I've never played this game, and I'm not feeling well, which means No Photos For You, but: please go check out this ADAM syringe gun replica at Volpin Props. It's pretty awesome. The Little Sisters use them to collect genetic material. When you're done, check out the rest of Volpin Props. I love this kind of prop reproduction, because I love to continue to develop my ability to look at something and know how it's made.
Still keeping up with the paper journaling, though not as regularly as I had been. Taking it all to the park with me a few weeks back was fun, but I had to come home and print and cut out the photos and tape them into the journal, and that was tedious and took some time.
In the recent past, I haven't felt much like doing any kind of online journaling. There are plenty of reasons, but the ultimate one was that there was little I felt like sharing with the world. So, in mid-April, I started keeping a paper journal (something I never did with any regularity in the past, and have not even done sporadically in the past decade of slice-of-life blogging). I have the largest Piccadilly (Moleskine-style) Notebook, and a set of 20 Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens that I love, and the variety keeps me faithful.
My favorite thing to do is to make a gradient of paragraphs down the page, with successively darker shades of ink. The molded plastic case that the pens come in is a small marvel of engineering, with a little tube for each marker, a snap-back lid that also forms a stand, and an interesting ridged texture. The triangular shape of the pens is ergonomic; they're lightweight and comfortable to use; in effect they're like a longer, triangular version of Marvy's LePen with fewer design flaws. I'm also happy with the notebook, but its ribbon marker did come loose the other day. (Here's Black Cover's review of the Piccadilly Notebook.)
(Oh my god click on "molded plastic case" and then look at the other fineliner stuff on the menu. I'm geeking out over the pen-shaped pen cup you can get!)
I'm also using some scrapbooking paper I've had around forever for collage backgrounds; when cut to page size, The Old World Stack and The Rock Star Stack are both great, though Old World has more papers that are usable in this way. The patterns are muted, and most of them are smaller scale and cover the whole page. I use a page I removed from the center of one signature as a template for cutting the papers down. The cutting is done with a craft knife and a self-healing mat.
I have recently become obsessed with the idea of a Lamy Safari fine point fountain pen filled with J. Herbin ink in "Poussiere de Lune," but we will see if I can force this obsession to GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY.
Anyway, along with all this paper journaling happiness, there are two free printable creativity aids, one of them recent, the other older. I thought it would be nice to post them here.
Harvard Women's Health Watch published this fantastic new article about sinus problems. It explains the roots of the condition, and what you can do about it, in detail, but also in simple language. If you live in this kind of misery, I can't recommend this article and its suggestions highly enough.
It's timely for me for a couple of reasons. One is that I have had a lot of sinus infections in the last year. I've been plagued with them since I was about 12 years old, but I had been able to stave them off for a while in the relatively recent past. More about that in a minute.
Because I don't have health insurance -- I haven't had it in a decade -- I usually go to the clinic at a local drugstore for this kind of illness. There was a new LPN when I was there last month, and she was much more aggressive about her recommendations than the previous nurses have been. I wound up with a new humidifier, a renewed commitment to nasal lavage and Mucinex, and a course of antibiotics.
The funny thing is that I wrote a long, mildly controversial article about nasal lavage -- sinus rinses -- about 15 months ago, but after I wrote the article, I started to neglect the rinses themselves. The preparation can be time-consuming -- cleaning the NeilMed bottle, boiling water, waiting for it to cool, having a clean area to do the rinse itself, etc. If you'd like to read the article, it's here: Cleaning Your Sinuses.
I had waited several years to get a humidifier -- for some reason, I thought it would be too wet for my bedroom, make all the books damp, etc, but that hasn't been the case at all. I'm thrilled to have it now. I don't even seem to mind that it means an extra trip up and down the stairs at some point during the day, when I rinse and refill the water tank. The one I bought is this Vicks Warm Mist model, for about $37. It's kept near the wall 3-4 feet from my bed.
The second reason the article is timely for me is that my mother just had outpatient surgery on her sinuses, and I've been helping her out for about the past 10 days. She's a terrible patient, because she doesn't take the recommendations to stay in bed seriously enough. The first few days were unpleasant, but she's doing much better now.
The whole thing started this past fall when she had a sinus infection that wouldn't go away. Eventually they did some kind of Serious Business scan of her head (CT? fMRI? PET? I don't know) and determined that one of her sinus cavities was completely packed. There were some visits to an ENT and surgeons after that, and it turned out that one whole side of her sinuses had been blocked for most of her life by a deviated septum. The surgeon removed a bone spur and left a stent in for a week.
My mother absolutely refuses to do sinus rinses, because she says the idea makes her gag (she's kind of a delicate flower about stuff like that). I'm wondering how much she'll protest if she continues to be in a state of chronic sinusitis even after the surgery.
The Harvard article was linked from Popgadget, which I've been reading for years. The blogger there commented that it seemed like nasal rinsing was becoming mainstream in the last few years, when before it had been considered a New Age thing (anyone else remember when George on Six Feet Under gave Ruth a neti pot as a gift, and she was mightily annoyed?).
I'd argue that the mainstreaming of sinus rinses has to do with NeilMed distributing its kits as free samples to doctors' offices. My kit came from my boyfriend's mom, who was the lab tech in an office for many years. I've tried a couple of different products of this kind, and NeilMed's Sinus Rinse Regular Kit is the best -- the easiest to use, the most comfortable solution mix, etc.
I'm hilariously evangelistic about this product; add this Harvard article to the list of things I will be gushing about in the future.
(Thanks to Flickr's Bionerd for supporting the Creative Commons with this pic from a sinus scan!)
Just a quick note to say that I discovered OutsaPop earlier and thought it was worth a look. There's been a "reconstructed fashion" trend the last few years, but I find that most pieces in most of the books that have been published on the topic lately are just eccentric and unflattering, particularly if the book is aimed at high school girls. You have to be sixteen to get away with dowdy "art clothing."
That's not the case with OutsaPop, the brainchild of a Finnish fashion grad named Outi; most of the stuff showcased here is actually wearable and current, and plenty of tutorials are linked.
[via Haute Macabre.]
One of my long-term favorite crafty/fashion/artsy blogs, Red Lipstick, ceased publication yesterday. I'm disappointed! I haven't been following a lot of blogs lately, but I've started to get back into it, and it was a blog I was definitely planning to catch up with.
Staceyjoy's second-to-last post at Red Lipstick was about Weekend Designer, a site I think a lot of crafty types will want to check out -- sewing patterns for recent runway items. Many of the patterns are simple -- skirts, blouses, and accessories made mostly from squares -- but some are as complex as jeans or tailored vests.
I'm not sure whether you will actually wear a caftan after you make it, and I think I might put some waist darts on that pencil skirt; even so, it's worth more than a look. Their tagline is, "It ain't rocket science." You'll learn a lot about drafting your own patterns if you do some of their more complex projects. They seem to be taking the mystery out of sewing as much as Threadbanger aims to, but with less of an indie-rock vibe.
I'm not sure where else this has been featured lately: I'm keeping up with WhipUp and not so much with CRAFT, these days. Both are good, but about a year or so ago, CRAFT started to focus a lot on local craft shows & other stuff that isn't of much interest if you don't live in [insert hipster-friendly metro area *here*], along with a lot of patterns for sale (great if you're the person selling them, not so much if you're interested in free tutorials). A lot of the same free tutorials show up on WhipUp first. That said, I always enjoy CRAFT when I do get around to checking it out.
(Creative Commons photo of Chanel boutique in Paris by Flickr's wallyg.)
