updates

Looking Forward, Looking Back

I think it’s pretty typical to use the end of a year to look back and reflect on what happened, what didn’t happen, accomplishments, failures, and what-if’s. 2024 has been a rollercoaster, an evolution, and a year of discovery - and 2025 is going to be even worse! (Or better? Maybe both. Probably both.)

Project Updates

Dollhouse - I fixed some fallen shelves, hung some interior art, worked on the exterior (finished windows, flower window boxes) but otherwise haven’t really touched it. I ought to take some really good progress photos/videos for a post.

Beetle Impasto Painting - I did finish that beetle painting!

Sea Holly Impasto Painting - Untouched

Tattoo design for a friend - Finished!

Furbinator - Untouched

the writing project - Progress has been made.

the shrimp - Untouched

the window book - Untouched

Temperature Quilt - Untouched

Annatar

The robe is sewn, lined, and trimmed. So trimmed: custome embellished piping and beading on the sleeves, foil stamped trim on the hem which is now being embroidered. The shirt is sewn, ruched sleeves and all with some fuck-ass button holes which are fortunately covered up by black glass buttons. I’m thinking about embroidering snakes along the cuffs but haven’t quite worked out the technique between the ruching and the fact that they’re already sewn. The belt is essentially finished aside from adding grommets to the back which I’m waiting on for fit (there’s been a weightloss journey this year which has plateau’d recently but I still have four months until March) - but also I’m still thinking about making a leather version - not that I’ve ever done any leather tooling before.

Which leaves the collar. The leather I initially ordered was thicker than I want for the “feathers”, I ordered more different hopefully thinner leather; and I have yet to decide on the shape/I have to commit to cutting leather and I’m procrastinating as much as possible so I and think through it longer.

2025

Bingo Card - I made one. And I probably already have to change is because the day I finished inking it - because I decided to illustrate it this year - the husband revealed to me the Flat Earth WAS ALREADY going to Antarctica, because some guy offered to pay for them to go to “prove” the earth is flat. Except they’ve almost all backed out because they’re all actually grifters preying on humanity; and now the bar has shifted and I’m sure it will be Firmament or Bust.

2025 Reading List

My reading list, documented here, because accountability. One of the podcasts I have loved in the past was the British History Podcast. I don’t know enough about British History to listen with a critical ear, but it seems balanced? And also left me searching for something similiar with American History - which this recent election and a pointed question from my mother earlier this year left me wanting to explore further and really deep dive into. The History of the American's podcast was a surface level answer to this - but ultimately I found the personality/attitude of the host Jack Henneman to be overly obnoxious and weirdly dismissive of a lot of points that were important to me, and I found myself cranky every time I listened and had to stop.

In short, I’ve put together my own reading list/curriculum to enable me to participate in conversations with facts behind ideas, and because facts sit in my brain more permanently when I take note and write about them after - that will be happening here. Ideally I’d like to finish a book a week, but with everything else in my life… well we’ll see how that goes.

Silversmithing

By hook or by crook, I’m starting my silversmithing learning journey in 2025. I have a plan. I have a bunch of books. I have the emotional support of the husband, although he’s going to be very busy working on his thesis.

I am tired, & we haven't even started yet.

Omg the last 30 days… to say a lot has happened is an understatement - and that’s personally in addition to everything else in the wide world at large. To address the personal items without the external chaos feels cheap and disingenuous, so…

To say I’m unhappy with the outcome of the election would be to put too mildly what has become an ever present booming of foreboding in my ears - flowery language for “I don’t feel good about this at all” - and at the same time I remain completely unsurprised. That a populace with decreasing media literacy has taken that same unwillingness to read between the lines into the voting booth was honestly to be expected. That fear-mongering dominated over hope is unsurprising. I feel there’s been a long tradition of voting against something else rather than for something - and by and large that pretty much played out last week exactly.

I am still processing it all, unsurprised and still stunned and forming all of my usual backup and contingency plans. To voice too loudly the concerns I have about future policies seems hasty, and also I’m too preoccupied with that effing Cabinet nominations. Mostly I think I plan to read a lot, and think about what I’ve read.

And make a 2025 bingo card, for my sanity.

In a more personal mode - I finished some things. Two things. The beetle impasto painting, & the tattoo design. I haven’t finished any of the books I start reading, but I have purchased 9 more volumes of varying subjects.

We (husband and I) also went to the Nelson to see the Hokusai exhibit - which I may have to write about later because this is enough of a disjointed mess of a post without dragging another artist into it.

And then there’s Annatar…

That’s actually coming along really well.

Morgoth’s crown - constructed of wire, paper maché, hot glue, more hot glue, heavy gel medium, paint and silver gilding is finished. There was a moment when my husband - coming home from a long library day to find me on the couch covered in paint and things, made mention of the fact that I could probably find a 3D print pattern of it in a minute and use either of our college’s labs to print it out in a fraction of the time I was spending on it. And yes, I could - in fact I did. One etsy vendor selling the pattern for 6 dollars, and another selling the print for less than 40. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to make it - and it turned out pretty well.

The belt - pattern changed for reasons is also pretty much complete - it just needs grommets which will take all of 5 minutes. I learned a whole heap about crafting with EVA foam - how to carve and cut and paste it. Priming, and the 7 layers of paint it took for full coverage.

The robe/dress is coming along - I did a muslin mockup for the first time in my life. Ordered fabric swatches from Mood and a company in Portugal to find the right fabric - which I then silkscreened to get that gorgeous pattern onto. That pattern itself was about 8 hours of obsessively studying various screen shots to find most of the angles of, and it’s close. Not perfect, but 75% accurate. Fortunately I work at a company that does silkscreening, and was able to have the screen burned there, and then do the actual printing myself after hours on the partially sewn robe. I may yet go into the seams and create joining lines so that the seams all “match”, but I also may not as they are largely not too noticeable and the paint strokes I’d inevitably make may stick out more than the gaps do. There’s some possible refitting to do, embroidery to add, the trim to finish which is a beautiful gold print fabric I’m going to foil stamp over as the very last thing as the foil itself probably won’t stand up to excess handling.

Additionally the shirt is 50% complete. And after all of that, or next thing to start at least is that leather wing collar. And buy a wig. And then it’s done?

And once it’s finished I expect to collapse for a bit in a fit of “what now?”

Probably some coding.




Intentionality

I’m old enough to remember the infancy of social media, when it was all supplemental to everyone having their own websites - myspace and opendiary were supplemental to your geocities or blogspot or custom domain. You’d spend time. week to week checking in various sites to see if that lady who bought the 6ft tall metal rooster had written a new post, or if the geeky lady had a new review of some etsy shop. It was all a little more time intensive, but also very intentional. And it feels like the internet may soon be making an about face back in that direction.

Meta and IG are scraping all of your images for their datasets - apparently in using the platform you’ve given permission for them to do whatever they want with your images unless you can prove it’s directly harming you. I remember seeing this in the IG terms of use back when I first created an account, but it also seemed very choiceless at the time. Scrolling through a feed is so much easier for an audience than going through your list of links to see who is going to entertain you for 5 seconds - and at the time I was a lot more concerned with being seen than I am now a decade+ later. I’m curious to see if we all go back to individual web preseences, or if artists will attempt to use tech like Nightshade to protect themselves from what is essentially theft. I’m not 100% sure it matters - I don’t know if Meta is able to remove the millions of ai images from the dataset effectively and I have been watching for that moment when that snake starts eating it own tail.

I remember my moment last year(or was it two years ago?) when I had a glint of optimism about what ai was going to do and what people were going to do with it. I’d forgotten that people are human and humans do what humans do - and it’s frequently the least amount of work for the most amount of gain regardless of who it hurts in the process.

In short, I’m going to be purging and deleting my IGs, which is going to take forever to delete each individual image - not that it matters for past content, what’s been scraped had been scraped already. But this venue give me infinitely more control of what is mine, and more reason to use a blog space.

I’d like more intentionality in my life - which includes who views what I make. I’d rather you were here on purpose than a glance in a sea of content.

And then it was December... also I got married.

It’s been over six months since I last posted anything here (so much for goals). A lot has happened, and also very little has happened - as is the way things feel sometimes.

To start, a chain of events:

  • Last year I completed a Data Analytics Bootcamp hosted through KU. It was great, it was overwhelming. I learned a lot, and “graduated” with 103%, despite coming out of it without a final project I could show anyone. But it was so much in so short a time, I felt like I needed to do more to flesh out and reinforce what I learned.

  • I started 100 Days of Python, while I considered what to do next. This was also great, and was reinforcing a lot of key fundamentals in my programming knowledge that had been glossed over a bit during the bootcamp.

  • A quarter of the way into my pythoning, EdX - the company that runs the bootcamps - contacted me about being a TA for the program. This sounded like an excellent way to do some of that reinforcement I’d been wanting to get around to. I applied, I was hired.

  • It was not the reinforcement I’d been looking for. Mostly I spent my time helping students install things on their computers.

  • Talking with my partner about my experiences with the bootcamps, he brought up his own trepidation about working with anyone who’d learned in one for the same reason I hadn’t applied to any jobs yet - too much too fast with no reinforcement. I took a beat, and started looking at local college programs with Analytics degree programs. I found one at a community college that looked good, applied, registered, and I’m just completing my first semester this week.

  • A month ago I finally declared my “major” - Computer Science and chasing another Data Analytics Certificate. I will quite likely not finish the former, but I really only declared a major so I could sign up for classes three days earlier than I would be able to do otherwise.

  • Also I got married two weeks ago. 

TLDR: Did school. Did more school. Did more more school. Got married. 

School has got me to finally update this site though, as it’s a requirement of the Data Analytics program to have an online portfolio (how convenient for me that one already existed). I still need to finish my Bigfoot project, which might get a complete overhaul for very important reasons. I also find myself wanting to do an exploration of Kansas City crime over the last 10 years because True Crime, and also convincing my mom that Seattle would actually be a safe place to live.

Art has been more of a private affair. AI and advancements and AI internet drama is provoking thoughts about the commodification of our attention that I can’t quite put into words yet. The next (insert number here) months/years are going to be interesting to say the least. I have mostly been working on my dollhouse, learning basic electrical to light it up, and lots of faux-everything techniques. Wanting to share it, that will probably be here in this blog. It doesn’t fit in with anything else and it’s not something I want to market, just share. Though truthfully I’m feeling very over marketing myself. I don’t want to be a commodity, and to keep people’s attention everything about you has to be a commodity.

I much prefer the quiet.