Josh per a tres!

Red, black & white banners flying on the stage outside the Rose Garden Arena before the Trail Blazers' first playoff game in several years. These semi-transparent banners are really beautiful rustling in the breeze with the cityscape in the background.

I’m hoping that “Josh per a tres!” actually does mean “Josh for three!” in Catalan, because that’s what the online translator said, and those things are never wrong–right?

I thought I’d share Josh’s latest screen printing project–an impromptu one, at that. (Although, let’s all agree that normal people don’t plan and execute a three-color screen print on an “impromptu” basis–Josh is weird.)

It’s been well documented that Josh has officially jumped on the Portland Trail Blazers bandwagon in a big way. (Although, really, he’s been on the bandwagon for about three years, but he’s reached the terminal stage of BlazerMania–emotional investment.) He has also sucked it up and finally become, like the rest of us here in Portland, a big Rudy Fernandez fan. Portland hearts Rudy, an flashy player from Spain–and people are wearing the T-shirts around to prove it. (Seriously, the now-defunct G.I. Joe’s sold them. First they were just women’s shirts, but then they started stocking men’s and you’d see a lot of very old male Blazers fans wearing them too.) I think the final straw was last Wednesday, at the Trail Blazers’ last regular season game, and Josh’s return to going to games after nearly a month of dealing with a nightmarish situation with regard to the horrendous customer service by the Trail Blazers season ticket staff and dealing with the thugish occupants of section 322 in the Rose Garden over the course of 41 games (and really, I’m pretty sure that I’m not quite ready to drop my complaint after the service folks’ pathetic reaction to our concerns). What was so special about Rudy’s performance that night? Well, he made six freaking three-point shots! Six! Which meant that he also broke the rookie record for most threes in a season. (You can check out some highlights of Rudy hitting threes this season here and if you’re feeling really wild and crazy, check out this phenomenal bit of play from Rodolfo.)

So, a bit more about Josh’s inspiration. Rudy makes a really unique and energizing hand gesture when he makes a three, and fans have started imitating him when he scores. It’s joyous, and it gets everyone fired up.

Portland, Oregon - Where the NBA Playoffs are finally happening again!

Josh got the idea to create a screenprint based upon the logo from the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain–you know, as a shout-out to that awesome city and country. (We went to Spain in 1998 and spent quite a bit of time in Barcelona, it’s one of the most wonderful places we’ve been–and we’d love to go back sometime.) Do you remember that logo? 

This is Josh’s re-interpretation:

A last-minute three-color screenprint? What a maniac!

Josh elongated the “face” to better resemble Rudy, and added Rudy’s signature “3″ hand gesture. The results are pretty nifty, if I do say so myself. 

The Trail Blazers put up this awesome banners of all the players all over the Rose Garden Arena outdoor concourse. They're really swell-looking. Here, Josh demonstrates Rudy's "3" sign under one of the Rudy banners.

Now, Josh would be the first to admit (actually, he did admit it to me yesterday), that he got all nervous about the playoff game on Saturday night (with good reason, apparently) and had to do something, hence the complexity of the three-color screenprint. He also printed me one. 

Josh tried to get me to take my picture under a certain players banner, but I thought that would be 1) a mixed basketball metaphor and 2) too Fan Girl.

Sadly, the Blazers lost their first playoff game, and I was–frankly–devastated. I never imagined that they’d lose, let alone get blown out. But, I’ve got to believe they’ll come back with a vengeance. So, I’m asking y’all a favor: If you currently have no NBA loyalties, or if your team’s not in the playoffs (I’m speaking to you, Phoenix Suns fans–I rooted for y’all’s team for a long while during the Jail Blazers Era and have even read :07 or Less.), please consider sending some positive playoff energy our way. It would mean a hell of a lot. For inspiration, here’s a video we shot at the Playoff Rally at Pioneer Courthouse Square on Thursday. 

15,000 of us showed up to cheer on the team just for making the playoffs! Look how excited everyone is! We need this here in Portland! So, please, send some positive vibes here to the Pacific Northwest.

~Sarah

P.S. You can check out my Flickr set for our pics from Saturday’s game.

Garden Dreams

Some of last year's bounty. Those beans were so, so, so good--an heirloom mix of bush beans that were almost leggy enough to be pole beans. Very sweet and crisp.

We’ve still been sick around here. Between the two of us, there hasn’t been a single healthy day in all of March. Pretty crummy, huh? We’ve been keeping thoughts of warmer weather and less sickness alive in our hearts, though, by dreaming about this year’s vegetable garden.

We plant an organic vegetable garden every year. In fact, we have gardened together since 2001, when we had a plot in one of the original Victory Gardens in the middle of Rock Creek Park in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. That year, we had put our names on a waiting list for a garden plot in the community garden near us, knowing that it usually took several years to get a plot. However, right at the beginning of the season, someone was unable to care for their plot anymore (there were a number of people who’d had their plots since they were originally developed in the 1940s), and the garden coordinator went down the waiting list, and we were the first people who answered the phone. And that’s how we wound up with a primo piece of D.C. real estate–a large garden plot right across the street from our apartment building, for the very small price of $40 a year. Our plot was pretty overgrown, and we didn’t have garden tools per se, so we spent a lot of time on manual labor churning up the soil and preparing it for planting. We walked all over the city in search of vegetable plants and seeds and, not having access to a car, carried some pretty wacky things on the subway and bus. That summer was incredibly hot, and our garden flourished. Quickly, vegetables started producing. Soon, we were feasting on fresh lettuce, peas and all sorts of other goodies. And just as quickly, wildlife began having our way with our bounty. Oh yes, Rock Creek Park is home to a lot of urban wildlife–coyotes (we would hear them howl from our apartment), turtle, foxes, rabbits and deer. Those damn deer. They would crawl under our fence, leap over it and just push through it. No matter what we did, the deer would get in and eat our vegetables. Despite that trauma, it was one of the best summers ever–and we spent hours every night outside in our garden. We’d often take our dinner out to our garden and sit in lawn chairs, enjoying the opportunity to have a piece of the country right in the middle of the city. Friends would stop by our plot and say hi. We made friends with the older folks who’d gardened there for decades, many of whom were also seed savers who shared seeds and knowledge with us. It was a special place. After 9/11, the garden was one of the first places we visited, and when we left D.C. later that year, the garden was the last place we said good-bye to.

We’ve pretty much gardened together ever since.

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Letterpress Class – Week Deux

Photos of letterpresses and letterpress tools from around flickr. Click through for links to the original images.

Why I felt the urge to call this post “Week Deux,” I cannot explain…

Last night was the second installment of my letterpress class through PNCA’s Continuing Education Program (and, no, I’m not pushing PNCA just because I’m teaching a class there this summer–it’s an awesome place, I swear). We got to fire up the printing presses and play with inks and actually start printing. Well, by “we” I really mean the collective “we,” rather than actually “me.” You see, when I pulled out my project from its drawer, I set it down with the other side facing toward me and noticed a big, huge gap next to the large “7″ I had in the middle of group of wood type. The “7″ seems to be fairly old, and the type slopes down and is significantly worn on one side. What this ended up creating was very loose type that would be a mess once it was placed in the press bed. So, the TA helped me fill in that large gap, which then affected the structural integrity of the entire thing. We ended up spending probably an hour and half filling in each little gap (they were odd-sized, too, since my type was going all different directions) to create a nice rectangular design that could then be placed on the press for printing.

A nice clean, tight rectangular shape, ready for printing! Finally. All of those little pieces of leading, word spacing and reglets (the odd-shaped wood pieces) were items we used to fill in all the gaps created by that funky "7."

While I didn’t get the chance to start printing my project, it was really helpful watching several people lock up their type–a much more complex process than I ever imaged. Many of you probably know this already, but you can’t have any movement in the type, so you used furniture (wood blocks), reglets (funky-sized, smaller wood pieces) and leading (thin pieces of lead) to “lock up” your type. You then use quoins (our instructor pointed out that this is a great word with which to zing someone in Scrabble) to tighten everything.

The inking process is really interesting as well. I sort of regret not taking pictures, but I think that would be a bit obnoxious to those folks who are in the process of inking their projects. We used rubber-based inks (some people use oil as well–rubber dries through absorbtion, oil through evaporation) and they’re mixed according to a pantone formula guide. (Sidenote: I would love to have one of these formula guides for screenprinting–but they’re so expensive.) Since I love inks and colors, I’m really looking forward to my turn to mix. The rubber ink is so different from what I’m used to in screenprinting–it’s the exact opposite consistency.

Once the type was set, and the rollers were inked, people started printing and experimenting with adding more color to their inks (we used rather transparent ink on very transluscent paper). I think everyone who printed tried layering by printing repeatedly over the same sheet of paper–which created really beautiful effects.

Finally, clean up took a good twenty or thirty minutes with mineral spirits and three different people. Geeky me, I really enjoyed the chance to see the “guts” of the printing press.

Lots of fun again this week. While I didn’t make a huge amount of process on my project, I felt like I really accomplished something, because I spent so much time problem-solving. I’m looking forwarding to sharing photos of what I’ve printed and (hopefully) what other folks have printed as well. We have two weeks to come up with our proposals for our personal projects, and I have a pretty good concept formed in my mind. But, I’m not quite ready to share it yet.

~Sarah

P.S. We’ve got several sewing projects to share with you, but our camera has been acting up (these pictures were with the camera on my phone), so we haven’t had a chance to photograph them–hopefully, this weekend. Also, plans are in the works for an upcoming Video Threads episode that we’re very excited about.

More Blazers Craftiness

Obviously, I’m in need of a cell phone with a better camera, because I’ve spotted some awesome Trail Blazers craftiness at the last three games and my pictures suck, suck, suck. First, on Monday versus the Sacramento Kings, Susan and I were behind this guy on our way to the Fan Shop:

This dude cut strips of black, red and white felt and then sewed them to a patch to create a wig fit for a true Blazermaniac.

Next, the lady sits in the row in front of us, and sewed a great blouse out of Trail Blazers branded fabric (they sell it at The Despot) that she wears as a jacket to the games. Her collar points are a work of art, and I wish this picture was better so that you could see them in all their perfectly pointy glory.

This woman is a hardcore fan. Not only does she wear this awesome home sewn Blazers blouse, she simultaneously listens to the to games on the radio and keeps a stat sheet while watching the games. Impressive. She's kind of my personal hero now.

And finally… Josh and I got to sit in a suite in the game versus the Miami Heat because I was on the 2008 Fan Advisory Board and it was our last get-together. (This was a nice upgrade from our upper bowl seats.) The wife of one of the Board members made the most amazing sign ever. Ever. Check it out.

For those of you not in the know, "G.O." stands for Greg Oden, the team's 7 foot center who was out last year (his rookie season) due to knee surgery.

The sign was created by Michelle, who is another Crafty Blazers Nut. She made this sign using glitter and installed a battery pack (battery pack!!!) to illuminate the basketball. The glitter letters pulled the whole thing together. Needless to say, her sign is unchallenged in its awesome. However, the geniuses who operate the fan cam thing that put people’s signs on the giant jumbo-tron thing obviously didn’t understand this and failed to feature her sign. Personally, I think this is a travesty of monumental proportions. My theory is that they didn’t want all the other sign makers to feel bad because their signs didn’t involve battery packs. It’s just a theory, though.

~Sarah

Bingo, Bango, Bongo!

That post title doesn’t really mean anything, but it’s a quote from the great Bill Schonely, the best play-by-play announcer of all time. When someone would do something really awesome, The Schonz would randomly shout, “Bingo, Bango, Bongo!” There were other things, too. Like, “Rip City!” or “Ocean to Ocean…” or “Lickety Brindle up the Middle.” I listened to him call Portland Trail Blazers games on the radio my whole life, and no on will ever be as awesome as The Schonz. Seriously, Josh and I saw him walking down the street last year and I literally started hyperventilating. He’s that rad of dude.

Anyway, this post is about a T-shirt I screen printed and embroidered, but you’re going to have to humor me a bit while I digress…

I'm not a crazed fan! Really. I'm not. I swear.

It’s been well established that I’m a crazy fan of Portland Trail Blazers basketball. And keep in mind, Trail Blazers fans are a special breed of crazy in general, so that’s saying something. This season, we are actually season ticket holders. We have seats waaaaaay up in section 322 to each and every game this year. This is going to sound cheesy, but this is actually a life-long dream of mine. When I was a kid it was nearly impossible to get tickets. When Josh and I moved back to Portland, no one was going to the games, because of the whole Jail Blazers thing, and we were able to score all kinds of free or deeply discounted tickets (great seats, too). So we went a lot. (An aside: for the longest time, I thought that if I was at the game, the Trail Blazers couldn’t lose–it wasn’t until Portland played the stupid Clippers that season that I attended a Blazers’ loss.) That year, 2006-07, was Brandon Roy‘s Rookie season–he eventually become Rookie of the Year, Ime Udoka made the team (he’s a Portlander) and Nate McMillan was coaching. The vibe was changing, and fans kind of knew that it was Zach Randolph‘s last season before he was traded. Portlanders knew the team was changing–and something good was going to happen. Then Portland won the #1 pick in the 2007 NBA Draft.

It was amazing.

Blazermania was back.

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Pimp My Ride

Errr… Well, “Pimp my skateboard,” at least.

Do you remember this skateboard? We’ve used it as a prop few times in photos here off and on.

This is the best "Before" shot we've got--we're always forgetting the befores.

As you can see, it’s pretty darn boring.The stuff on the back that looks like “wood” is actually a big decal printed to look like wood. So, armed with the contact paper stencil technique from Lena Corwin’s Printing by Hand, I created a new look for my crappy skateboard.

Cutting out the stencil. (That's our dining room table, by the way--it doesn't see many meals, obviously.)

First, I sanded off the sticker. Which was vinyl. Which made Sarah really annoyed, since I forgot to wear a mask. Wear a mask if you sand off a vinyl sticker, folks!

Then, instead of taking the path of least resistance and making a normal stencil, I made a reverse stencil of a wolf from an image that I manipulated in Illustrator. I spray glued the image to a large sheet of contact paper and cut out all the little, tiny pieces that made up the wolf.

Next, I stuck the pieces on the sanded board.

Sticking the pieces of contact paper on the board.

The wolf silhouette on the back of the board.

We have a large supply of wood stain products in our garage–not of our own doing, they came with the house. So, after some spot testing, I selected the fancy-sounding “Red Wood” color and started staining over the stencil. I applied four coats of stain. I also learned that Sarah knows a lot more about wood finishing than I do. For example, she showed me how to rub the stain in rather than just brushing it on so that you won’t get streaks. However, this was after I had already been a bit “aggressive” with the paint brush, so some of the small stencil pieces got stain underneath them. But, I was able fix this after I peeled off the contact paper by scraping the stain off with an Xacto knife. The staining component of this project took four days, because I let it dry thoroughly in between each coat.

Following the first coat of stain, I was starting to wonder what I'd gotten myself into...

Scraping off the excess stain from my overly-enthusiastic staining. I first tried this with the Dremel tool, which didn't work at all. The Xacto allowed me to use a much lighter touch.

After fixing the spots where the stain ran, I started the polyurethane process. two days and four coats of semi-gloss (which was also found in our garage) later, the damn thing was finished.

After the fourth coat of polyurethane.

I reattached the trucks and wheels, and the skateboard was looking good.

It's hard to take pictures when there's so much shellack--can't avoid the glare when using the flash.

The pathetic thing? I don’t have the heart to ride it now, because it looks so nice and took so long (10 days!). I’m going to have to get over that, I know.

Done!

~Josh

Election Pennants at Crafty Wonderland

A message from an adorable little girl at Crafty Wonderland: "Vote!"

A couple of weekends ago, I ran the DIY table at Crafty Wonderland here in Portland. If you’re not familiar with Crafty Wonderland, it’s a monthly crafts fair that’s held at the Doug Fir Lounge and is organized by gals from PDX Super Crafty. One of the fun things they do each month is host a free craft activity that anyone can try out, and it’s loads of fun.

It’s sort of funny, because–and I think I’ve said this before here–I don’t think of myself as a particularly “Crafty” person. First and foremost, I consider myself a person who sews. And the crafty stuff that I’m attracted to are generally the things that are more technical or more designy; and I see sewing as definitely both of those things. Screen printing, which I really have grown to love, is very technical and design oriented. I’d love to learn letterpress printing (and I’d take a class if they weren’t 1) so damn expensive and 2) always full), which I see as technical and definitely very much a design process. It’s probably because I am a tremendous geek (just ask Rachel and Diane who have both been victims of my eagerly volunteering as tech support for their various web and computer woes) and I have somewhat of a background in art–since I took a number of art history courses in college and was particularly interested in mid-century advertising/propaganda and popular art. (Like I said, I’m a tremendous geek.) Anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying that when Cathy asked me to consider doing my election pennants as the craft at October’s Crafty Wonderland, I had a bit of anxiety over being “crafty” enough.

I cut out about 90 triangular pennants in advance, and instead of hanging them from a string, like I did for mine, I hot glued each one onto a skewer so they’d be like a little DIY flag.

This was one of my prototypes. I hadn't used glitter glue in about 15 years.

I also created several stencils with slogans like “Vote” and “Hope” as well as some stars of various sizes. We set everyone up with fabric paints and glitter glue and let them go to town.

Supplies ready to go...

There were basically no supplies left over at the end of the day. I was shocked at how enthusiastically everyone embraced this dorky little project I came up with. (Sidebar: A young gal, probably 20 or so used the “Hope” stencil to make a “No Hope” flag to commemorate a recent breakup. Not really what I had intended, but oh well…)

The "Hope" stencil was definitely the most popular one of the day--it had pretty much disintegrated by 3:00 p.m. A number of people remarked that they felt like it was a message was timely, given the horrible news about the economy the previous Friday.

We literally had folks ranging from infants to nearly 100 years old!

My pal Bryan and his 96 year-old grandmother working on their flags together.

I so appreciate how enthusiastic people were about sitting down and doing something fun like this. Everyone was chatting with one another, sharing paints, discussing glittering techniques (that is, until one young man literally used all the glitter) and just having a good time. I think that this type of thing is so healthy for folks of all ages to try out every once in awhile–there’s something good for the soul about getting messy and goofing off with complete strangers. (I probably helped in the cause by resisting the urge to lecture everyone about the history of political flag-making while they worked on their project. It was tough, but I kept myself in check.)

This couple made two of my favorite pennants.

When Josh came to pick me up, he said it was quite the delightful sight as people walked down East Burnside on a windy, yet sunny, Portland afternoon with their little flags waving in the wind. I wish I’d seen that.

~Sarah

Crafts We Can Believe In

We hope you’ll humor us for a moment while we diverge ever-so-slightly from our regularly scheduled programming…

From the “Crafters for Obama” badge that’s been on our site since Julie Ree created “Crafters for Obama” back in January, you’ve probably noticed that we’re supporters of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for the Presidency. We believe that his leadership can help our country move in the right direction. We’ve been personally affected by many of the tough issues that are facing our nation, and many of our friends and family have also been directing impacted by the poor economy, lack of accessible and affordable health insurance, the expense of a higher education, among other issues. We’re also fairly typical Gen Xers, we think, having never really been thrilled about the dialog and personalities in American politics, and generally feeling like politicians at all levels don’t speak to the issues that matter to us. We both went to college in Washington, D.C., and grew to loath many of the politicians on both sides of the aisle–since politics is so very “in your face” all the time (Joe Lieberman cut us in line at the supermarket once, so some of those loathings are more personal than others). We were both very excited by Senator Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004, and were thrilled when he became a viable candidate after his win in the Iowa caucuses in January.

This weekend, Sarah decided to take that enthusiasm for the candidate into our crafty/sewing/screen printing world, and made some old school pennants to hang in the window of her home office and support our candidate. (Everyone–and in our neighborhood we sort of mean everyone–has a yard sign, no one has craftastic handmade pennants.)

Sarah made these creating a pennant template, using our flag making book as a resource, pinking the edges so they wouldn’t unravel/look snazzy, and then screen printing the Obama campaign logo on each one in white. The screen was created using the stenciling technique from Printing by Hand, but utilizing Tyvek instead of mylar. The way the logo is designed, it was a relatively simple one to cut. The tough decision was, however, how to attach the pennants together. Twine just seem a bit lazy, bias tape seamed bulky, but rick-rack, that was just right. Sarah stitched the pennants onto the rick-rack a couple of times so that they’re nice and secure and the pennants hang flat.

They’re now hanging in the large window of Sarah’s office. They look pretty sharp.

(Once the campaign season’s done, Sarah’s wanting to make some Portland Trail Blazers pennants to replace these. With the retro logo, of course.)

We know we’re not the only crafters out there who have been making all sorts of items celebrate the historic campaign by Senator Obama–whether they’re knitted, sewn, printed, embroidered or some crazy plastic canvas. In fact, pretty much every day we see something new and fabulous on Flickr or one of the blogs we read. We thought it would be nice to have a central place to feature some folks’s work, so Sarah’s set up a quasi-photoblog over here, called “The Obama Craft Project,” where she’ll be featuring some fabulous Obama inspired crafts. Stop by and check it out. If you know of anything that we should feature, send us an email at sewersewist@gmail.com or pop it into the Flickr pool.

The Obama Craft Project is obviously focused on our support of this particular candidate that we believe in, and we know that not everyone who reads Sewer-Sewist agrees with us. However, that’s one of the beautiful things about our country on a macro level, and sewing and creating “stuff” on a smaller scale — it takes a diverse chorus to create a vibrant country and community.

“It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun. Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”

–Barack Obama

~S & J

Blocked

We got the book Lotta Prints by Lotta Jansdotter (who also wrote the very-popular Simple Sewing book) when it first came out. As you know, Josh has gotten really interested in printmaking, especially screen printing, so this book had perfect timing as an impulse buy. We’re not going to bother to review the book, since both Average Jane Crafter (aka Rachel) and Diane (of CraftyPod fame) wrote great reviews already, but we thought we’d share the first results from a project in the book.

This was Sarah’s first attempt in, oh, seventeen years or so, at printing using a linoleum block. (Lino block printing was big at 91 Grade School in Hubbard, Oregon, for whatever reason.) Needless to say, we need a bit of practice with the technique. It seemed easier as an eight-year-old. Or maybe we’re not as hard on ourselves when we’re in the third grade. This is an original design that was decided influenced by Lotta’s characteristic shapes and forms.

The carving part was actually the most fun part of the process. There’s a certain element of danger involved in using sharp tools to carve up a little block. In true crafty-geek fashion, Sarah sat in the garage/screenprinting studio and worked on this while Josh printed up some stuff. The neighbors probably think we’re loony when we do this sort of thing (we open the garage door to the street for better light/ventilation).

Speaking of tools, we were able to score a great quality, very inexpensive ($7 or so) set of carving tools at Kinokuniya Bookstore, which is inside Uwajimaya in Beaverton. Kinokuniya is a Japanese bookstore that sells all sorts of intriguing stuff including animae pens, Japanese craft books, magazines from Japanese (including craft and sewing selections) and other odds and ends. Check it out if there’s one near you.

~S&J

Tutorial: Adirondack Chair Redux

As promised, here’s the step-by-step for making over your very own crummy plastic Adirondack chairs into something fun and unique. We had some of the classic “computer monitor beige” chairs that were leftover from our past lives in Santa Fe where you just get used to everything being brown. Somehow, all brown stuff just doesn’t fly now that we’re back in Portland, so red and blue polka dot chairs seem much more appropriate. We’re really enjoying our new and improved chairs. Hope you have fun with this!

1. Locate some old plastic Adirondack chairs, and clean them well (you don’t what to immortalize old cobwebs). We’d suggestion first looking in your garage (everyone seems to have some of these sitting around). If you don’t have any, check garage sales, dumpsters and/or sales at Target. They’re cheap. And comfy. And pretty damn ugly.

2. Get yourself two cans of contrasting colors of Krylon Fusion for Plastics spraypaint; this will makeover one chair. You must use this type of paint. Anything else, you’ll have a huge mess on your hands. It takes one can of each color, per chair, more or less. For some reason, neither Lowe’s or Home Depot carries this brand; we found it at Fred Meyer, and hardware stores seem to have it too. They have a ton of colors, including some new, intriguing-looking metallics. Avoid the new textured spray paint for this project—the stickers would likely grab onto the texture and destroy all your hard work.

3. Get some weird foam stickers. We got our in the “foam” section at Michaels. They have all sorts of shapes and sizes—stars, letters, monkeys, you name it. You could use regular stickers, too, but these will make your life easier in the long run. So go with the foam ones, assuming that the foam section of the craft store doesn’t scare you too much. (Consider yourself warned.)

4. Move your chairs to a well-ventilated area, and lay out a drop cloth. Or do as we did and use the yard and just mow the lawn afterward. We’d suggest following the safety precautions on the can of Fusion. Don’t breath this stuff, okay!

5. Select your color that you want to have as the dots (or whatever shape you’re using). So if you want a red chair with blue dots, select your blue paint.

6. Spray your chair with the base color. You don’t need to be thorough, but you do need to make sure that you’ve got good coverage of the area that you want dots on. When you’re done, it should look like the photos below.

See how we just focused on getting a good coat on the places we planned on having dots? The nature of this paint means that you don’t have to worry about having even coats at this point.

7. Let dry. The can suggests waiting an hour before adding a second coat, and that’s what we did, which turned out fine.

Now the fun begins…

8. Take your “foamies” (we were not aware they had a name until we googled “foam stickers” to write this tutorial), and stick them randomly all over the parts of the chair that you’ve painted. Stick them on firmly. We had a few that weren’t stuck on solidly, and we got slightly funky results. A nice random scatter works well. We used around 20 medium-sized stickers for each chair, but it really depends on your preferences and the look you want. Your chairs should now look like this:

9. Take your contrasting can of spray paint and completely coat your chair, stickers and all. Give it a nice thick, even coat so that there’s none of the previous color or original plastic showing.

10. Let dry. Wait at least an hour. It dries to touch really quickly, but takes some time to set.

Now even more fun…

11. Start peeling. This is why the foam stickers work so well. Because they’re very thick, it’s easy to grab them and pull them off the chair. They should lift right off. It there’s any foam left behind after you peel off the stickers, don’t worry—it rubs right off with your fingers.

12. Voila! Let these set for a week before you use them. The Krylon Fusion needs to cure. The colors will also deepen. After a week, you can clean them like any other plastic, if they get dirty. (We suggest a garden hose.)

Enjoy! There are more pictures over at this Flickr photo set, too. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section!

~Sarah & Josh

Extreme Makeover: Plastic Adirondack Chair Edition

Now that it’s (finally) sunny here in Portland, we’ve been furiously spiffing up our backyard so that we can enjoy hanging out outside. Our old crappy “computer monitor beige” plastic Adirondack chairs (that were our living room chairs when we spent a year living in a converted Santa Fe blacksmith shop—but that’s a story for another time) have been resurrected. These look so awesome with super funky blue and red periwinkle polka dots that we’re thinking this revamp may deserve a tutorial. (It’s pretty simple, really…)

What do you think?

~S & J

Party On

This weekend I went to a party for an old friend of mine (like, we went to preschool together, old friend) in celebration her graduation from medical school. I actually got to see a bunch of people that I hadn’t seen in ages—including a friend of my who (thanks to Facebook) I recently found out lives down the street from me, a gal that I thought I didn’t like but who actually seems pretty cool (funny how we get so much less judgmental as we, er, “mature”), my favorite high school teacher (English) and the German teacher I was terrified of (he’d yell horrible things at us in German and whacked our desks with a yardstick—I wish I were exaggerating). I have to admit, there’s something very weird about drinking beer in front of your teachers—even if they haven’t been your teachers since 1995, and even if it’s high-quality microbrew. Just sayin’.

Like any relatively normal person would be, I was a bit stressed out about seeing everyone (it’s been awhile, people are busy with lives, reside all over the place, plus the smallish town I grew up in is a long 30 miles from Portland) and of course I wanted to make sure I wore something that seemed marginally cool, without looking like I was trying too hard. None of us went to our high school reunion that was a couple years ago, so this almost felt like a very mini reunion-esque function. I’m sure you understand the need to appropriately wardrobe myself.

Josh is still screen printing like a madman, and is constantly on the lookout for clearance T-shirts (yes, we could make T-shirts, but that’s about the most boring sewing project ever) to continue the printing adventure. He designed and printed me an OFFICIAL “Moon Family Band All-Star Show” T-shirt that has quickly become just about my favorite thing I own. (The Moon Family Band is, sadly, not a real band. But it should be.) He did some cool (and I’m not certain intentional) blending of inks, so there’s a snazzy iridescent effect as well.

I combined this one-of-a-kind T-shirt with my first creation from The Alabama Stitch Book, which is a fairly new book that’s seeking to revitalize the hand stitching traditions of the southern U.S. (This book is going to get it’s separate entry—I promise.)

I didn’t use the traditional hand stitched reverse appliqué method that the author prescribes, but I think I made a pretty nice approximation of the technique using the trusty Kenmore. (Again, I promise that I’ll cover my modified reverse appliqué technique in a near future post.) The purple knit fabric is a remnant that came for free in an order from Fabric Mart (the same order where I got the freebie wool for my mom’s jacket). the black knit backing is recycled from the sleeves of one of Josh’s T-shirts that he got when he used to work for a performing arts organization. I used some slightly-too-shiny (it’s probably meant for dance costumes) fold-over elastic for the waistband. Oh, and the pattern and leaf stencil are both from the book. I think the outfit achieved the balance I was looking for. I call it “Crafty Cool.”

Now, I didn’t tell Josh that I made the skirt so that I’d have something to wear to this shindig that went with the T-shirt he’d made me—’cause I had to wear the Moon Family Band T-shirt, just had to. He probably thinks I’m completely certifiable now. Wait ’til I tell him that this was our class song—yes, they played it as our recessional at graduation—and we had no clue whatsoever what it was really all about. Then he’s going to really wonder what he got himself into all those years ago. But, the shirt was a great conversation starter.

The polka dot Vans really pull it all together, don’t they? Plus, Vans are the “Sewist’s Shoes,” if you recall.

I ended up having a great time at the get together and stayed out until an unheard-of 11:30 p.m.! (We’re wild here at Casa de Sewer-Sewist.) The oh-so-late night did result in my being way too tired and missing both Diane’s CRAFT release get-together and the Rose Cup Races, though. Too bad, both were going to be a lot of fun.

~Sarah

It’s Gotta Be the Shoes

It has taken me ten days, but I think I am finally able to discuss the shoes. The combination of frustration, old shoe funk and the massive loss of brain cells from working with Shoe Goo had rendered me unable to rationally explain why and how I made these things and their deeper meaning (not really, they don’t have one).

I had been thumbing through the most recent issue of Craft Magazine a while back and noticed that there was an article on making shoes using an old pair of Chucks. Honestly, I thought this was pretty sweet, but wanted to go a step further, you know making my own toe instead of the rubber one and sewing the shoe into the sole instead of only gluing it (I would later regret the latter, greatly). I don’t have any old Chucks around that fit (this again is another incredibly whiny story about how sweet Chucks used to be and how I have worn the same size for many many years until buying my last pair which fit like clown shoes, errr) so instead I grabbed my lawn mowing shoes and went at them with a box cutter.

Making the pattern for the shoe was fairly easy, I skipped the gusset that the original shoe had and made one long piece that wrapped around the foot and another piece which was the toe and tongue piece. Off to a good start. I decided to make the shoes “super sweet” so I choose the left overs from Sarah’s lovely polka dot bag. I have worn shoes most of my life (and for a good portion of my adult life) so I am a fairly good judge of what fabric would make a sturdy shoe and obviously the cotton/linen blend of the Echino fabric was not going to cut it. As with every other project I start from scratch I grabbed some fusible fleece and some buckram (as US Weekly might say, “Shoes, they’re just like hats) and fused all three together to make a good solid shoe. As you can see I put three vertical stitches at the back of the shoe to force the buckram to curve and giving it shape and I added an extra layer of fleece on the heel for more padding. I used the same combination to make the tongue/toe piece with additional padding on the tongue bit. At this point things are going really well and amazingly quickly.

The next step was to line the shoes, again I used the leftover bag material and cut the shoe piece slightly longer that the pattern piece. I simply edge stitched the right sides together (leaving the bottom unsewn) and pulled it over the shoe. I used spray glue to hold the lining fabric down, this would be the first instance of trouble. I really should have used the Shoe Goo at this point instead of the spray adhesive. While the Elmer’s sticks, the inside of your shoe takes a serious beating that only a probably toxic glue can handle.

On the tongue I did roughly the same maneuver, except I only sewed the half way down the tongue rights sides together and then I stitched on the outside for the rest of the tongue/toe piece. I found that this was the way that my other shoes were constructed and the laces other part of the shoe hides any rough edges.

So, I have my shoe pieces finished and waiting to be inserted into the soles. You can see I used some old Puma soles that were originally white but had turned that color of brown only dirt, grass and grime can turn rubber. This would stand and I attacked with spray paint. Unfortunately, I went to Freddy’s (Fred Meyer, ya’ll) by myself to pick out the spray paint and grabbed what I thought was a really close match to the Cherry color of the fabric. (Let’s be honest if this would have worked it would have been sweet). I went out to the backyard, sprayed those soles down and realized that I had gotten a maroon color instead of anything close to red so it was back to Freddy’s and another can of spray paint in black (labeled, I probably would have bought navy if I was just looking at caps). The soles sat for a day and half and looked alright.

This is where I really start to get into trouble, the soles are off limits and I am wanting to finish. My mind starts to wander and it hits me, I am going to make a sole out of (one guess……) that’s right buckram and then I can just glue it right into the soles. I cut out the shape using the shoe insert and start going to town. I get the sides sewed on and I put the toe/tongue in and realize that I have made elf shoes. Because, as I now know you must shape for your toesies. I immediately lop off the toe part from the tongue and make a larger newer toe out of the lining fabric but with nothing to stabilize it. Failure, now have a pair of really ugly slipper with know shape. My next move is some stretchable pleather from the Despot (yes I drove across town for 1/8 of a yard of fabric). I rip of the second toe and try this. Now I have really ugly vinyl slippers.

Sarah suggests that we make a straight piece to provide a bumper and the space for the toe piece to go over the toes. This is bloody brilliant I think, and I try again. Slightly cooler slippers, but I think it will work. The soles have dried to a point where they are usable. I start jamming and trimming my complete “shoe” into the sole. Awful. It dawns on me (really it should have long ago) that I should just directly glue the shoes into the sole. Who needs the buckram footbed? Out comes the seam ripper and off come the shoes (and a large part of my thumb). I reattach the original toe piece to the tongue (the applique leopards are there to hide this) and start gluing.

It gets ugly, because the glue and the paint are having a chemical reaction that is stripping the paint from the soles and turning the glue black and maroon, plus I neglected to bandage my thumb (if it falls off I have a culprit), which burns. After lots of needless pinning (the goo sets up fast) the shoe actually takes shape and looks like shoes!

I added some eyelets and laced these bad boys up. While the aren’t the prettiest things they are unique. Unfortunately, I should have used a nicer pair of shoes to start because these weren’t that comfortable to begin with, so ripping out the inserts and reapplying them hasn’t done anything to improve that situation.

I am working on a second pair with a canvas liner to give it more strength and shape and hope to have something even prettier and more comfortable.

This was actually an incredibly fun project. It really doesn’t take that much time if you do it correctly, and you gotta love recycling old stuff to make nicer stuff.

Creative Energy

Josh’s screen printing has really piqued my interest. So much so that since he made his first screen, I had this vision in my head of a tree. I couldn’t quite get my head around what that tree would look like, but I had been messing around with a bunch of different ideas of trees and being slightly obsessed with looking at tree silhouettes online. Weird, I know. Anyway, I finally found the image that I was looking for—in the wonderful book Neubau Welt. This is the description of the book/CD:

My house, my pool, my horse, my Learjet, my Mercedes, my wife, my toys, my trees, my garden, my cockroach. Now it’s really all yours.

It’s an eclectic assortment of royalty-free vector images that are manipulatable using Adobe Illustrator. Pretty sweet!

Anyway, I printed “my tree” on several items, including a raglan sleeved T-shirt that I’m going to reconstruct into a cardigan inspired by The Alabama Stitch Book (I will write a review soon, I promise!). I also got the idea that it would be interesting to “make” my own fabric. And by make my own fabric, I mean printing on some black cotton from our local Ikea. (Oh Ikea, how I love you, even though that love makes me feel really unoriginal.) Using the same deep burgundy I used on my T-shirt, I screen printed my tree at more or less regular intervals over a yard and a half or so of fabric.

Flat fabric is kind of hard to photograph, so this isn’t quite what it looks like in reality. The tree is a much deeper color, and it’s actually quite subtle. It turned out really lovely—I’m not really looking forward to cutting into it. But I am looking forward to telling people I printed the fabric myself. I’m thinking about either this skirt or this skirt—both from Burda World of Fashion.

Not really sewing related, but I’m also pretty proud of some printing on paper that I did with the same screen.

I messed around with blending several iridescent colors, trying to mimic (albeit in an abstract sort of way) the way that the leaves on some of the Japanese maples in our yard almost glow in the fall evenings.

I’m warning you: I’m going to sound like a tremendous dork here—don’t say I didn’t warn you! I’ve never really thought of myself as a creative person. I had some really bad experiences in art class in elementary school (91 Grade School in Hubbard, Oregon!) and actually got a really bad grade in art on several occasions. Perspective gave me all kinds of trouble. I also had a lot of problems with the whole complementary colors thing. I distinctly remember having a fairly heated disagreement with my fourth grade teacher over whether or not green and purple are complementary or not. (I thought they were, but I guess our art curriculum didn’t agree.) I sort of realize now that a lot of my problems in art class actually were because I was kind of creative, and wasn’t huge on the rules of art (really, rules have never been my strong point in any context). Anyway, my point is, I’m always reluctant to do “arty” stuff because I have it in the back of my head that I suck at it. Anyway, screenprinting’s been really fun, and the stuff I’ve made with “my tree” doesn’t look half bad! That’s pretty exciting for me.

~Sarah

P.S. Lots of sewing projects we’ve got going on… We’ll update you soon—promise.

Big Printin’

Sarah made me a lovely Burda raglan sleeve knit T-shirt (8827) for the Christmas Day Blazers vs. Super Sonics game, where the crowd was encouraged to wear red. I didn’t have anything red to wear, so she whipped this one up for me (it literally took her like an hour). Let me say that while it is really comfortable, how often does someone need a plain bright red shirt? If you are me, not often. I must admit that I love t-shirts with things printed on them. I am not much for the logo wear, that acts has expensive advertising for a product (unless that product is a baseball team). Sarah and I have spent some time talking about doing some printing on fabric and even bought some fabric paint and a lotus root to do some abstract printing. However, the lotus root did not dry very well in this climate and rotted away—kind of gross actually.

After much deliberation, we decided to go for it and buy a screen printing starter kit. Now there are a lot of different ways to do screen printing and a lot of ideas of how to do it on the cheap, but we decided to go for the basic Speedball Fabric Printing Kit. If you decide to give this a try (and already I am going to spill the beans and say that it is great fun) a little comparison shopping is a must. The same kit varied in price by 20 bucks (with Michael’s Craft being at the high end). We ended up buying ours at a local independent art supply store, though with even more searching on the internet we probably could have saved a little more money. While the kit isn’t the greatest value in the world in a per ounce basis of the chemicals and ink, it was the cheapest way to get started with out knowing if we were going to like it or do it again. The biggest advantage with buying the kit is the INSTRUCTIONS. I should say that I am terrible at following directions (unless the Sewist tells me something to do), the few time in our lives that we have bought Ikea furniture, Sarah has to interpret things and we have to build the things together (the first time this happened, we were a bit frustrated with each other, but after many years we have settled into a nice routine on these matters). Even my dumb ass was able to print properly the first time around.

The image that I choose to print was a baseball player (surprise, surprise I know). The Library of Congress is a great resource for old images (among many other things) and I found this great baseball card in the American Memory Collection. I have Adobe Creative Suite on this computer because I use InDesign a lot for work and with that have Photoshop and Illustrator for work. After much tinkering with the image I was able to come up with a monotone black and white line drawing (later I found the live trace function in Illustrator which made this go really quickly, yeah I don’t know much about these programs).

We set up our printing station in the garage on an old table.

Something everyone should know about this is it isn’t a tidy process (oh my god, if we had white carpet and I tried this on the imaginary white carpet you would be reading my obituary this week) and you need a sink to wash all of the inks and chemicals and either a table that you can destroy (or “customize) or at least something you can cover the table with.

The first print we did was the baseball print and, amazingly enough, it worked.

A couple of days later we printed AU Eagles t-shirts to celebrate the old alma mater’s first round lost in the NCAA tournament. (These shirts are hilarious. We’ll make sure to post pictures of them, but Sarah’s been sick and doesn’t want her picture taken with a big red nose.) We did these shirts later in the evening and I didn’t bother to wash the screen out well enough. Big mistake. You always have to clean the screen promptly, I have had nothing but trouble since.

This has turned into a great new part of the sewing hobby. Even the Sewist has gotten behind making prints. She wants to screenprint herself a “SuperTrout” T-shirt to wear to a Blazers game as part of her penance for saying really mean things about Travis Outlaw early this year (this is a long story that would only be entertaining to Blazers fans, so I won’t torture you with that).

~Josh