feeling crafty

ok, i come clean, because i told my mom that i'm a genius for making this, only fact i hid was that it's not really my crafty idea. i saw in a magazine when i was doing my hair last friday. anyway, i thought it's such a cool idea to reuse my old unused jeweleries into bookmarks. not that i read much nowadays, but it's so cool to be given as gifts!

so i did a few, using scraps of ribbons from my cousin's wedding (mom was in charge of doing the hantaran and all that), and random jewelry items like lockets/pendants that i do not wear anymore because i'm more into statement-making chunky accessories right now, and also earrings i've never worn or which have lost it's pair.

it's so easy to make. for earrings, you just have to loop the wire that you poke into your earlobes with into a circle. better if you use pliers coz it'd hurt you if you do it freehand. trust me. and then pull a ribbon through and knot it. make sure that you really cover the sharp, poking wire part that you looped just now.

i love them so much they make me want to read again! my mom loves them, she took two, and my brother took one. i plan to make more and give out as gifts. if you want one, be nice to me!

inspired travesty

inspired by this customized poster i found just now, i thought, hey, it's simple and easy enough to make it myself. it's just a play of typographic elements. my mom did not send me to study graphics for 4 years for nothing, right?

this only took about 2 hours to do - 118 minutes just to decide on the colour combination. taupe-mauve (ceh! still want to be ambiguous and dare not say the word PINK *cringe*) and brown is slowly becoming Arwen's personal theme colours, ever since her cukur jambul ceremony. she can decide to change them when she's old enough to wipe her own shit. but for now, it's gonna mama's choice.




what do you think?


like i actually give a crap what you think? i love it. so this weekend, we shall go get a RIBBA frame from IKEA and mount this inspired travesty. yay!

a prolonged nesting period

i love Project Nursery! why oh why didn't i bump into these amazing nursery sites during my nesting period? seriously. i would've done something wonderful to Arwen's little corner in our room. but then again, considering her daddy's inclination to change the arrangement of our bedroom furniture every 2-3 months or so, allocating a special 'corner' for Arwen would be rather impractical.

maybe it's not too late. i should probably start designing some artwork to frame up. something that could be moved at her daddy's disposal. something like a personalized alphabet poster, (i love this!) or something like this would be awesome!, or her name on typography vector art or something. and then i would probably ultimately dump it alongside all the other half-assed personal projects i've started and not finished, because that would be so typically me. maybe i should start compiling a nursery idea board for the next one. (next one? hah! ada hati lagi nak fikir about the next one so soon?)

the fridge will never look the same again

i know im supposed to be doing something constructive, like cleaning the junk under our bed. but i just got home from lunch, shopping (more baby clothes and other random things), a movie (bride wars. good funny sometimes hormotional shit. watch it!), dinner and more shopping (bread and house-needs) and im pretty worn but still had some pent up energy left. so, i sat down and finally made some moognets.

i had some moo cards left from my last project, so i figured, why let it go to waste? my mom always complained that we take thousands of pictures but we dont print them out to show off our talents to people who come over to the house.

since i think photo albums are overrated (i havent even printed out my wedding photos yet. it's been more than a year, i know. pengantin basi) so i guess, the next best things are framed collages and moognets.

it was easy, really. and only took about half an hour to turn these :



into these :

more moos

i took me almost a year to get something done and finished. no, actually this project is far from finished. it's on-going. remember the moo cards i got last year? well, initially, when i first got the moo cards, i wanted to turn them into a collage and frame it. and then i had to wait till i got married so i can include my wedding pictures in before i order up another batch. and then i found out i was pregnant and wanted to wait for baby photos. pasal tu sampai setahun nak siap. but alas, buat jugak ...

these were how they turned out :






tu pun ada lebih banyak lagi. i think can make another frame or two.

the wall

the project i've talked about earlier is now ready to be revealed. in pictorial format. yes, i've been posting a lot of visual journeys lately. it's not because i'm too lazy to write, ok fine maybe i am a bit, but actually it's easier to explain using photos rather just using incoherent words strung together to make make sense of what is not making a lot of sense.

see what i mean?

oh, and also because i think that my picture-taking has improved considerably. (still not good enough, but at least better than those i've taken back when ISO 400 film was considered hi-tech).

anyway, this project revolves around this particular banal and empty wall on our stairway, which desperately screams at me to splash some creative juices on it every time i walk up and down the house.



so i figured, since we've got a lot of pictures unprinted, unframed and unhung, and ever since we've finished with the 2nd phase renovation a couple of years ago, there's no family portraits on any of the many walls in our home except for a couple of our baby pictures ... thus, i figured, this wall needs some family portraits. so i sketched the layout a bit, trying to pacify all the visuals and ideas that are roaming around aimlessly in my soup brain on a piece of paper. i did this during one of the brainstorming sessions at work, to stay awake.



and then comes the hard and most expensive part. the choosing and printing of the photos. i've had like a gillion random-sized boxes drawn in the initial layout, but i only had enough money to print a dozen. it's the gigantus size of the photos and the texture matte lamination that cost me a hand, a foot and 1/2 a foot of my lower intestine. the biggest ones are the picture of mom & dad (24" x 12.5") and the picture of the 3 of us (16"x16").



by the power of greyskull, my genius brothers proposed that i use polystyrenes as my frame. at different depths so that i have a varying degree of dimensions and dynamics. (words were purposely used out of context for geek effect)





i painted the sides of the frame with black pelaka (pelaka, for ye non art students, is basically the expensive version of the buncho poster colour we used to use in school), an event that's brought me back to 1997 during my first year of art school when my first presumption of graphic art was doodles and scribbles and fancy handwritings and was terribly clumsy with the brush.

and then it's the mounting on the wall, which, without help from my mother and her sound measuring and calculating proficiency, i'd have a really careless, haphazard mush of random pictures arranged like it seemed to have been inspired by the stretch marks on my thigh.





we still have a few more pictures to be printed, which will have to wait till the next payday. the beauty of this wall is that it's an ever growing, expandable project. well, at least until we run out of wall.

i love to moo

last friday, i sent an email to the good people at MOO about the status of my moo minicards floating somewhere in freight world. they were supposed to arrive a week ago (which was only supposed to be 5-7 working days from the day of dispatch), but it's been 17 days and i was getting foamy in the mouth trying to figure out what happened to them. patience just isn't one of my virtues.

but on saturday, while ayis and i were casually having roti bakar and kopi at station kopitiam in semua house, taking a breather after a whole freaking day of walking around masjid india-jalan tunku abd rahman looking for wedding-related stuff, and become subjected to fittings after fittings of a really distressing state of baju nikah which by the way has a mind of its own, falie called with a very enthused tone telling me that he's gonna 'open it' now. of course, i didn't know what he's talking about, because i'm naturally slow. can't help it. was born that way, just had to wait till the very last day of the decade to embrace the world and all of its quandaries. but when i finally deciphered his coding messages, i was shouting - louder than how i'd normally talk and you can actually see the all caps and exclamation points in my eyes - YES! YES! OPEN THEM NOW! at that point, i just couldn't wait to get home. luckily traffic was clear that day, or else ayis would've gotten a taste of the wrath of my impatience and decide to call off the wedding.









they're so cute! the RM84.00 was totally worth it. actually i expected them to be slightly bigger though, but they're still really cute. and the matt lamination adds depth to the photos. making them look like as if they were taken by professionals.

we're gonna turn them into a mosaic collage and frame them. our piece of camerart - a showcase of our combined imagined grandeur. initially i wanted to make funky moognets out of them but then i figured, people - especially those who'd be coming in and out of the house during my wedding - could just simply pluck them off the fridge and keep as souvenirs. can't risk that. so we just might as well collage and frame them up. it'd be a fun project but i'd only get started on it after the wedding and probably wait till i order another batch of the moo minicards.

this however, isn't the project i mentioned about in the last 2 post. that particular project is still waiting to be revealed later because it's still incomplete for documentation purposes. but i promise myself to get it done before the wedding.

like she needs another one

i'm about to start on yet another personal home-beautification project. this time i'm determined to see through till at least, AT LEAST, 80%. given my history of half-assed personal endeavors, i'd say that's pretty optimistic. this particular project though (which i'll reveal later) has already cost me RM153.00. money i should've kept for wedding needs. but i'd like to think that this one applies as 'wedding needs'. i'll tell you why in my next post.

edit : ok, probably not next post, but definitely next next (next) post.

competitive procastinator

i'm notoriously known for doing things half-assedly and not finishing what i started. i dont know how i manage to meet work-related deadlines, sometimes even juggling 3 different jobs and getting all them done even before their deadlines.

but when it comes to my own little personal projects, i just fuck up. i haven't gotten a new artwork started for my project12. i've been slacking on it for 3 months, mostly due to work. and i havent really been inspired to come up with a composition. well yes, i've got some time spared but .. okay .. fine. i'll be honest. i was lazy.

and now, i'm starting on a new project. browsing through the almost 50 gig of family photos my brothers and i have taken these past few years, i though i should do something about it. like a coffeetable photobook.

i always find a new thing to procrastinate on.

project 12 : march 07

i know i'm lagging behind on my project 12. i was supposed to do this once a month but i cant seem to get my ass up in tune with my aspirations and projections. that's just typically me. my butt is bigger than my dreams.

this artwork thing... it's not even that hard once i get started on it. its just the 'waiting for inspiration to come' phase that takes a really long time. but i'm not totally off track though, i've done 2 artworks in a matter of 2 days. which means that since november, i've done 5 artworks, so i'm actually right on track. although i'll post the 5th one much later because i still have some finishing touches to do.

i was having a hard time sleeping and i suddenly had a flicker of inspiration last tuesday night, so i picked up one of the 3 blank canvases stacked under piles and piles of clothes and started laying out my art materials on my bed. like a whore, if i had a choice, i prefer to work from my bed.

i wanted a funky colored base so i started the background with purple. i used up one full small tube of purple acrylic for this. since i used acrylic, it dried really fast. so i proceeded to draw the outline of my subject. a foliage design inspired by jason gaylor's brushes. while i was doing this, bruce springsteen's secret garden was randomly played on my iPod. kinda uncanny. so i shall name this artwork ... SECRET GARDEN.



i needed a contrasting colour that goes well against deep purple. i didn't want yellow. i did white against dark colour already. figured that i didn't really want a funky painting afterall. i wanted gold. but i don't have gold acrylic. so, i settled for a light brown colour. well, some may call the colour ochre, or clay, or mud, or dark blondish, dark yellow. i call it Liquid Shit.



and then i did the round thingys. for now, all my artworks have but one common recurrent theme. circles. or rounded curvy shapes that used to be a full circle in its previous life or perhaps aspire to become a circle in the next. the foliage kinda looks like a medieval malaysian tree money (if there's such an era).



here's the completed 'secret garden'.

project12 : december 2006 (1)

mood of (the 1st part of ) the month : tumult. scared. unsure. chaotic.

this one, i actually started a couple of weeks ago ... it only took an hour to finish painting the background color. but it took about 5 days for it to dry. i have to wait before i start on the composition i've been conjuring up in my head and that has kept me sleepless for 3 nights in a row.



and once the primary has fully dried, i drew the outlines - and since faiz cant remember where he puts the color pencil collection 2 boxes worth that i've passed down to him after i've graduated art school - i had to find other resources. and since i have no idea where my mom puts her sewing box, i couldnt find a tailor's chalk and so i ended up using my expired skin-tone brow pencil (dont ask. it was free)



why waves? this month's been exactly like that. a lot of ups and downs - sometimes i'd feel free and flighty and weighless but sometimes, it even came to the point of just giving up and letting myself being dragged down by the undertow. scary thing is ... i cant even swim.



and so ... after 2 weeks, it has come down to this. so far, this one's been a bit of a pain in the ass - it took took a lot more brushes, patience, time, emotions, energy as well as neck and back rubs.



but it's worth it.

project 12 : november 06

i was supposed to start this project three months ago … but typical me ... being the ultimate procrastinator that i am, put it off till forever. i have no problem seeing things done .. the only problem i have is getting things started. okay, perhaps not procrastinating ... i’d prefer calling it ‘waiting for inspiration to come’.

there’s this empty wall by the sofa at our family lounge area. wtf? trying to make it sound official. heh. in actuality, we just call it the ‘tv place’. so anyway, there was this one time that i laid and stared at the empty wall .. it was one of the few rare moments that my attention deterred away from the death grip of the tv .. and i envisaged an art project that i was determined to see through. i kept on nagging about starting to paint again ... and now, i finally have a goal and purpose. i’m going to try to adorn that empty wall.

here’s the plan :

i call it project12. there’ll be twelve 12” x 12” canvas frames (which amazingly cost only RM12.90 each, i thought it’d be at least RM30 plus) which i’m going to paint once a month for 12 months. so, there’ll be 12 separate art works, hung 3 frames across and 4 down. it’s not going to be a series, but just random, abstract designs that i’ll paint according to my mood of the month.

yesterday, while i was on leave (supposedly medical but couldnt even bring my ass up to go to the clinic) and bored at home, i decided to start on my project. it didn’t require me to move much, so i figured why not.. it’ll hopefully take my mind off the pain. and it did. i was so engrossed in it that i didn’t even realize that i almost got it finished in a matter of 4 hours.

i've almost forgotten how therapeutic painting can be. while i was painting, i felt somewhat calmer, centered, grounded and free. i managed to blocked everything else out ... there’s nothing but me, the brushes, the paint, the canvas and tori amos. for a second then, i even thought about doing this for a living. painting, photography, traveling, perhaps a bit of writing ... very bohemian. but then again, im not good enough at doing any of those things.

well, anyway.. here’s a photographic account of my journey to absolute freedom..

1. tools i need to get me started :



most people use photoshop and vectors nowadays. but i am old-fashion so.. canvas is my choice.

acrylic, oil paint, brushes, canvas ... and couldn't have done it without my trusty iPod, playing nothing but tori amos, good music to channel into that artsy mood.

i like using acrylic, as opposed to oil paint. acrylic has the shine of oil, the intensity of pelaka, it's easy to control, it's quick to dry .. and it doesnt smell. the only drawback is that it's bloody fucking expensive. but for this piece, i'm mixing between acrylic and oil.


2. laying the groundworks.



outlining what i want to paint. i can only do abstract. coz i cant draw shit if my life depended on it. my first composition.. circles. probably because thats the collective mood im feeling this month. running around in circles, chasing my own tail, extremely tired and totally confused. and also because im menstruating, i was feeling rather round-er.


3. first stroke.



choosing which color to start with is important. i makes or breaks the whole composition. well, yeah, of course it's reversible, i can always cover everything up with white paint and start over .. but im a bona-fide lazy ass so i have to really pick and stick with that color for as long as i live.

4. filling in the gaps.



initially, i wanted to make a black base with red fillings and white trimming .. but at that moment, my mind sort of wandered off to spain and i just somehow picked up the yellow tube of oil paint and started trimming. kinda makes the colors stand out i guess.

5. final touches



a lot of people have pointed out that it looks very batik-esque. whatever.

one more layer of oil to give it shine and texture .. wait two to three days for it to dry and its all ready to be hung.



i can't wait to start on the next piece.