these are available to buy here, or click each photo for the specific link to that exact shirt!
originally posted Sept 2 2026
Friday, September 4, 2026
spoopy guys
these are available to buy here, or click each photo for the specific link to that exact shirt!
i love tie dye
this is a thing that has been true of me for as long as I have known tie dye exists.
I have historically tried to make every tie dyed shirt absolutely perfect, and when that has inevitably not worked out, I've been deflated and ignored my tie dye supplies again for a few years. I always tried to make everything a perfect rainbow, because tie dye + gay is a pretty winning combination, except that also resulted in a lot of muddy blobs because if you mix all the colours it just turns brown.
I was feeling fairly dejected about clothing lately, feeling like I'm really excited about a lot of the t-shirts I've been making, but also that most of the shirts I make are not shirts I would personally wear, because I'm pretty consistent in the color palette I wear and it's mostly very dark colours that don't show sweat and don't show stains. And I haven't figured out printing with white ink on dark shirts yet, so I've felt fairly stuck. BUT then I had a stroke of inspiration and thrifted a handful of tshirts that meet my sensory criteria, and decided to tie dye those shirts in colours that I would actually want to wear, not just automatic perfect rainbow, and I'm SO EXCITED by how they turned out.
The one I'm wearing today in fact was a shirt I thrifted, wore once, realized it showed sweat under the armpits too much for my comfort, and then ALSO managed to stain it with grease somehow after wearing it one time. But I tie dyed it with black and dark blues and now it's perfect and I'm so thrilled.
I'm planning on block printing some things on a few of the shirts and I'm sure some of them I will leave as is and just wear plain, but I do feel like I've invigorated my wardrobe a lil and it's nice to feel excited about that again.
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| that is an egg carton behind me on the floor, but it's okay it's not weird, it's just how I feed my dog breakfast |
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| look at how good this spiral is! this might be the best spiral i've ever done |
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| Halloween tie dye i mean come on why did it take me so long to think of this |
originally posted August 28 2026
mental health cause and effect is on my mind again
as in, the question of "does writing regularly improve my mood or is it easier for me to write when my mood is better?"
I'm feeling vulnerable about art stuff lately, maybe self-conscious? One of my classic forms of self-sabotage is to half-ass things and then reassure myself that if I had really tried, I would surely have succeeded and therefore, I am not a failure. So I've been avoiding writing, and telling myself that it's just because I've been stressed with life stuff. Except I now realize it's not actually because of that, it's because it feels scary. And because I still feel like I don't want to write, I am writing about that feeling. So there.
Today was a lot. A day full of many slightly stressful things, and it culminated in a comical shit show. I was sitting by the campfire with some friends and we were talking about a skunk that had been in our alley the night before, when my monster dog bless her heart, Macaroni, suddenly bolted at something and started shaking her head back and forth like she had a rag doll - except it wasn't a rag doll, it was a mother hecking skunk. We all immediately ran over and I managed to grab Macaroni and pull her away from the skunk, which dropped floppily out of her mouth onto the ground, and while I'm trying to mentally process what the heck do we do with this skunk corpse now oh my god, the stinky little rascal skunk just pops back up onto its feet and goes trotting off into the night. Mac got sprayed directly in her face, and she's got all these tiny little scritchy scratches on her snoot, but we got the stank out and it's chill now. Every part of it was hard. But it was okay, and I knew it would be okay, and that we just had to get through it and then it would be okay. And that's what happened, and on this side of it, it's kind of funny.
Look at that. When I tried to write about feelings my brain decided "fuck it, let's write about this ordeal instead", so I guess that's what we're posting today. Also this self-portrait of me as a goblin creature, why not.
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originally posted August 27 2026.
my diabetes nurse is retiring in september
i've got a lot of feelings about that, but i want to make sure she knows how important and impactful she has been in my life over the last decade and change. so i made a card. i'm planning on letting the ink dry and then doing some watercolour painting to add some colour.
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originally posted August 1 2026.
what if it all works out?
another work in progress i'm feeling very pleased with so far
sometimes I exist in kind of a creative frenzy where I'm so jazzed about the project or idea i'm working on that I disappear into it and can't talk about it yet because it's still too much an idea in my head, and then I finally emerge and take a breath and take a step back and look at what I've done. Today I felt delighted and proud of myself, and that's an increasingly familiar and pleasant feeling.
Originally posted July 17 2026.
self compassion revelation
I was thinking about fashion experiments I did as a youth, like, this one time, probably in 7th or 8th grade, I hot glued a bunch of seed beads in a star shape on a tank top and wore it to school the next day feeling like hot shit and then when my friend saw it she was like "uhhhhh what are you wearing..." and I realized oh no I have done a mistake somehow, and she explained that it looked sloppy, the lines were uneven, the hot glue was kinda blobby, the beads were all facing different directions, it just looked jacked up for so many reasons. I felt embarrassed, stupid, humiliated by my overconfidence, and when I recall that memory, I feel that shame again. For the last couple of years, there's also been compassion for little me, for their pain in that moment. I'm confident that little me didn't deserve to feel so ashamed about this thing. But today I realized, I also feel admiration for that younger version of me. She made a craft that she was SO excited about, just so tickled by the idea that you could hot glue seed beads to a piece of clothing and then have a new piece of clothing, that she didn't pause to do quality control, and she felt like such hot shit and she believed in herself enough to immediately rock it, and that's awesome. It feels very peaceful and warm, to think about this experience that has always felt like shame, and also feel not just understanding but appreciation and admiration for the version of me that did the 'bad' thing. The shame is not gone, and I think that's important - the shame is still there, but now there's also understanding, and admiration, and compassion, and warmth, so the shame takes up so much less space. I can't make the feeling of shame not happen, but I can cultivate other feelings. I can add more good. That's nice.
Here's a photo of a table of tshirts from our garage sale this weekend - 2/3 of them are ones I printed on, and 1/3 are just used graphic tees; I sold zero tees of any kind but I still bought a bunch more plain tshirts because frankly I'm having a delightful time making shirts and the more I do it the better I'm gonna get at it, and that's cool.
Originally posted July 6 2026
works in progress
more specifically, these are the first test prints I've made on 2 new blocks I carved, using old greeting cards for reference images and then adding my own words.
This part of the process used to annoy me a lot, because I'd carve something and I'd think, "I'm finally done carving, hurray, time to enjoy it!" and then I'd make a test print and I'd see 19 things I hated and I'd feel like I was going back to the beginning when I went back to the block to revise those things, and as that kept happening, I would feel more and more frustrated at the fruitlessness of this endeavour.
But I really like printmaking, so when I realized that was the pattern, I worked on reframing how I think about it. Instead of "hurray, I'm finally done carving!", now I think about it as "okay, I feel really good about this and I think I'm done, so let's find out what I've missed". It's like if I know the objective is to identify the areas that still need some work, then when I find areas that still need work, I feel like I've succeeded!
Reframing shit is maybe like the easiest way to instantly pull myself out of a gloomy feeling. I have yet to find a thing that's not reframeable. It doesn't fix everything, but it makes me feel better, and that helps me do whatever I need to do to fix the thing, if a thing needs fixing.
these test prints are exciting though, because i can see the shape of what I'm trying to do. I'm real jazzed to share them when they're done done.
originally posted July 6 2026
I feel better when I write more
or is it that I write more when I feel better?
I think when I spend more time writing, I feel more like myself, and I also feel like I know myself more. Maybe writing forces me to slow down and spend time inside my own brain in a way that nothing else does. I think I'm onto something here.
anyway
I made these froggy shirts tonight and that was really exciting to do.
Originally posted June 29 2026
some works in progress
my street is doing a community garage sale in a couple weeks and I've been working on these lil patches to sell. I carved the images and words and printed them on thrifted bedsheets, and then I'm going to fuse them with a stronger backing and add some iron on stuff to make them iron on patches, and I'm real excited about how they're coming out so far.
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spoopy guys
spooky season is the best season. i've been brimming with spooky ideas but it's taken a while to actually finish something. I call...
