Point #14-Christmas is Interesting

45 cool points to whomever gets the reference in the title.

I have a tree. I put this tree up several days before Thanksgiving and am quite happy with dragging out the winter holidays super early, thank you very much. When I expressed this sentiment in the the form of, “I put up my tree. Shut up.” on my Facebook page, a friend responded that it sounded like K-Tel was putting out a new holiday collection entitled, “Shut Up, It’s Christmas”. I not only found this wildly hilarious, but had to concede that that is pretty much what any Christmas album I could ever release would be called.

So the tree is up, and I couldn’t be more pleased. As all my stuff continues languishing in a storage facility, and I have little extra cash or inclination to purchase lavish new decorations, this holiday is being done shamelessly on the cheap and mostly handmade. The tree itself, including lights, tinsel, and basic ornaments were purchased at a Goodwill store with the remainder being made when I feel like it and stuck on the tree over time. I should finish decorating sometime around December 27th, I reckon.

The ornaments so far are…well, interesting. I have taken ideas I have found from various sources and “added my own touches”, or “cocked them up” quite nicely. I made little candy type hearts with cardboard backed felt and puffy paint, which look pretty cute if you didn’t see the much nicer inspiration pieces made of polyfill stuffed felt and fabric flowers. I also made some gingerbread men out of the same materials, however, I didn’t make them terribly plump. In fact, they are downright scrawny. When my exbesthusbandfriend remarked upon it, I tried to front and say they were just supermodel gingerbread men, but the truth is, these little guys clearly don’t feel ok with themselves. They have gingerbulimia.

I have also made cards, which was a whole new experience for me. I barely keep and fulfill a Christmas list, let alone handcraft cards to send to it. There’s just a mental block against it. Maybe it was using cookie cutter cards and this is the solution. I like the people I know. I know they live out there somewhere. I know they like cards. I like cards. It just always seems so…worklike to send cards out. When I am independently wealthy (aaaany day now) I will keep a card sending wench of some kind on retainer. I will make her answer to Becky like the scullery maid in A Little Princess and pay her in small amounts of money appropriate to buying crusts of bread and Fresca, giving the whole venture a Dickensian feel. You know, for the Christmassiness.

As the month goes on, no doubt all measure of mad things will be going up on the tree in the form of can tops, and bits of magazines and twine and such. It will be glorious. I just hope the gingerbulimics don’t persuade the can top snowmen to go emo and start cutting.

Point # 12-Read slooowwwer

I post a fair amount of projects over at Craftster. The stuff I have posted is fairly basic stuff, nothing too amazing or different, but I get decent view and comment numbers. I should read those comments more slowly. I should revel in my knowledge of, you know, language. It tends to lead to less of this lookin’ like a jackass thing.

I posted a set of pictures of my awesome lampshade. This is a floor lamp with attached little round table that my sister tells me is from the forties. Vintage or not, it’s a pretty lamp. The shade needed work (read: “was ugly as goat fuck”) and so one night with just a bottle of glue, some fabric scraps, and a dream, I got this:

Later I added fringe to create this:

Trust me, much improved upon the original porridge-like “greige” of before.

Someone responded to the pictures by asking if I was going to post a picture “of it on”. Eh? I was puzzled. On what? On my head? I literally had no clue what she was saying. The plain, clear, straighforward English, which last I checked was my first, last, and tragically only, language was before me, and my brain shut down like large wafts of meth had just hit it. I swear for a minute or two I saw only colours. I could actually taste fuschia. Then the brain cloud cleared and I realised she of course meant “with the LAMP on.” You know, performing that function the gods created all the good little lamps to do. I am not even kidding, I am a believer in giving the people what they want; I was mentally halfway to putting the bloody thing on my head and clicking away. I was saved by the resumption of the firing of the synapses of my stupid, stupid brain and eventually posted the pictures. Honestly though, I think I may post some with the lampshade on my head. Every village idiot needs a cunning headdress.

Point #10-See the World Through Dork Coloured Glasses

It seems like the more art/craft/makin’ stuff I do, the more I see new patterns and colours and that sort of thing all around me. The word “craft” jumps out at me from books and websites; I notice shapes and designs on commercial packaging; I wonder at colour combinations on billboards. I start to see the beauty and splendour of beaded sushi.

Beaded sushi is something no sane person would create. It’s purely decorative; it’s glass beads so you can’t actually eat it. It’s not like wax or beaded fruit that looks like a normal sort of older lady table decoration. You see beaded sushi sitting on someone’s table and you start to wonder if they have a woman suit made of human skin hiding somewhere in the house as well. I see beaded sushi periodically in bead magazines or web articles about beaded plants and flowers, which, while not alive, at least make more sense as a decorative item. Inevitably, the creator of these weird, but admittedly beautiful, objects cop to the fact that they made them because they were inspired by the original sushi’s colours, shapes, and patterns. And I get that.

I went through a period of time that the kindest term to apply to it would be “craft hiatus” and the worst would be “miserably unimaginative life-wide snooze fest”. I am gratified to know that when one slides back into a life that devotes itself to making that one can develop an artistic eye again. I was truly afraid that that wouldn’t happen to me…that I had lost it for good. Then the beaded sushi started making sense and I could stare enthralled at the design on a label for Method cleaner without the aid of Substances (meaningful wink) so I knew I was back in the game. I begin to see why an artistic eye and Substances (meaningful wink) can result in great art being made, because just the eye part makes you see batshit things anyway. (Here again, beaded sushi, I look at you…you just make me hungry, you know…and I can’t eat you.) I’ve been grateful for a lot of things lately, but the Eye coming back has been a big one. The next step is trying to figure out how a giant beaded turkey may have a useful place in society.

Point #7-Halloween Costumes Suck, and Wedding Dresses are Exceedingly Comical

I am busily working on my sooper sekrut awesome Halloween costume…if by “working on it” I mean “thinking really hard about it”. It’s always been hard to get really excited about something I will wear once and then dismantle, throw away, or forget about. That’s why I never buy one, because it’s a total waste of money to me; at least when I make it, I have created something that I won’t feel bad about ripping to shreds and changing up later.

I couldn’t even get too aerated about my wedding dress, lo, these many years ago. I went by myself, utterly sans the huge rock star sized entourages most brides are packing. I fairly coldbloodedly picked out something that met my precise requirements, which is to say, “fit me”…well, and was froofy and lacy enough to double as dessert topping…got basic alterations and called it a day. I like the show “Say Yes to the Dress”, because I can experience that deeply special emotion that is a combination of crying like a big gay monkey at the heartwarming tales, scarcely restrained glee at some of the consultants’ bitchiness, and a nice soupcon of “WTF?-the natural reaction to seeing some numbnuts spend more on a dress than I have ever dropped on a car-nicely giving the whole thing savor. But I, myself, found a deeply discounted confection that was roughly what I thought defined a wedding dress for me, little thinking of the hilarious effect it would have years later.

I’ve been divorced for five years now, but as my ex and I are still the best of friends, and I didn’t feel the need to destroy the dress in a fit of temper or pique, I still have the thing. I have visions of using it as a costume or gown for something someday, as long as fairly drastic alterations are made. I pulled it out one day recently, and my boyfriend (who is also friends with my ex and things are nice) said, “oh, that’s the wedding dress…let’s see it”. Wanting to give the full effect, I actually slid the dress on (as far as it would go, at least) and presented my enormous white form to him. He looked with horrified fascination at the large, puffed, slightly off the shoulder sleeves and said, “Are you hiding the sweatshop kids who made that thing IN the sleeves????”. I offered my counter to that remark in the form of a very special finger and said, “Yeah, it gets worse…don’t laugh”, whereupon I turned to reveal the horror of my ginormously bowed backside. This bow was large enough to shelter whole villages and be seen from space. It was the UberBow, a creature renowned in song and story. I had been told in wedding magazines-clearly as an elaborate prank-that an “interesting back” of the dress was preferred since that’s what the guests would be looking at through the ceremony and that for a girl with a broader beam, a bow was concealing and flattering. All it really did was make my ass look like the world’s saddest, most unwanted gift. Socks from Grandma had nothing on opening a present and finding my Big Bowed Butt inside. Needless to say, I think the most interesting thing about the guests getting to watch the Big Bowed Nightmare waft tantalizingly in front of them were the hilarious gales of laughter they were no doubt sharing at the sight.

So the moral is, kids, watch what you wear on your wedding day to avoid that charming “what the fuck was I thinking” moment ten or fifteen years hence. And make your own Halloween costumes. I have this big bow I can let you borrow.

Jessica