It gets the message across, I think.
I said I was going to do this and I did it. Poly Pride, Poly Love is available on many fine products in my RedBubble shop. So now I have 3 non-heteronormative designs in my shop, I have to create a new portfolio to house my message. I had way more to say about this design and accidental representation spotting but it took me way longer to draw than estimated and now it’s late and I’m tired.
Anyway: T-shirt! And I actually have a comic in the works.
You must provide your own attitude. Come on, you can do it.
Here’s the world famous Ms. Kitty modeling my “The Future Is Non Binary and Intersectional” shirt at the world famous Tucson Bartending Academy, where I presume she is about to earn a degree in mixology. It really looks like a bar, but it turns out all those bottles are full of water and food coloring. The fruit is all plastic. She mixed me about 25 drinks in an hour but I left feeling very thirsty.
Anyway, this shirt! It looks good. You have to get it in black. The tiny spaceship is adorable. Also available as a sticker, a travel mug, a wall clock, a notebook, and much much more. Check out this design in my RedBubble shop.
Not available in stores. You cannot order yours today.
Not being one of those people who ferociously guards their costuming secrets, I present here my first-ever handmade tutu, size adult medium, in blue, purple, and teal, what the Fox refers to as “dragon colors.” Although actually, maybe he means “Dragon colors,” as in my colors, since dragons come in every color, while I personally own a pair of shoes, and a several dresses, and some other garments that match this tutu. Also, a dragon tattoo.
This project is incredibly easy; it took maybe 5 or 6 hours. It required:
You could probably dispense with the needle and thread if you secured the waist with safety pins or just tie it together with the tulle. The elastic was the most expensive part at $4 a yard. The tulle was $4.50 for 6 yards, so the whole thing comes in under $10.
Basically, you measure your holey elastic to the part of your torso where you want it to hang (I chose just above my hips) and then create a circle of elastic with that circumference by sewing the two ends together. Then you cut the tulle into 18″ x 4″ strips. One by one, take your tulle strips and thread them through 2 juxtaposed loops in the elastic, with each end an equal length sticking. Then tie a simple half knot in the tulle, so you end up with a pair of 9″ strips sticking out of one loop in the elastic. Then repeat approximately 215 times.
Possibly with stiffer tulle or a smaller waistband, your might need fewer knots. If you’re making the kind of tutu where the tulle is long and hangs down, you probably need much less tulle. What I read online suggested that this project required 3 yards of tulle, but it definitely wasn’t fluffy enough until I got through the whole 6 yards.
Next week, we’re invited to a cosplay wedding, and also I’m the photographer. So I was wracking my brains trying to think of a good cosplay. Like people have suggested I should do Garnet from Stephen Universe, but not only is that a complicated costume, it seems pretty impractical to wear a giant visor while working as a wedding photographer. My go-to dress-ups are either Pippi Longstocking or Little Red Riding Hood, but the problem with Pippi is that you end up fussing with your hair all night to keep it on the wires that help it stick out from your head, and at this point my hair goes all the way down to my back, so getting the hair to stick out right in the first place would be a pain. As for Red, the riding hood seemed likely to get in the way of taking pictures, not to mention that it’s the bodice that makes the outfit really pop, but again, you can’t have a costume that restricts your movement/breathing while you work. Unless you work at a Ren Faire or something.
So, I mentioned this problem to the Vampire Bat, who frequently works as a professional photographer while in ornate costumes, and she was like: duh, slap some butterflies on your regular clothes and you’re already Delirium from The Sandman. Duh. Literally. I have the leather jacket, the combat boots, the fishnet shirt, the red hair, and a wide variety of outlandish stockings: colored, striped, fishnet. Now I just need to figure out how to make a bunch of fish float around my head. The sad thing is that I actually own a remote-controlled mylar fish balloon, but that would be another thing that would impede my ability to take pictures. No, the really sad thing is that I won’t be able to make it to Tucson Comicon this year because I got my media request in too late and also because I already have 3 parties to go to that weekend. Maybe I can just sneak in Friday night, which is the only free time I’ll have that weekend anyway.
I can still take this costume to at least 3 other events besides the wedding this year alone, and now I don’t have to steal the Girl’s tutu, which is more than 6 years old and has stretched-out elastic, ever again. Plus, you know, sometimes I just dress like this for fun, and this tutu matches more of my clothing than her pinky-pinky one.
So: some kind of hair piece that makes it look like fish are floating around my head, and then convince The Man to grow his beard and hair out a little, wear a peasant shirt, and carry a bindlestiff. He’s not much for cosplay, but if I can get the shirt, I can probably persuade him about the bindlestiff. With the addition of a loving but unwilling Destruction towering over me, my Delirium costume is complete.
Admittedly, artists do this too, but people think we’ve done it on purpose.
The Man is pretty fastidious about his sartorial choices and wouldn’t fail to notice that he was wearing his shirt inside out unless he was really sick, but this did happen with the guy I dated before I met the man, referred to elsewhere as Engineer #6 (The Man was lucky #7 I guess). Engineer #6 was already married to his work and left me for NASA, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be either way. Plus, he never reads this blog, so I can say whatever I want about him. But he did call me the other day, which he does once or twice a year, so that reminded me of this.
In real life, right after the moment in panel 4, while he was still hanging his head in shame, I coined the term “adorkable.” This was 2005, so I like to think I can lay claim to the word.
When I realize my clothes are on inside out, I just go with it. But I do that when I realize that there’s a huge stain down the front of my outfit or a massive rip in the seat of my pants, too.
We didn’t have summer reading when I was a kid. Actually, I read all summer long, but we didn’t have assigned books. It’s hard for me to understand that some kids don’t read for pleasure, despite the fact that both the kids living in my house fall into this category. The Girl probably would, sometimes, but her dyslexia makes it hard. I have no idea what the Boy’s excuse his. He is supposedly a very good reader, but I have never, ever seen him read anything for pleasure besides gaming manuals.
Anyway, 6+ weeks into summer break and he’s barely cracked his summer reading book. Considering he’ll be spending a week on vacation in San Diego with his mom, and a week in Seattle on vacation with his dad and me, and that school starts up on August 8th, and the book in question is 550 pages long, he’s really cutting it pretty close. We’ve been bugging him about it off and on, but today the Man cracked down on him. No Kindle until you’ve read a big chunk of that book, he was told. Fifteen minutes later the Man found him hiding in his room, watching YouTube on his GameBoy. Now he’s lost all screen privileges.
So now I feel compelled to check. That is, I got my own copy of the book. This morning he claimed to be on page 47. Now he claims to be on page 125. At any rate, I’m somewhere at the 35% mark (mine’s a pdf and it’s paginated differently but I’m guessing I’m probably somewhere around page 175 of the print copy) and now we can all experience the joy and excitement of me going all English teacher on that kid. There will be book talks. I will determine how much he has actually read. He will be prepared, goddamnit.
It took me a couple chapters to get into the story, but it’s very beautifully written and I ended up reading much longer than I had intended. However, now it’s 12:30 and there are no comics for your reading pleasure.
Great Things Are on the Horizon
What I have instead, is a couple new product types in my RedBubble shop. It feels like they’re adding new stuff too fast for me to keep up. No sooner have I enabled one new kind of notebook for one product than they introduce a different kind of notebook. This spiral one looks pretty sturdy. It’s 6″ x 8″, 120 pages (ruled line or graph, your choice), and comes with a pocket in the back. Pictured here, My Sister and Brother-in-Law Look to the Future is very timely, as their wedding is fast approaching and my mother bought a bunch of these T-shirts for the grandkids on both sides to wear.
I’m working to get all product types available for every design, but it may take a while, since I now have a lot of designs and I also have a lot of more pressing other stuff to accomplish. Like finishing this 8th grade reading assignment and find a wedding present for my sister and brother-in-law. I can’t use this design because that’s what I gave them for their engagement present.
Big, blue, and beautiful
This is a different style of notebook, the hardcover journal. It’s similar in size to the above product, but not quite the same: 5.2″ x 7.3″, with 128 pages. In addition to ruled lines or graphs, you can also order this one as a blank book for a more freeform writing/drawing experience. The image wraps around to the back of the cover, which looks pretty cool.
This, of course, is the Blue Morpho design, a painstaking and velvety recreation of one of planet Earth’s most spectacular insects. Although they’re all pretty spectacular if you really open yourself to that sort of thing. I mean, I was strongly considering drawing a comic about the tarantula hawk, a giant local wasp that literally hunts and eats large spiders. They are spectacular in their own way, although not everyone will be filled with awe and wonder at their presence. I can still hear the pained shrieks of the Girl after one flew in the general vicinity of her head 5 years ago. She didn’t stop screaming for about 15 minutes. She only got over the experience about a year ago. But really, they’re pretty cool, for what they are.
Draw attention to your middle part.
I’m actually sort of torn on this pencil skirt, simply because it seems like only women who are perfectly comfortable with the shape of their legs, hips, and belly would want one, and generally speaking, I don’t know a lot of people who fall into that category. At any rate, this style of skirt in the Vanity Has a Thousand Eyes design is certainly a hugely striking and attention getting way to CYA, if you feel comfortable drawing the gaze of other people to this region of your body. It’s a personal choice, I guess. It comes in 7 sizes from XXS to XXL, and the price is reasonable.
There are actually more new products but I shall save them for another update.
Some fun things: last night the actual physical human being Matt Paxton, a guy whose wit and wisdom I have enjoyed for a number of years on the horribly voyeuristic and schadenfreude-tastic reality show Hoarders, saw my comic in honor of his superior organizational abilities and retweeted me with a compliment.
Go me!
Then this morning, I woke up to 2 i.m.s, 1 asking me to review the ARC of an upcoming book by an award-winning author I love and have known personally for some years for a website where my work has never appeared, and the other asking me if I would be willing to help someone write their autobiography. It’s nice to be recognized. Although, to tell the truth, I get asked to help someone write an autobiography about once a year and so far no one’s ever written anything.
Well, better get back to my middle summer reading assignment. You know that sort of thing goes on your permanent record.
Raven: out of the forest, into the city. Photo courtesy of VioletPhotography
Direct from California, we have another iteration of Punk Rock Raven, pictured here on a red tank top modeled by the ever-lovely Violet.
One takeaway I’ve gotten from customers is that the sizing on some of the shirts is unexpected. Although the site shows a female model wearing the “unisex tank top” (pictured above), the sizes on that product are actually calculated for men. The “racerback tank,” however, does use women’s sizing: the chest measurement for a small racerback is 3 inches less than that of a small unisex tank. In any case, if you’re on RedBubble buying a T-shirt, and you’re trying to decide which size is correct for your body, there’s a tiny link beneath the size choices that says “sizing chart,” which explains how that particular style is cut. It’s different for the different types of shirts, so I would advise checking that out before you order. Then you can easily measure yourself/your favorite shirt, and choose accordingly.
Closer view of the bird. Every feel like giving someone the bird? Well, now you can. Photo courtesy of Violet Photography.
I noticed that this design wasn’t available on the coffee and travel mugs, so I reuploaded it to remedy that oversight. Now Punk Rock Raven can join you for breakfast or on the road.
Click this link to check out Punk Rock Raven products in the QvD shop!
If this onesie looks small to you, don’t worry. Rainbird is available in a wide variety of sizes and on many products.
Throw off the burden of darkness and feast your eyes upon this updated version of my original design. Rainbird still believes you can make your own magic, but it’s more of a tacit message.
The thought still holds true, but the shirt seems better balanced without the text. Live and learn.
As pictured, this onesie cost $18.04. You can buy it here. You can also find it in kid and adult sizes all the way up to 3XL and on tote bags, pillows, phone cases, stickers, of course, and also paper. See all products here.
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