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Thursday, March 10, 2011

Lovebird Dress for Lil Blu boo / Dharma Trading Co. Design Challenge

Here is the dress I am submitting to the Lil Blue Boo / Dharma Trading Design Challenge
Around Valentine's Day I designed a shirt for myself to wear to school.  I used the Iggy Suit screen to print designs on the sleeves and my own lacy heart screen for the heart design.  I love the shirt and I wear it a lot, but after I made it I thought the design might better suit a little girl's dress.
I happen to know an adorable little girl whose mother is a professional photographer, so we made a swap.  I stitched up a dress for Ariel and her mom took these fabulous photographs.
I designed both the shirt and the dress to have the red ties streaming down the back, so technically, the dress is being worn backwards in these pictures.  I think it works this way as well!









The neck line is adjustable and the dress is roomy.  I figure that a little girl can get a lot of use out of it this way.  She can wear it as a long dress until she needs to
let out the neck and wear it as a tunic with jeans.

Ariel is really an excellent model.  She very clearly knows what she's doing!





Here's a photo of Rigby wearing the dress facing forward....





Monday, February 21, 2011

Monsterbrella Trompy-day

Yesterday Arjun and I designed a shirt together.
We worked on a sketch together.   


Our influences included this book:


This song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Kgj6EiZtw
 
And this movie:

We recently watched the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie.  I fell in love with the color combination in Charlie Bucket's outfit.  This is the best picture I could find of it.  I love the bright green and teal plaid with the navy jacket.  I designed a Spoonflower fabric while we were watching and ordered it in an organic knit.  By the time it arrived I still didn't know what I would do with it.  All I knew was that I was going to combine it with navy and olive.
So.... When we finished our design I chose T shirts to recycle and cut the pieces for a hoodie.  I used the body, sleeves and hood from two different patterns and the pocket from the Lil Blue Boo hoodie pattern.  I cut out a stencil from freezer paper and painted.





I stitched it all together and then I waited for Sweet Pea to wake up and try it on.



HE LIKES IT!  He calls it:  "Monsterbrella Trompy-Day"

He wore it to the puppet show at the museum today.


Some action shots:










Sunday, February 20, 2011

Panda Shirt

Arjun's good friend at school LOVES pandas.  He is the inspiration behind this shirt.  While I was stitching it I realized that of course it should have black sleeves and a hood.  The next ones will....

 Arjun loves his panda shirt almost as much as he loves lollipops...

 And sharing...

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Iggy Suit

For Christmas, I made him an Iggy suit, complete with patterned shirt, sleek black pants and green hightops.  They are still all a bit big for him, but he loves wearing them.
I silkscreened the pattern using cut-up contact paper. 



Relaxing at school on his birthday...




Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Mosaic Painting

Arjun and I love to do projects together.  This is one that took us several days, but we are both very proud of it!  We used boxes cut into 2" X 2" squares to make tiles and fit them onto a grid.  The tiles are made from cereal boxes and the gridded base was made from a box used to ship large picture frames to me at school.  I saw a little version of this on Lil Blue Boo a few months ago and did a similar project with the 4 year olds at my school. 
I had the whole thing set up for him to start when we got home in the afternoon.  He was excited to start as soon as he saw it.  "A puzzle!" he said.
Arjun arranged all of the squares (some of them were arranged under the backing) and I helped him glue them to the cardboard.  He liked rubbing the glue stick onto the backs of the squares, but they were the sticks with the spongy pads that need a little squeeze to get the glue to come out.  He had trouble with the squeezing part.  He was surprisingly good at following the grid!

I let the glue dry under a heavy board overnight.  In the morning, it was set up for painting and printing.  When that became old, I hung it on the easel.....

Then back to the floor again.  We took turns printing on it.  Arjun did all of the brushwork himself.

We both love it!

Friday, November 12, 2010

More Mummies!

Arjun and I were Mummies for Halloween........











Grape Hyacinth Bulbs


Yesterday, Arjun and I planted 50 Grape Hyacinth bulbs in honor of someone we are missing.