So, the other day at work my boss comes to the press and tells me he's got a guy with a load of flat files he's looking to get rid of for $25 and asks if I'm interested. I think my voice steadily rose an octave as the reality of the offer set in and I gave my reply of "hell yes!" Even now it seems kind of surreal, but let me put this in one clear sentence.


Ooooooooooooh fucking hell YES!!! I've wanted a flat file for AGES. I think probably anybody who does work on paper sort of drools over the thought of getting one of these. But the thing is they're heavy, HUGE, and generally cost hundreds of dollars unless you score one from some place going out of business. And that's basically how this worked. One of my boss's buddies clears furniture out of industrial buildings when the businesses shut down. He had 20 of them, and was only asking $25 for each one. Really, I just got lucky that my boss is well connected, and that this connection though to call him first.

I went ahead and purchased two. I figured I would be retarded not to. Part of me thinks I should have gotten more, but two is enough for now, and they are really big, so I have to consider that I have to PUT these things somewhere. What I'm thinking right now is that I'll break down the shelving I built under my kitchen table and put them there. Hm. I really need to build a stand for my vacuum table and move it back to my room before I do that, though.

Anyway, that is pretty goddamn exciting and I needed to share! Still need to post about halloween! And I've got another [BIG] contract printing job coming up, so that's super exciting, too :)

More later!
-P.

So, my buddy Jeff at work goes to a community life drawing class once a week. It's $5, and he does a lot of figure painting, so it's good practice for him. I haven't drawn something accurately from life since I left school, because, well... it's a boring, academic exercise. But, feeling the need to get some practice in myself, I decided to go this week. Took about the first third of the class to knock the dust off, but I ended up with these two that I was pleased with. The red one was about... 30 minutes maybe? The blue one was an hour. Definitely not bad considering how long it's been. Also considering I didn't do any of that hand/thumb/pencil measuring shit I always hated in school. Did all the measuring by eye, and except for the totally screwed up legs, it all looks good. So eat it, academia.


-P.

Arright, yall! I've got a pretty awesome thing to announce! I can now screenprint glossy vinyl stickers AT HOME!!! It occurred to me this was something I could probably do at home around the time I got my vacuum table, so I talked to my boss about it. He hooked me up with some samples of pro weatherproof ink and some sheets of old vinyl sticker material and I set to it.


I remembered that Jennpac had wanted to have some stickers made, and that seemed like a great place to start and test out my new gear. Well, I'm pleased to say that they came out fucking GREAT!!! Oh man, these things are awesome! (Check out her post here.) The art looks fanastic, and I gotta tell you, it's really sweet to see a high gloss finish on something you print when you're so used to matte finish inks.


The inks my boss gave me to try were solvent based inks, which worked well enough, but I'd have to switch emulsions to use them, and the fumes are unbelievable, heh, so fortunately, NazDar makes a really good, high gloss, waterbased ink for this kind of thing, so I've gotten myself some of that. BOO-YA!

I'd really love to do more of this kind of thing, so if you want some stickers done, send me an email!

-P.

WORD!!!! So, ok, lemme start by explaining how I have been printing posters at home up till now. For a couple years now I've had a large plywood board with two hinge-clamps screwed into it. I would put the board onto my kitchen table, clamp the screen in, get everything lined up and print (pictured, right, video here).

Now, thing is in screenprinting, when the ink goes down onto the paper, it tends to want to stick also to the screen. So, if you don't have any force holding your paper down, when you lift your screen up, your print goes with it, and often smears when you pull it off.

So if you're working like I was, the easiest thing to do is to put a light misting of spray adhesive down under your print to hold it down. However, this creates a goddamn myriad of other problems, that after printing Patrick's illustration, I finally decided I'd had enough of.

Now, what the big-boys use for doing this kind of work is a vacuum table. Imagine an air hockey table. You know all those little holes that blow air up creating that cushion the puck floats over? Well imagine the air direction was in reverse, the puck would be sucked down to the table. That is EXACTLY what the pros use for printing posters, etc.

I had decided I wanted to build one, and was pretty stoked about it, when I remembered that a printmaker I know here in Charlotte, one Dan Allegrucci, had one he didn't use and was looking to get rid of. So, even though I was itching to DIY it, I went and picked up his table. It was in kinda bad shape at first and I had to put some work into it--giving it "legs," installing some plumbing on the bottom (floor flange, elbow joint, rubber coupling with screw-clamps) so I could attach my vacuum, patching leaks, and finally, plumbing out each and every single hole in the table to make sure the airways were clear. Oh, and I also had to install new hingeclamps, because the ones it had were WAAAAY too far back (I don't want to lean over further than I have to), and the old ones didn't seem to allow for any off-contact distance anyway.

It's still not in top-notch shape, but it does work and oooooooh GOD I love using it! It makes the process so.... silky. Yeah, totally smooth workflow, I love it! I really need to get, or make, a foot-switch for it though, so I can keep my hands free, and not have to lean down awkwardly to flip the vacuum on.



So yeah, this is what I'm using to do posters now. And it is BAD. FUCKING. ASS.

BOOM.
-P.

Ok, phew, man, I need to get caught up here!

So, about a friggin month ago now. No... more than that! My buddy Patrick Leger, who was in the MFA program at UNCG while I was doing undergrad, contacted me about screenprinting some of his illustrations. So we went back and forth about what he wanted to do, settled the details, arrived at a price, and I set to work.

And ooooooh MAN they came out SO GOOD! Check these bad boys out! It's a 4-color image, and an edition of 50. It's entitled After the Heist. It was really cool to work with Patrick on it, and both of us were really happy with the finished product :)



He wants to do editions of 3 other illustrations, once he sells a few of these to recoop the printing cost. So if you like this and would like to purchase one, please, go to his website and send him an email! Patrick Leger Illustration!

Sadly, that Star Trek illustration on the main page *isn't* one of the ones he wants to get done. But I want to do that one so bad I may offer to do it at cost, hahaha, just so I can have one, lol.

So, I've always HATED mixing ink. It's just always been sort of nightmarish, and until recently it's taken me lots of time and wasting ink to get close to what I want. But my friends, lend me your ears and HEAR me, for I have found THE GODDAMNED LIGHT!!! Print and paint shops often use the PMS system (or Pantone Matching System). It's basically a book of color samples with formulas for mixing those colors, from a stock of standardized pigments. You mix the ingredients by weight, so there's no guess work. My shop mixes ink this way all the time, but I'd never had the ability to use it for one of my own projects until now. HOLY CRAP. Seriously, a color that would have taken an hour to mix took me mere minutes and was perfect on the first try. I am SOLD.

More in a bit! Getting caught up here. It'll prolly be a few posts before I get to halloween!
-P.

Pictures of costume later!
-P.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Hey, I got in the mail a couple gift cards for 1 free month of Netflix service. Anybody want to try netflix free for a month? If so send me a message or leave a comment and I'll send you the code.

Later
-P.

1) Earthbound Pets. AAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!! Oh christ I hope these guys make millions.

2) 3 amazing YouTube videos (songs, all), cut, because you probably have too many videos on your friends page already. ( Read more... )

Enjoy.

More later,
-P.

So the Tate St Festival was two weeks after the ButterBean show, and I'm definitely glad I went!

To start, I knew I'd need a canopy, so I checked around to find the cheapest one I could, and scored one for $40 at target... or so I thought. Well, turns out, it's a damned good thing I got a canopy because it rained the entire day of the festival. Lightly, mind you, but when you work on paper, rain is your enemy. And, turns out, the canopy I bought had leaks. Plural. And some of my stuff got dripped on pretty bad. There are two prints I'm probably gonna put up cheap on etsy under the 'scratch and dent' heading, as I don't feel I can sell them at full price. And, to their credit, target took the crappy canopy back for a full refund.

Despite the crappy weather, the show was still a lot of fun, and there was pretty good turnout. I didn't make as many connections at the show. I did take a look around, and I saw some stuff I liked, but most of it was by people I knew, ha! A girl I went to school with, Tristan was there and had some really awesome work. Hana bought one of her paintings, which I was happy to see. And SJ(shinychocoholic) WAS THERE, WOO!! Man, I feel bad, I have not done a good job of keeping up with her, and I was blown away by how cool the work she's doing now is, heh. I totally scored a pack of cute monster cards from her. Totally SJ awesomeness. (Hey SJ, you got a site you want me to send the unwashed denizens, to?) There was another girl who had some reaaaaaally nice hand-paintings on jeans and jackets. I didn't get her card, though, damnit.

So, I didn't make many connections, but I did in fact sell a bunch, so the day was plenty profitable, and paid for the first round of drinks that night, which felt nice, as I am so rarely able to do that :) Hana and I hung out with Joshjoshtothemax and Lauraalethalruby, which was a ton of fun, heh :) And we walked to McCouls for drinks that night. Ahhhhh, meeeeeemmorriiiiies.

So yeah, show was good, the night was good, I'll definitely go back to do Tate St again :) woo!

Ok, more later.
-P.

OH, WAIT, NO, THERE'S MORE. I totally forgot, Brian Sinclairsebejias dropped by and gave me an AAAAAWWESOME present--a while back I sent him some art and he etched it into some small brass plates, then filled the lines with black paint. I never got a chance to get them from him, but he had them with him at the festival and I finally have these two AWESOME little plates of my artz! Thanks a ton, Brian! They're awesome. I've gotta try that technique one of these days. You know, when they make days long enough for there to actually be time for everything, heh :)

I kinda love going to the post office. And when I mail things, I like to decorate the packaging. I drew this face on the back of a small (4x5") box I was mailing to a friend of mine.

So, I'm home sick from work today. Dunno what I've got but I know it blows goats. Going to the doctor in an hour or so.

But, in the meantime, I wanted to post about those shows, and plug some really awesome people, who really deserve to get plugged (pun may or may not be intended).

ButterBean Arts Market, Huntersville, NC
So, this show was over a month ago already, yeesh. It was held at a small, local, organic grocery grocery, and there was a $20 entry fee. There was a great artist turnout.... and a really puny customer turnout, unfortunately. The general consensus among us artist types was that they probably made more off our entry fees than they did selling produce that day.

Now, charging a fee for vendor space is standard operating procedure for this kind of event, but generally, the events which charge for space are established enough that a certain level of traffic is guaranteed. I don't know this for sure, but I gather this was both a new arts market and a new store in general, so perhaps they simply haven't built up their client base yet. Maybe in a few months it'll be better. So, didn't make any money, and neither did anybody else, but I'd be flat out lying if I called the day a wash, because I met some AAAAAAWESOME people.

Right next to me was a young couple Hannah and her husband Mark, and Hannah's sister Amy. Hannah had some fucking INCREDIBLE work, haha. Seriously, she had these AWESOME construction paper cut-outs diarama things that looked like stills from old macabre horror flicks or novellas. She also had severed limbs, roadkill animals, sugar skulls and organs in jars--ALL made out of felt and cloth. Seriously, you have to check her work out on etsy: The Friendly Misanthrope. I traded her a woodcut and a plush toy for one of her plush toy sugarskulls and a papercut. The papercut I gave to *my* Hana, though the next time I see her I'm totally trading for another one, haha.

Her sister Amy had really awesome paintings, sort of a little touch of folk art, with a little touch of the decorative. I really liked them, and the detail she puts into them I could stare at for hours! Check her out!

Next up was Eric Huskins of Electric Blanket Art. He had a bunch of really rad, short and sweet acrylic paintings, totally graphic, totally funny, totally man-of-my-own-heart kinda stuff. I traded him a Blinky print for a painting of a blue piggy bank pig with flames on the side, AWESOME.

Aaaand let's see, I also met this rad dude, Mike, who is also a screenprinter, and makes his living basically just selling his own quick 'n dirty designs on ebay. Not exactly what I wanna be doing, it was really really good talking some shop with him and getting some ideas on ways to bring in extra money with this whole printing thing. He was there supporting his girlfriend who had some stuff yall might like. Check him out here, and her out there!

So yeah, what the day lacked in monetary return, it made up for 100 fold in contacts, trades and good times. It also became clear that if I was to continue doing shows outside, I would *have* to invest in a canopy--I was the only artist there without one--also the only artist to end the day with a sunburned neck, heh. More on that in a bit, though.

I guess... maybe I'll try the ButterBean show out again in a few months, but for now I don't have any immediate plans to go back.

Ok, that's more than enough info for this post. I'll post about the Tate St Festival in a second.

Also....

I will bring my camera with me to art shows.
I will bring my camera with me to art shows.
I will bring my camera with me to art shows.
I will bring my camera with me to art shows.
I will bring my camera with me to art shows.
I will bring my camera with me to art shows.

-P.

Putting out Fires
So, a lot of things in my life are on fire. In the bad sense of that expression. My car has been in really bad shape for a long time. I didn't do anything about it at first because I didn't have the money, then, when I started having monday, I thought I'd prefer to just buy a new used car. After reviewing everything again, I've decided to actually just invest the money (probably around a grand, maybe more) in fixing my car. The rationale behind that is that even if I could get a car payment as low as I would need it to be, my budget would be so tight I wouldn't be able to afford *art supplies*, and I'd basically just be trading anxieties over my car for anxieties over money. I'm trying to improve my life, and I don't think that quite fits the bill.

I'm dropping my car off at the shop Saturday to have it worked on while I am out of town (see next topic section).

Also, lol, the graphics card in my computer is dying. A horrible death. For the kind of work I do, this is equivalent to the engine in your car dying. And, this is a graphics card I paid $430 for, new, 5 years ago. Luckily, computer part prices drop like goddamn stones, and in fact, a *better* graphics card than mine which is presently dying cost me $53, shipped. SOLD.


Tate St Festival
Hey all you greensboro folks! Come on out to the Tate St Festival (guess where it is!?) on Saturday! I'm gonna have a booth set up with my posters, shirts and plush toys! It's gonna be great! Come out and visit me!

Gonna be hanging out with Joshjoshtothemax and Lauraalethalruby afterward. Sweeeeeeeet!


Ok, gotta head to work. The last thing I want to mention is that my buddy Patrick Leger, who was a grad student in the art department while I was doing undergrad, recently got in touch with me about screenprinting some of his illustrations, and I've just completed the printing on the first of them. 4-colors, ~12x15", it looks fucking BAD ASS. I'll post pictures as soon as I can (computer allowing, and Patrick allowing). In the meantime, go check out his work: Patrick Leger Illustration.

PAZ!
-P.

SWEET! So, I just ran another quick test with my discharge paste, attempting to work out a way for me to be able to print waterbased inks onto dark fabric. Waterbased ink is quite thin, and even the best stuff isn't opaque when printed on a dark substrate, so to print on dark fabrics you've generally got two options: 1) print, dry, print, dry, print, dry ad nauseum until it's opaque, or 2) print a layer or two of white ink down, dry it, then print your color on top of it. This second method is actually quite adequate, but takes time, and leaves you with a heavy print.

What discharge agents let you do is basically bleach the color out of your substrate, so when you print your color on top of it, it's as though you're printing on a much lighter shirt.

And as you can see by these samples, HOLY CRAP! It worked out even better than I could have hoped. I tested out white, process yellow, and red ink, printed over a layer of discharge base. The colors are BRIGHT, vivid, and look more like they've been burned into the shirt than printed heavily on top of it.


So this is pretty exciting. My only concern is that when I wash them, as the discharge paste washes out, it may take the ink sitting on top of it with it, but we'll see, I'm going to toss these samples in the wash later today or tomorrow.

Also, I think tomorrow at work I'll ask my boss if I can take home a little bit of discharge powder that can be mixed directly into my inks, and try that. Using that would save me the extra step of printing the base down, and make printing on dark shirts every bit as easy as printing on light ones :)

w00t!
-P.

PS - ah crap, I still haven't posted about that show I did last weekend. Aight, I'll get to that later.

Hey there folks!

So remember back this spring, my roommate was doing a fundraiser walk for Crohn's Disease, and I thought it'd be hillarious if she named her team, "Rectum!? Damn Near Killed 'Em!" She didn't want to at first, but I had just built my press, and I finally convinced her to adopt the name by telling her that if she did, I'd design and print her team shirts.

Well, I still wear mine around all the time, and it gets a lot of great looks. Some people kinda stare at it with confusion (I guess the expression, "wrecked him? damn near killed him!" isn't as common as I thought it was), some give it a shy smile (they get it, but think they shouldn't be laughing at something dirty), but most people downright love it. So, I decided that I would print a new batch to try and sell, and I'm happy to say they're finally ready and available!

They came out great, and printing went a lot more smoothly this time, heh. I've got S, M, L, XL and XXL available. Aaaaaand, while I had the screens burned, I decided to go ahead and knock out a handful of posters, too! The posters look great, too, and printing them was a breeze.

So hey, spread the word about these, show the etsy listing to your friends!

Cheers yall! More stuff always in the works!
-P.

What's up folks! Got some new stuff to show you. Plush toys!!! My everencouraging (I declare that to be a word) LadyFriend™ encouraged me to combine my screenprinting and my sewing and make up some cute plush toys, so I figured what the hell and gave it a shot! You might remember these two little fellows from the shirt I made for my cousin's kid a few months ago. It's a modified version of him, and who knows, if he proves popular I may make additional permutations of him in the future. He's easy to edit, and small enough I can make films of him at home.



And, so then, there's this guy, heh. He actually comes from a nightmare I had at my girlfriend's place one night: (I was on a camping trip with my brother and dad in the Linville Gorge area. We were contemplating our campsite when we heard a rustling behind us and turned to see the shape of a very large bird forming out of leaves and other detritus from the ground, swooping by the tree line. There was a crack like thunder and the form of the bird dissapated, and something fell, spinning, out of it. The spinning object slowed and hovered a few feet from the ground. It was a koala, a very ANGRY koala, with antlers, holding a scimitar. That's when I woke up shouting.) Erm, right, so anyway. I told Hana about the dream in the morning, and she laughed at my ridiculousness and insisted that I draw the koala nature god for her, but that he must be cute. Heh, so I drew him up, screenprinted him and surprised her with a koala-nature-demigod plushie for her birthday :)

These have really been incredibly fun to make, and I've learned a SHIT ton about sewing in the process. I'll definitely be making more of this kind of thing, as well as other soft sculpture things in the future. Heh, I sort of have a vision of getting a wicker basket, making a model guillotine out of cardboard and filling the basket with plushie severed heads. I think that'd be fuckin rad.

Anyway, while they may not always get along, these fine stuffed, printed gentlemen are available for sale, individually, through my Etsy Store :)

More soon!
-P.

Just a reminder (cuz I totally know you handful of locals are going to get up early on a saturday morning and drive thirty minutes, lol), I'm going to be doing the ButterBean Arts Market this saturday morning from 9-2pm.

And this is what I've been doing till 2am the last two evenings: printing a new batch of business cards cuz I was almost out. I now have something like 108 of them. That oughtta last a few shows.

Cheers, folks!
-P.

Ok, I'm really tired and need to head to bed, so I'll just knock out this one more quick post.

I'm trying to jump on every show opportunity I hear about these days. I just did the First Friday event at Salvador Deli this past friday. And I sold a t-shirt, and a print, so I walked away with more money than I had before, but... Hmm.. it seems that while a few months ago, most of the artists were actually INSIDE the Salvador patio, they're now congregating across the street, which is rad, because they get lots of foot traffic. The problem is that the only *light* over there is street light, which doesn't really show off the color of anyone's work. I need to scout around over there and see if I can find an outlet on the side of a building folks could plug into, and then maybe I'd join them over there, because the people at Salvador this time were there to see the band, not to look at art, and also, I was the only visual artist setup there, which you'd have thought would help my odds, but no dice. BUT, I've just gotten word that the Neighborhood Theatre wants to start having artists show work inside on nights they have free shows, so that might be another option for first fridays.


I'm doing another show up in Huntersville (about 20 minutes north of where I live in Charlotte) this saturday, from 9am-2pm, so if you're up for it, come on out and see me! It'll be at the ButterBean Village Market. Hopefully it'll be a lot of fun!


And then, later this month, I'm scheduled to do the Tate St Festival in Greensboro. A LOT of you on my friends list should know about that one, heh. It'd never occurred to me to do it before, but now it makes total sense. And it'll be really good to see Jaime Coggins (the organizer) again. I used to volunteer for her at her gallery when it first opened up. Anyway, that's scheduled for Saturday, September 26th, I believe. I'll post about it again. There should be another show or two in october, dates tba!

Ok, I sleep now, and post more tomorrow probably, cuz I gots more to show yall!
-P.

So, dig this, yall. I hung out with my old mentor Bill Fick a couple weeks ago and we got to talking about ways to create a bleached effect in printing. The obvious answer is, of course, to use bleach. However, bleach is a harsh ass chemical which breaks down fabrics after a while, and, as a liquid, is impossible to screenprint with.

So, I decided to do some digging. For screenprinting, you want a kind of thick liquid. Think... melted cheese, or stirred up yogurt at room temperature. Turns out, a company called SoftScrub makes two GEL cleansers that have bleach in them. BOO-YA! Perfect!

... Kind of..


I tried the first one (SoftScrub gel, in the green bottle), with lackluster results. Even left to bleach over night, it barely made a dent in the color of the shirts I tried it on.


So then I saw the other one (SoftScrub gel in the white bottle). THIS stuff got the job DONE! It's a thick, opaque white liquid, that I think has some abrasive 'microcrystal' stuff in it. Whatever it is, it did a great job bleaching the color out of the shirts I tried it on. It got black down to a nice texas orange, blue all the way back to white, etc, and that was only after bleaching for 30 or 40 minutes. If left longer, I imagine the effect would be greater still.

So, while yes, the white stuff works pretty well, I'm still not totally satisfied with the bleach technique. It's still a harsh, smelly-ass chemical, and will still degrade your fabric after a while. And, how exactly you would work it in with other printing (as in, bleach + other colors in a design) is... tricky.


So, then, I found this other--terribly named--product called Discharge Paste. THIS stuff is EXACTLY what I've been looking for. Basically it works like a heat-activated bleach. You either brush or print it onto your fabric, and it goes on totally clear. Once it's dry you can't even see where you printed it. So yeah, once it's dry, you heat it, either with a steamer or an iron (I used an iron), and almost as soon as the iron hits it, the color just saps right out of the garment. BOOM. Gone. It did a better job than bleach, but I still would like more of the color to have faded away. I think a few more strokes (getting the paste deeper into the fibers of the swatches) would have helped. Here's some pics.



Now, this is exciting for a number of reasons. Using discharge paste on its own lets me get an awesome bleached effect in a controlled way without degrading my fabrics. It also may finally let me print waterbased ink to dark colored shirts at home. Waterbased inks are thinner than plastisols (commercial, oil based t-shirt inks), and so you really have to layer them up to get them to look opaque on dark fabric. Using discharge paste, I can print down a base layer of the paste, dry it quickly, then print a colored ink on top of it, then when the ink is dry, iron it, and the discharge layer underneath should sap the color out of the shirt, making the waterbased color on top suddenly appear, very bright, as though it were printed to a light colored shirt. I haven't had a chance to test this latter technique yet, but rest assured I will in the coming weeks.

These are exciting times, folks!
More later!
-P.

So dig, one of my good friends from college is getting married this weekend. (And I'm a groomsman again. Do ya believe it? You think people would learn the first time!)

Anyway. They wanted shirts for the wedding party, so I made it happen. Brittain did the designs, I did the printing. Navy blue Union Aerotex ink (not my favorite) on standard ass gildan shirts.

They came out lookin pretty good!


Haven't been on LJ much lately. Seems my life's been running on the philosophy of "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Pretty much every weekend for the last month or so Hana and I have been either at the beach, or in the mountains, or doing stuff with folks here in charlotte, on top of each of our various creative tinkerings we're doing at home.

I did an art show in Matthews a couple weeks back that was fun, and profitable even if it was small and in the boonies. lol, and Cougar. As far as the eye could see.

Saw Dar Williams in concert at a festival in Asheville.

Been at my job a year now.

Oh, and I'm planning on buying a car. Probably in september. Give or take. My car is due up for inspection then, and I'll be amazed if it'll pass without a hefty bribe. Actually, that probably deserves its own post.

Anyway, yeah, been up to a lot. Later.
-P.

Heh, haven't seen one of those from me in a while!

So dig this. Someone at work (I think it may have been Bossman himself), described his job as like having a bunch of little baby birds cheeping at him all day. My buddy at work Jeff thought that was pretty funny and decided to illustrate it.

I'd been wanting to experiment with plushie thingies for a while now, so I came up with the idea of making a little plush thing out of it.

So I got Jeff to scan it in and do color separations for it, and I printed it up on some old soft white jersey cotton, I made a back for it, and tonight I sewed it up, stuffed it, and sewed the corner shut!

It's super cool and was WAY fun to do. The craftsmanship is CRAP (except for the printing, which is pretty spot on), hehehe. It's misshapen and lumpy as fuck. My sewing, it needs work, and I need to learn to stuff these things and not have them be full of lumps.

Now, to sew the thing closed, and not have a big, obvious spot where it was sewn shut, I had to learn how to do an "invisible" or "ladder" stitch. Now, I'd looked around for a good tutorial on how to do this for a while now, but couldn't find one. In fact, the ones I found were impressively shitty. But then I found this one, and all was well with the world. It really laid it all out, cearly and comprehensibly.

So lemme know your thoughts, cuz I definitely see a lot more of this on the horizon! And check out the flickr page for more photos of the cushion!

-P.