Grauwyler: Artist’s Rendering

Posted on December 17, 2012 by nordahlia

A couple years ago, my trusty Grauwyler ran off and was missing for a week. I printed off enough small fliers to tape to the door of every single house for about a 5-block radius. I had a flier and piece of tape in hand and was just about to stick it to the door of one house when I looked over and saw him sitting on the porch staring at me like “what?”

Grauwyler used to be a cat who appeared sickly and homeless and possibly diseased, due to being a runt and having a nervous disorder, so his would-be new owners had taken him to the vet and spent a bit of money attempting to fix what a vet he hadn’t been to before didn’t realize was his genetics.

So when I dropped off a check for his doctoring, I put it in the mouth of this interpretation of Grauwyler (I created the grip using plastic canvas covered in flannel) so they wouldn’t have to be so sad to lose their new friend.

Okay, so it looks more like a hunch-backed opossum, but I think he’s recognizable.

I painted stripes on the back:

I think it’s a pretty good likeness:

Silkworms

Posted on December 13, 2012 by nordahlia

My First Sewing Sales

Posted on December 13, 2012 by nordahlia

When I first got into belly dancing, and I checked out the prices of the costumes online, I decided to make my own. A roommate saw me wearing an outfit and said, “You could sell that!” We decided to sign up for a booth in the upcoming ren fair.

I had a month and a half to make enough clothes and jewelry to fill the booth. The tent was a lunch pavilion from Wal-Mart or something, and was so much smaller than the tents around it that even I walked past it while looking for it. Luckily, we wound up right next to the drum booth, so that made it easy to dance to try to attract attention.

I now know why dance costumes are so expensive when they’re freaking covered in jewels and dangly things. Now I have no idea how they can be as *cheap* as they are (the answer is slave labor wages in other countries). But I was in college, where rent can be as low as $200/month, and $90 on groceries is living large, so actually showing up to your minimum wage job can make you the wealthy one in the group. (Also, I hung out with hippies.)

Here is my very first booth, with my very first sales, with me wearing an orange panne costume I made pre-serger, and before I figured out that those crappy little leather straps you get at craft stores are not to be used as structural elements.

This is the first booth I had back in the 1890s, though why I sold costumes rather than time machines, I still don’t remember:

My troupe was also the main dance troupe at the fair, so we got a lot of stage time, as well as a near-monopoly on the field. The photo quality is terrible, because, kids, this came from way back in the day when a 1.4 megapixel camera was actually impressive.

Yikes, will I ever be that thin again?

Or have the posture that only a year of pilates classes 3-4x per week can provide?

GOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLL!

And it’s good.

You’re not a man, you’re a mannequin

Posted on December 12, 2012 by nordahlia

These are the closest thing I will ever come to bipedal children of my own, and I don’t even own these. These kids live at the Art Institute of Dallas.

I walk the line:

Velcro for the Chinese New Year

Posted on December 11, 2012 by nordahlia

The project: 72 strips of velcro for Chinese New Year window display panels for Cartier

Those are the finished boxes in the background:

The fabric this go-round is fancy taffeta, which feels lovely, and would make a great dress, but its high-wrinkle tendency adds to the difficulty of using it for window displays. It also doesn’t work well with spray glue and makes the whole process especially hard for pretty much everyone involved. Except for me!

Boxes of velcro-sewn panels ready to be glued, with test-glued mini-panels sitting next to them:

Our Lady of Perpetual Machine Lubrication

Posted on December 10, 2012 by nordahlia

I spent some time working for a sewing machine dealer and started getting into sewing machine repair. The two most common serious problems with sewing machines are when they need to be realigned and when they need new gears. I can’t do either of these things, but other than those, it seems that most seeming problems with machines are actually pretty minor. Basic maintenance, needle/thread choice, and giving the machine some love so it knows you appreciate it will fix many other problems.

Here’s me in my original Weirdery hat healing my friend Diana’s machine by the laying of hands, with an assist by Mother Mary in the background.

I found that Mary statue at on sale at Wal-Mart, obtained it, and set it behind a corner in Diana’s yard while she was out of town. It turned out to be perfect, as her arrival angle caused her to come upon it with a maximum of surprise.

Winnie the Pooh Light Show

Posted on December 9, 2012 by nordahlia

There was a big Christmas event at Cook’s Children’s Medical Center that involved lighting up all the trees as well as the topiary animals. Santa rode in on a fire truck with police escort. The middle of the event had a surprisingly long fireworks display, and for the rest of the night, kids had a chance to push the button to set off the remaining fireworks.

My camera and D.’s handled the lights different. Mine focused on the lights, as seen on Rabbit above; his focused on the objects, as seen on Rabbit below:

This girl was adorable; it’s too bad you can’t post pictures of strangers’ kids’ faces online:

So sad, though this time I’m the only one without a tail:

The rest of the trees light up, too, but they’re all flashing on and off; it was about a dozen shots before I could get this many lit up at once:

To see the other animals, the grounds, and the rest of the shots from the night, my gallery is here: http://www.nordahlia.com/?page_id=885

Neiman Marcus: Other Stuff

Posted on December 9, 2012 by nordahlia

Here are the windows other folks in my crew worked on but that I didn’t have anything to do with:

Here is D. taking a picture of me taking a picture, along with some of the protruding crawl-through tube and the dripping icicle-lights:

Lit-up tube and the outside snowflakes:

I really wanted orange on this color-shifting ball, but my camera kept refocusing for close-up whenever that color rolled around, so I got a number of shots of the other shades as well:

Looking like a low-flying sun:

Last year, I got to meet the guy who makes these. I sat with him at lunch while he explained the process that goes into covering the frame with fabric and making it that taut and that round and that perfect, and I still couldn’t explain it to you. (Though, to be fair, I have slept since then.)

Here is the gallery of all the images of the finished windows: http://www.nordahlia.com/?page_id=851

Neiman Marcus: Carlos’s Candy

Posted on December 9, 2012 by nordahlia

A lot of people’s talents went into creating these windows. The video from 2 years ago can give you an idea of what goes into popping the windows open, putting the crawl-through tubes together, and then sealing the whole thing back off again. But then there’s the planning, the lighting, the backdrops, the lettering on the windows (this year even the plastic covering the windows pre-unveiling had writing printed on it), the lettering inside the windows, and on and on. There are dozens of small motors set up throughout the windows that make the bees fly, the springs boing, the snowman shiver, fruits and silverware and wheels spin. You don’t even want to know how long it took to bring motion to the cascade of jewels.

And most of it’s a pretty thankless job of running around, futzing with wires, installing the not-so-interesting hardware to hang the interesting things from the ceiling, and so forth making the non-visible parts work. I’m not going to go into all of that, mostly because I wasn’t there for much of it. The parts I got to admire were when Carlos, along with his trusty assistant, Carlos, made crazy things come to life.

Here is a huge cookie:

When not on the cookie itself, the cookie part looked exactly like cat puke.

Here it is in the window:

The candy video monitors

Icing:

In the window:

The enormous cake being squished by the tube and the n&m’s

It starts out looking like cheese:

The cake covered in plastic to protect it while the raspberry filling gets painted. To the left, the n&m’s and the chocolate frosting drying on the table. To the right, Carlos’s feet and elbow:

In the window:

This is how seriously cake-y this looks, even on close inspection:

Carlos also put together the infinitely-pouring bag-o-jewels. There’s an enormous, still pile in the front, then a spinning pile behind it designed to look like it’s an unending flow coming out of this huge, magic, velvet bag.

Carlos also blinged up a couple sets of paparazzi, made even more dramatic by the the folks in charge of the lighting:

Every year there’s a big event in the nearby park square in which Santa flies in from a nearby parking garage. This year, Carlos built a realistic-looking jetpack that included a chemical reaction designed to look like it really was shooting flames out the back. Alas, I didn’t get any pictures of that, as I witnessed the building of it during what was, for me, a 12-hour day that still had more non-Neiman’s sewing to do in the evening.