Progress has been made in the shirt that I've been mentioning for the last million years, and it's taught me a little bit about my creative process.
As I've mentioned before, I live on an island. Usually, this is great. I love my island. I wouldn't have stayed on for more than a year if I hadn't hit the jackpot in terms of placements. But in terms of getting cloth? Well, you're a little bit handicapped. This wouldn't really be a big problem, except I've realized that a good chunk of my creative process is seeing cloth and deciding what to do with it. I decided to make the fish bag because I saw that gorgeous blue cloth and thought it looked like water. I decided to make the vampire because I bought black cloth. But I couldn't find anything good for a shirt. I settled on orange gingham, but I just wasn't feeling it. It reminded me too much of those plastic tablecloths you use for picnics back home. The ones that are pretty much fancy tarps? Yeah.
Well, fatefully there was a sale on fabric at the local supermarket the other day! They often have random sales where people from the mainland bring in a huge selection of some random thing. Two weeks ago it was sharp, pointy tools of all kinds. Last week it was discounted handbags. Apparently this week is sewing accoutrements. Unfortunately, the selection was still pretty dismal unless you wanted to look like your grandmother's couch. I found this one deep red fabric that I liked at first glance, but when I looked at it more closely I realized that it was suede on one side. Whoops. Ok, not going to choose that fabric. I circled the table again and again. Maybe I'd overlooked something? Maybe the third time I looked something would jump out.
Eventually I found something passable. A black fabric with little pink hearts printed all over it that reminded me of the goth Hello Kitty phase that some friends of mine went through in high school. I'm not a huge fan of it, but I can see it being a shirt much more than the orange gingham. I'm happy that I found it, but I'm also a little down. This is going to continue being a stumbling block, and I'm not exactly sure how to get around it.
There are solutions, of course, but all of them have cons. For example, my parents have offered to go to Joanne's Fabric, buy, and send me fabric I chose on their website. That would be great except it would be a pain for my parents. I could always order online here in Japan and have stuff shipped. That's the M.O. for most of the island residents anyway. But websites aren't easy to navigate in Japanese, and the payment options can get pretty funky. For example, doing a bank transfer and then finding out that none of the banks on my island support that kind of transfer, argh. I've looked online at some places abroad, but none of the ones I've found ship internationally without emailing back and forth to decide on rates, which is inconvenient. Finally, none of these options allow me to touch the fabric, and I'm a very tactile person. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them! I've got this feeling that I'm missing something really obvious that everyone else already knows, so please, enlighten me!
The baby vampire is going well. I'm a little over half done with his cape. It's turned into a bit of a pimp cape and I'm not sure how I feel about it. After I finish the cape I'll be moving on to the background, which I've decided to do in Bokhara couching. I'm thinking of adding a jack o' lantern and a creepy tree to the front, sort of Nightmare Before Christmas style. Thoughts?
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