Once again I’m attending the fabulous charity prom put on by Sigler Companies in Ames.  This year’s theme is Night of the Living Prom.  So, you can go as a zombie or as whatever you want. So really, the only difference from last year is the zombie part. Last year’s theme was Revenge of the Prom.

Anyway, Mark is going with me and I kind of fed his ideas for what he was going to wear and let them snowball into something really cool.  So originally he was wanting to wear an old-school tuxedo t-shirt with weight-lifting gloves and a jacket, but I suggested we go to the Atomic Garage in Valley Junction to see if they had any cool vintage attire.  There, we found an epic PBR t-shirt, which is perfect because him and all my guy friends are notorious for drinking PBR since it’s the cheapest pitcher you can get. But it was too small. I bought it anyway assuming I could craft it into something.

Today I tried on my black dress that I’d bought last year that has never quite fit (it tapers to the top — which makes no sense, but whatever).  I decided that it was too cute with the electric blue and black lace tights I had on and that I HAD to make it work.  Coincidentally, at the same time I tried the dress on, I got a text from Mark saying that he was going to tuck his jeans into his boots, old-school punk style.

*idea!*

So we’re going punk.

I’m going to add a hook and eye closure where the zipper stops zipping on the dress, and add loops so I can lace the rest of it up like a corset so it will fit.  There’s only about 6 inches where it won’t zip, but I figured it’d be an easy fix and I won’t have to take the zipper out to do it, so if by some miracle of God or if I lose some ribs then MAYBE it will fit someday and I can un-frankenstein it up.

The PBR shirt is getting cut up and patched onto a charcoal grey t-shirt along with some electric blue accent fabric.  Also — safety pins.  He’s wearing the gloves and jacket along with the tucked in jeans. It’s going to be awesome.

I already made the corsage and boutonniere for the event, including some awesome houndstooth fabric, sequins and of course, safety pins, with a little bit of electric blue ribbon. AWESOME.  I hope it’s not too girly for him to wear.

I feel as if I may be neglecting my blog lately. Life has been busy and some surprises have recently caught me off guard.

However, I’m feeling kind of sassy today, so I’m announcing a Post-Labor Day Sale. Right now it encompasses one item: my hard rock quilt.

POST-LABOR DAY SALE Deconstructed Heavy Metal, Rock and Punk T Shirt quilt FREE SHIPPING

POST-LABOR DAY SALE Regular price: $125 Sale Price: $85 ——- This hardcore punky quilt is made from a collection of rock, punk and metal t-shirts. It’s embellished with fabric paint and embroidery. A deconstructivist approach was used to create this unique piece of art. T-shirts include: Slipknot Korn Static-X CGBG Lynyrd Skynyrd The Misfits … and many more Quilt measures 45×45 inches and the batting is warm and natural. The quilting is a traditional pattern and is in a slate grey thread. The binding is slate grey with a black backing. Fabric (aside from t-shirts) is 100% cotton. T-shirts are vintage and well-loved.

I’m participating in another craft show on the 29th of this month (yes, that’s 2 in one day!). This one is completely different than anything I’ve done before and it seems to be MY kind of people!

Here’s the details taken from Satanimals’ website:

Once again, here comes another art show where the weird are most welcome. Quickly gaining an awesome customer base, these art shows reflect the talent of folks who you wouldn’t ordinarily see in a Gallery around town.

Butch Von Dreaux is making another trek all the way from Louisiana to be here and Spookshow Pinups has been added to the list of amazing artists as well!

D. Ryan Allen will be there again showing all of his amazing work from zombie sketches to kid’s coloring books for the macabre.

In addition to the fine arts folks, we will also have all kinds of goodies like hand-made leather wallets, re-structured clothing, creepy dolls, hand-bags, pillows and everything else in between.

SATANIMALS will also be unveiling a new line of horror inspired pillows.. the first being an amazing SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA pillow!

This is not just your average art show. Pretentious art snobs are discouraged from coming. Although, it is fun to see them stick their nose in the air and turn on their heels when they see Gregg Bensink’s table of amazing goodies.

Attendees can enter the raffle to win numerous prizes including: original artwork from each of the artists, gift certificates for tattoos up to $100 as well as gift certificates to some local businesses including: Best Place Ever, ZZZ Records, Cup O’ Kryptonite and The Beauty Parlor!

The Raffle is at 9PM and you MUST be present to win!!

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In case you were wondering, I’m on the poster — credited as “toDIYfor” since I’m going to be selling my rock/punk/dark stuff.

I’m super excited for this show!  I’ll finally get to meet Sew Zinski and it sounds like there’s free beer all around. Sounds like a great craft show to me!

I blogged earlier today about the 2nd hardcore quilt top that I made.

Well, I took the plunge ladies and gentlemen.  I officially quilted a full-size quilt.

I took photos of the process. One thing I learned — I desperately need a walking foot. I couldn’t find one for my machine (they were sold out in two places, so I gave up since this was just a practice quilt anyway). Also, quilting on t-shirts is difficult when you come across larger patches of screenprinting, especially when it’s a newer shirt.

Here’s what I did: I got some backing and batting and made a quilt sandwich. I basted it with large safety pins. I took tape (artists tape would work the best but I only had athletic tape at home, so that worked) and created uniform lines to follow with my stitching….and I was off.  I only had to reload the bobbin once, which was awesome because I hate doing that (I’m lazy. if I had a self-loading bobbin or never-ending bobbin that would rule. also — self threading needle).  I trimmed it and sewed the binding on (backwards I believe) and since I’m really lazy, I zig-zag stitched the binding to finish it.

Anyway, here’s photogs of the process.

basting and taping before quilting …

the whole safety-pinned, taped-up mess before I started (note — I taped in one direction at a time because I didn’t want to sew through the tape)

here’s where the bobbin ran out of thread. I took a much-needed walking break and came back an hour later refreshed and ready to conquer the rest of this thing.

ta-da! finished quilt. took me from 1 PM to 9 PM to finish top to bottom (minus 2 hours for supper, walking and errands)

okay… so the back picked up a ton of fuzz from the batting and a bunch of threads that were randomly strewn about my floor. I’m washing this thing tomorrow. Hopefully fix that problem.

And … DONE!

A while back I made a “hardcore” quilt top out of a bunch of band t-shirts I had lying around. It was sort of practice for piecing since it was one of the first things I pieced.

Anywho, I only used half of the 50 blocks I’d created for it and shoved the rest of them in my closet to be used at a later date. Well, today was that later date.

This quilt top isn’t as cool as the other one, however; I did find one of the blocks I’d started embroidering back when I was all “ooh I should embellish these all with embroidery!” Not so much. Would have been cool, but too time-consuming for the likes of me.

Here’s a closeup of the embroidery.

what I love about these two quilt tops is that any-which-way is up.

Yay!

Now I’m off to Hancock Fabrics to get some batting, some backing (I think I’ll use the backing to bind in this case), some contrasting thread, a walking foot, some artist’s tape and a bunch of safety pins. You guessed it. I’m going to use this guy as my practice quilt to actually QUILT.

Wish me luck!!

As some of you may know, my boyfriend is in a band called Assault Company (www.assaultcompany.com for their latest EP).

Some of you may not recall that how I met my boyfriend was because I was in the band for a while as the lead singer.  I did two shows (in one day) and that was the end of my career. I broke up the band the next fall and Kasey (the bassist at the time) and I decided to start our own band — The Duct Tape Pirates.  It took a month or so to decide on the name…but we never really did anything. Basically I didn’t learn bass fast enough and I really just wanted to sing. So that project went down the crapper.

Anyway, I had won a free flickr pro account from my friend Niki’s Design-o-blog’s Ugly Website Contest.  I finally got the account up and running yesterday and was going through my photos today to upload…and found this gem:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1KdNTXkH5c]

This was at the SpringFest battle of the bands (the year VEISHEA was cancelled). Probably the worst song for my vocals. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wish somebody had taped a song that I was growly in.. that would rock. I can’t do that anymore, and I had some pretty scary vox.

Either way. Enjoy. Somehow I thought that the dress code for “metal” included a pink flamingo skirt. Also, the crazy bass player on the left of the screen is definitely Kasey with short hair. He hit his bass so hard that day he split his finger open and bled all over it…and didn’t clean the blood off the bass until after he sold it (in preparation to ship off of course). This is how I fell in love with him…ha.

EDIT: Okay, I can’t blog about the Assault Company without including this awesome promo that Kasey put together for their 2nd to last EP:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb-y-_oWbTY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0xcc2550&color2=0xe87a9f]

Um and I also can’t blog about the boyfriend without including the AWESOME birthday song that he did for me last fall:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX9PusqM-Yo&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0xcc2550&color2=0xe87a9f]