Archive for January, 2012

Illustrate 2012: January

Illustrate 2012: January

I have a cat problem in my neighborhood.  Or rather, I have a human problem that has caused an abundance of feral cats in my neighborhood.  You see, my neighbor has set up a kind of a cat hotel on his front porch.  He doesn’t do the responsible thing and make sure the cats are spayed or neutered, but he provides shelter and food for them.  As a result, we have a feral cat problem in my neighborhood.  They regularly defecate in my vegetable garden beds and my front yard.  It’s not as bad as it was a couple of years ago, when the front of my house smelled like the barn I grew up down the street from, but believe you me, it’s still bad.  Very bad.

I used to love cats.  I even subscribed to Cat Fancy magazine in middle school.  But now I have come to loathe them, and I am not the least bit sad when my German Shepherd catches one in the backyard.  Really.  I still like other people’s cats (okay, except maybe Elsa, who’s just plain ornery), but the feral cats need to go.

Tangentially related, I have launched a project for 2012.  Inspired by TubaDan’s song-a-month project in 2011, I have decided to complete an illustration a month for 2012.  My plan is to do all the illustrations in pen and ink on high-quality watercolor paper.  I have managed to get the first month in just under the wire, and I feel like it needs a bit of explanation.  But first, here it is.

Continue Reading →

Crafting a Wedding

Wedding Arbor - close up

Last October, I got married.  Like a lot of stuff in our lives, my fiancé–now husband–and I didn’t want to do things like everyone else.  Specifically, we didn’t want to feed into the wedding-industrial complex that says you need to buy, buy, buy and spend, spend, spend for an event that represents only several hours–albeit several wonderfully amazing hours–of your life.  It’s a racket, really.  So we set to work crafting a wedding that was about us and not stuff.  As you might expect, this meant making a whole lot of things for the wedding, often from reclaimed/reused items.

While we were planning the wedding, a number of people commented that I should be blogging about all the stuff we were doing to make our wedding as sustainable as possible, so that other people could see how it can be done and be inspired to do the same.  The problem was that, while that sounded great in theory, I really didn’t have a whole lot of extra time to be doing something like that because, well, you know, I was planning a wedding.  So instead, I figured I’d save it all up until some later date to share with the world.  That day has come.  I invite you to take a little trip down recent-memory lane with me and see how we put together a handmade wedding that was about us–not stuff.  (Fair Warning: This post is a little long, so if weddings aren’t your thing, you might want to stop right here.  And if you don’t want the details but like wedding eye candy, you can just scroll through the pictures.)

Continue Reading →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox

Join other followers: