linen I got from namolio’s shop. I was going to make all the animals from thrifted outfits, and some still will be, but I was trying to cram too many ideas into one toy: stripes or patterned faces, moustached, thrifted outfit transformed into plush toy.  Besides this grey linen was a little wrinkly just like a naked elephant.

Here he is almost done.  He (ah! no name! any suggestions?) is sporting this fantastic fake moustache sent to my by Melinda (thank you again!).  And after seeing little elephante sporting this polka dot moustache, I don’t know if I should use a completely different print for the moustache or make it out of the denim I used for his pants or the grey linen again, or embroider a big fluffy one. I need feed back from all of you who have made it to the end of this post.

just a quick post to say there are some felt stones in my shop.

My husband cleaned up my website for me this weekend and I whipped up some brioche for him, well and me too.  It’s not completely done, but there is a new links page which you should go see.  The rest of my weekend was spent in Chicago with an old friend and some lovely food and wine.  I picked up some books at Mitsuwa that I’ll show you tomorrow, because right now I’m off to bed.  good night.

Another post about another artist, because there’s not much coming out of my studio these days and what is coming out comes out very, very wrong.  I picked up this book at a thrift store a while ago because I recognized the author’s name.  Eugene Ionesco was a playwright in the sixties who wrote in the style of the Theatre of the Absurd (thanks wikipedia).

The story is not so absurd, just a little silly.  Thankfully it’s not like his other plays: “Ionesco’s plays depict in a tangible way the solitude and insignificance of human existence” (thanks again wikipedia).  In the story, Josette’s mother and father are lying in bed tired and hungover (it’s always nice to read a book where the parents are real, instead of cheery cheery and never busy) and her father tells her a silly story about a girl named Jacqueline.

Everyone and everything Jacqueline knows is named jacqueline.  Really not the best story–the father is hungover, cut him some slack–but the illustrations are fantastic.  The colors are muted, but the pictures are still psychedelic.  Etienne Delessert is the artist and a quick search on amazon came up with a couple of books he’s illustrated and I know this book is the first in a series he did with Ionesco.  Anyway, I just think his pictures are great and wanted to share them with you.

more here and here if you are interested.

These beautiful alphabet cards were made by Ida Pearle.  There was a flurry of activity on the designy crafty blogs a while back when this set of cards came out.  And every time I saw pictures of her work I got excited because I knew someone who knew her.  Sadly, when picking up and washing up is most of your day this is as exciting as it gets.  So you can imagine how thrilling it was when the artist herself came to my house.  She (and our mutual friend, hi bill) ventured deep into the midwest just for a visit.  We had a very nice time in spite of the ridiculous amount of snow and then rain and hail and then more snow.  And I’m happy to say miss Ida Pearle is a kind and generous person as well as a talented artist.  She uses paper with the most amazing patterns in her collages.  And though I don’t really know how to talk about art, I know that hers is very much alive.  So go to her website and look at all her beautiful pictures.