SooooOOOOooooo. Here’s the story. While I’m prepping for Renegade Craft Fair, I realize that the berry basket I usually put my strawberry rings in is in L.A. (from Anime Expo). I either need to buy a new berry basket or come up with something different.

The berry basket is cool…cuz…you know…berry rings go in the berry basket … but I notice that they don’t always sit perfectly in there and sort of start to pile up on each other. I like the idea of using a regular ring display with the little slots that the rings go in, but they are usually pretty boring. You can find lots of tutorials via Google search for DIYing your own ring display from scratch, but I don’t have a lot of time to spare. Craft fair is in  3 days and I have a million other things to do.

So, I decide to buy a regular black velvet ring display from Michael’s, some Martha Stewart green glitter paint (I think green will set off the strawberries nicely), and invoke all the awesomeness of your fancy velvet Elvis paintings.

The color I choose is a nice, bright, yellowy springy green called PERIDOT, which, by the way, is my birth stone, and I always thought it was ugly and the worst birthstone ever.

This should have been a clue for what’s to come…

HIDEOSITY!!!!! I don’t know. I mean. It’s not horrible, but it’s just not what I had been envisioning in my head. I thought it would be really beautiful and cute and glamorous, but it’s more like, gross, ugly, tacky, and weird. Like the Hulk disco-barfed on a street gutter.

At this point, I realize, I can’t stop now. I NEED TO PUT MORE STUFF ON IT. Embrace that tackiness, make it weirder, make it uglier. Enter: green elastic ruffle trim I just happen to have because I love ugly things.

You’re probably like, “UH, by the way, it’s still ugly.”

I DON’T CARE. For some reason, the ruffle trim saves the whole project for me. I was going to also add a pearl trim and some bows, but, I decide to stop here, while I’m happy with it, and just let the rings stand out.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out now. I’m a happy camper.

If I were smart, I would have first painted the velvet with a regular green fabric paint and THEN gone over it with the green glitter paint. However, what you’re looking at only took two coats (just one bottle) of glitter paint, so, this paint is pretty good, and now I can go do the other eleventybillion things on my to-do list.

*high-fives Martha Stewart*

Yesterday Manda came over to my parents’ house and we spent the day improving the craft fair booth structure and trying to make it more stable.

Check out the humongous pipe-cutting tool that Manda is wielding. We were trying to decide whether or not this would be a worthy investment…AND IT WAS. IT’S OUR NEW FAVORITE THING. It makes cutting our pipe so much easier than with a PVC saw. It’s kind of scary, and you could probably cut your hand off, BUT WE LOVE IT. When we were looking at it at Home Depot, this big muscle-y dude walked by and was like, “That’s impressive. That even impresses ME.” SOLD.

Also while in Home Depot, I was walking through an aisle and saw some random monitor/screen turn into a camera displaying video of me walking, so then I started jumping and dancing in front of it in case someone was monitoring it, and then I kept walking and noticed an old man staring at me, disturbed.

Thanks so much to a friendly stranger on Facebook for  messaging me with ideas for making our structure less wobbly! It’s awesome!

We now have 4 days to complete this thing. It seems impossible to me, but we’re going to keep trying!

I have been flying back and forth between my house and my parents’ house and not really planning outfits at all.

I went to the J-Pop Explosion art show opening tonight and wanted to put a little more effort into my outfit than tshirt and jeans, but I was in a real rush and had no idea what the heck I was doing. Hence, this:

Obviously, there is NO RHYME OR REASON to any of this!!! I don’t know what I was thinking!

First I picked the dress. It’s cheery orange with cute carousel horses on it and my beloved peter pan collar, from ModCloth. Then came the shoes, NastyGal x Jeffrey Campbell, which you can’t even see anyway. Then my hair felt very unadorned, so I slapped my YumYums coin-purse/hair clips onto my head. DONE. YIKES!

I am freaking out, guys!

If you are in the Bay Area, please remember to visit Renegade Craft Fair July 21-22, 11am -7pm at Fort Mason in San Francisco. We’ll see if I manage to finish everything I hope to finish! EEEEP!

In the meantime, here’s a crappy phone pic of the postcards I made for the show. They just arrived today!

I was kinda trying to evoke actual postcards that are like, “Greetings from Palm Beach!” I know I need to take more updated photos one day. After Hairy set up his man-cave, my lights and backdrop moved to the garage, and I never really got into the habit of shooting in there. It’s cold!  Anyway, I need to work on that!

Here’s the back:

If I run out of these discount cards at the show, I’ll start putting them inside the packages I ship out.

These are part of the grand scheme I hope to pull off for my craft show booth. Cross your fingers! Hold onto your butts! I can’t wait to show you, if it works!

I’ve been living in a sleepless crochet-haze the last 5 days or so, working on these crochet paintings for the J-Pop Explosion art show at Hairy’s gallery. Here’s the little Q&A I did on their blog.

Sorry I didn’t get to blog about Craft Wars yet! Not only was I working on these crochet paintings, but I’m also planning for Renegade Craft fair, and I’m also house-sitting right now! EEP!

I’ll post better/more pics of the Pocky paintings after Friday, when the show opens :). I’ll also post my initial sketches and progress pics, and you’ll get to see how things don’t always go as you planned :P. At first I was going to have parts of a 3D Godzilla on the edges of the canvas biting into a a big box of Pocky which would be the canvas itself, but then I decided to just focus on the Pocky instead! Still turned out ok, I think! Actually last night I was freaking out because EVERYTHING WAS GOING WRONG, and I thought I had to deliver the paintings in an hour. I was really sweatin’ it! Luckily, I got one more day to work on it, so I drove back home today from housesitting to get them finished up.

I hope to have time to make a few smaller paintings for the fair as well!