HALLOWEEN! + She's BATTY + Custom Order Excitement

Ahhhh, Halloween! My favorite holiday!

Furry green monster costume = SUCCESS!

Haha, so I was totally working on my costume right up until the very last second. I don't know what happened, I was being pretty consistent about getting things done for a little bit there... School perhaps? Ugh, school. Also more frequent hang-out time with my friends. Oh! And I've been visiting my friend Mike (you know, the one who is in A City Serene? you read that entry right?) in the hospital! He's got a long way to go before things approach normal again, but he's talking and joking and being a jerk, so we're all pretty hopeful =)

Here's a slightly better picture of my costume:

I hand-sewed the hood, the gloves, the fur on the shirt, and legwarmers that you obviously can't see in this picture. The blazer was a $4 thrift store find and I found the scarf abandoned on the floor after a concert a few years back...haha. Besides that, I wore purple pants and pink shoes. I've got some picture from the party I went to here where you can see things a little better - don't mind my weird friends and I =)

Yay, Halloween party! And yes, I got my monstery-blood sucked by a vampire...haha

NOW TELL ME HOW YOUR HALLOWEEN WAS! I seriously want to know, I'm still kind of hyped up about it even though it's over...haha. And in that spirit, I'd like to feature someone who seems to be even more into Halloween than me - She's Batty Designs =)

She makes some really awesome cards, as you can see - I really really like the owl one on the right. Go check out her shop - in her own words, Jamie "specializes in greeting cards, invitations and other paper products such as gift tags" and she, like me, is up for custom orders!

Speaking of custom orders...I worked on one for the lovely Poison Ivy you can see in the collage up there =) She requested two bracelets and these:

BOB-OMB EARRINGS!

I am pretty proud of them and she seemed excited, so woo! As usual, please do take these kinds of things as encouragement to request custom work from me - I'm definitely up for it =)

Alright, this took me a lot longer to put together than I meant for it to...so many pictures! Haha...I'll be writing again soon.

Winning a Giveaway Pt. 2, New Polymer Clay Things, and Fabric!

Okay! Back to posting! Seriously!

As a brief update on my friends in A City Serene, all but two of the members are out of the hospital - my friend Marc is out, but Mike is still in there. Haven't gotten any specific updates on him lately so I can't say much besides that, really. Donations are still needed to help their families out, and I am still sending 40% from all Etsy purchases in my shop to them.

Now, for one of the things I meant to post before all that happened: I won a giveaway! 5erg had a giveaway on her blog a few weeks ago and I left a comment and WON! Haha...I got to spend $20 in her shop and I got an opalite bracelet, opalite earrings, and an ACEO. Look at how happy I am!

The opalite bracelet! I wear this almost everyday now...

 

Opalite earrings! So pretty!

In case you didn't notice, I really really like opalite...haha. The plugs I've got in my ears with the earrings are also opalite. It's just so damn pretty! Thank you again, 5erg!


Hmm, what else...well, I finally made some more polymer clay stuff on Monday. I decided to try making some slightly different kinds of horns and I also made some plugs for myself that I can fit through my silicone earskins (since polymer clay is porous, it's really not ideal for putting straight into your ears) after looking around at the kinds of things other people are making. Lately I've been getting all kinds of cool ideas from other Etsian's shops and various websites and so on - there's so much I want to make and try that it's kind of ridiculous...but that's the usual state of things with me. Anyways, here's a look at what I did:

Wooo, new polymer clay stuff! Just uh, hanging out on my messy desk...

I meant to start getting proper pictures taken of the horns yesterday, but ended up going to the thrift and fabric stores with my friend Hayden, so I didn't accomplish much on that front...hopefully tomorrow! What I did accomplish was getting black corduroy pants for $1.75 and some fabric, woo. Got fabric because 1) I love fabric, 2) I'm trying to build up a good collection of different kinds of fabric for the random projects I think up, and 3) I AM GOING TO TRY MAKING MY OWN HALLOWEEN COSTUME THIS YEAR!

Haha...I've definitely worn handmade costumes before as a kid - I had a glorious velvety vampire cape that used to choke me but I still loved it, I was once the pink Power Ranger (all felt outfit, if I recall), etc - but I've never made one on my own, so I'm pretty excited and really hoping I get it right. My plan is to be a monster! I'm thinking I'll use some awesome green fur I bought a while back to make a hood/hat/type thing with horns, armwarmers, and legwarmers. Not positive what I'll be wearing with them just yet though...might make something or might just look through my clothes/thrift stores to find something that will match it. I will keep you updated on my progress =) Here's the fabric I have so far:

Here's the green I bought a while back...

And this is what I got yesterday! I'm thinking the green and white spot cotton will be the lining for the hood and the pink fleece will be the underside of the armwarmers and maybe the horns. And uh, then there's some awesome pink fur =)

Alright, well I think that's it for today...I'll be posting again soon =)

Help Me Help My Friends from A City Serene

Hey everyone...well, I was planning to write another post a lot sooner than this, but in addition to being busy with school and, well, my usual state of tiredness (haha, seriously), this weekend I found out that two of my friends got into a really serious car accident while three days into their band's first big tour. There's lots of news articles floating around, but I think this is a pretty good one: http://tinyurl.com/acityserene

They have tons of AWESOME quality photos on MySpace, but I had to post this one because it's classic Mike (big arms) and Marc (huge smile and pointing) to me...sigh.

Basically what happened is that the tour bus they were driving got hit head on. All six of them were seriously hurt - they each have at least one broken bone - and even the best of them is still in the hospital five days later and is going to need months of rehabilitation to recover. Two of them are friends of mine from high school - one's actually my ex of two years who I'm still friends with, though I wish we had talked more often. Hearing what happened shook me up a lot more than expected, and I feel like I've spent most of my free time lately trying to see if there's any updates on their conditions from a friend of ours who's basically camping out at the hospital and re-posting news articles about what happened as more information comes out. I actually got a bit upset today about a post MySpace Music made on the accident because of some people posting unnecessary negative comments...ah, will I ever learn not to read comments on articles online? I mean, I do understand it's the nature of the internet, and I understand that it's easy to be desensitized to news and things that affect people you don't even know, but it's still amazing how insensitive people can be. I guess that's something I always knew, but it's become very personal now. But enough about that.

What I want to do right now is just to ask you to help them out, whether that be through donating money to them through a PayPal account set up on their MySpace page, buying their new EP or a shirt, or sending some encouraging words to them. I am going to be donating a percentage from any sales I make in my Etsy shop to them, so that's another way that you can help out if you have the money to spare, or have been waiting for a good time to get something from me. Honestly, I'm pretty broke myself right now (I actually don't have textbooks for most of my classes yet and we're three weeks into the semester - thank you internet for having a good chunk of my readings so far), and sales on Etsy are about the only way I'm going to get together any money to send them myself, so they would be doubly appreciated.

I promise to get back on track with this blog soon, but for now, please send my friends and the rest of A City Serene some positive vibes - they really need them right now. Thank you <3