0 The light at the end of the tunnel is just a train hurtling towards you

There's little work left to do on my bedroom now; the floor is down and varnished, the walls painted and wallpaper hung, sockets all shiny and fitted - all that's left really is fitting shelves, doors and curtains. You have no idea how excited I am to not be sleeping on a floor-mattress. Every now and then there's an avalanche, and a bunch of stuff from various periods of my life falls on me; yesterday, I was treated to floppy disks and my GCSE Latin notes.

The important thing is, we're nearly there. I even have a bed frame ready to go, so as soon as I'm given the all-clear I can move right in. As for the rest of the house, my parents are having a bit of decorating done too.

Okay, a lot of work.

This has thrown something of a spanner in the works; my art table was in this room with all my supplies on it, on the understanding that my room would be finished by September and I could move it all back upstairs. Obviously this deadline has sailed by, and now all my supplies are packed up in boxes like everything else.

I've had to cancel a piece I was doing for Chainbear's book project, and I can't put a portfolio together for my Masters application. Now I have no way of getting work done, my brain has naturally flooded with ideas.

In order to sublimate my lack of personal anything, I've been buying things online quite regularly. Hair pins, clothes, books, cameras, you name it I've probably ordered one this week. One of my most impressive purchases arrived today, though, which came from Cult Pens; for some reason its really hard to get hold of dot grid notebooks. I went to Moleskine first, then began googling which turned up an unexpected hit at the Cult Pens website.

John Burgerman referred me to that site last year as a solid place to get affordable, lovely Posca paint pens, but I'd never had a good look at the site. I ended up ordering a Leuchtturm1917 dot grid book and a couple of pens I'd been searching for. Postage was free, so I expected the delivery to arrive maybe next week.

After doing some time calculation maths, the whole ordering and delivery process took a little over one day. That's next day delivery, for free. I'm still reeling from it a bit.

Now don't get me wrong, I love a good Moleskine, but this... this is a serious contender.

Leuchtturm1917's notebooks have all the things Moleskine offers - acid free paper, different sizes, colours, an elastic cover strap, an expanding back pocket, and a page marker - however its the extras they offer that give Leuchtturm1917 a clear edge (and probably all of my future notebook-based business).

They provide a good choice of paper styles whilst still remaining useful. I have a Moleskine storyboard book that I've never, ever used; I remember being very impressed at the time, but its too small and constraining. Saying its original design doesn't make it useful.

The absolute selling point for me, as stupid as its going to sound, is the free stickers. The clever people at Leuchtturm1917 figured out that people probably store these journals after they use them, so they went ahead and provided archival cover and spine stickers with all their books. Its a simple idea, but oh so attractive to me.

They also have eight detachable pages in the back, which is useful if you want to hand a client a sketch, but then you have to choose your eight. If they started doing fully perforated, dot grid, soft cover notebooks, I'd just give up and buy shares in their company.

Leuchtturm1917

0 Crochetception

I've now crocheted a bag that's far along enough to carry the materials I'm crocheting it with in it...

My hands ache.

I'm making Christmas presents instead of buying this year, and I've already got a couple done. For starters, someone will be getting this bag; be grateful, and pay for my knuckle replacement surgery. I also am working on something for my best friend Jj, and some tiny things for my little cousiny people.  was worried I might be going a bit overboard with the crochet, then I visited the Victoria & Albert Museum's Power of Making exhibition:

That's a bear made from crochet by Shauna Richardson, life size, with all the appropriate details to make you think its taxidermy until you're right in front of it. This caught me completely off guard, and my brain went into overdrive - what can't you crochet? I can make a whole pair of gloves in two days, what could I make in a week? A month? Needless to say I've big plans as soon as I have a proper work space.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of Joep Verhoeven's lace fence panels, an artist whose work I stumbled across last year but couldn't put a name to it.

You can see the sheer scale of it here. It looks so much more delicate since its in a relatively tough, construction context. The boundaries of yarn craft are getting more and more expansive, and I want to help push them.

0 This is a man's (AU) world, right?

A couple of days ago, my friend Thea sent me a link to a this video:



The role of women in comic books, from characters to authors, is a hotbed of opinions, and as a female comic lover I get asked my opinion quite a lot. I've been asked questions like this one, complex analyses on the tropes applied to female comic characters, and much simpler ones like, "are these for your boyfriend?"

If you look at the comics that usually get brought up as examples, they tend to be from Marvel and tend to have started circulation in the 1950s or earlier. When they initiated, they were representations of a powerful nation fighting war - Captain America and Superman trouncing spies and strange Europeans. So yes, if you go digging through their back catalog, some serious misogyny is going to pop up; but so is some racism, xenophobia, homophobia and stereotypes. These comics were written by people in that era for people of that era, so when you look back at them they will often seem offensive and bizarre.

This isn't a defense for them in any way; many tropes are still applied to women leaving them as sidekicks, reporters, and second lines of defense, however their position is rarely undervalued by the true comic lover. When Stephanie Brown was written off by almost everyone involved in the Batman series as 'not a proper Robin', fans overruled them and demanded that she was counted.

Gender aside, everything must be canon. The same logic can be applied to the Batman-Oracle argument brought up in the video above.

When Batman broke his back, he recovered because he's a multi-millionaire business man with access to the world's best technology. When Barbara Gordon was paralysed by the Joker putting a bullet in her spine, she ended up in a wheelchair; if Bruce Wayne had become involved and thrown money at her an explanation would have been required as to why he cared.
Batman is close friends with Oracle, but Bruce Wayne should only have a passing knowledge of Barbara Gordon; if Wayne Industries suddenly got involved just for the sake of equal treatment, it wouldn't take long for Gotham's crime undercurrent to figure out Batman's already tenuous disguise.

Thus, canon is preserved and Batman gets a whole new range of technical upgrades thanks to Barbara's super intelligence!

I feel I should also point out the many, many strong female characters. Lots of the 'women are underrated' supporters deliberately leave out the ways women have defied tropes, and also the existence of male tropes. They do exist, but they're passed over as normal despite being just as distorted and unfair. You pretty much have to be the rippling-torso'd genius billionaire, otherwise you're the poor, crazy, mutated outcast:
Batman and Joker.
Captain America and Red Skull.
Reed Richards and Dr Doom.
For every supremely perfect man there is an equally malfunctioning one, and the 'perfect men' are often not as perfect as they look anyway. For example, the recent Green Lantern film only barely touched on the crippling alcoholism of Hal Jordan's comic counterpart.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to argue against WiR.  I hate tropes, I really do, because they reinforce the idea of comics being a boys' club.0 My personal favourite trope is Ghost. Have you ever read it? I have, and it was a wake-up call.
I was raised on Sandman, Preacher, and Batman. I was used to intellectual dialogue and dystopian societies, outcasts and figureheads from all walks of life. Eventually I began to search out 'new' comics, looking for things I might like that were outside of my father's comic book collection. Ghost was introduced to me by a shop assistant as a 'girls' comic'.

Aww.

This is true, insofar as there is a girl in it. It's written entirely by men, drawn by men, is aimed at men, and its obvious before you even open the book.

She's a reporter (why are they always reporters?) killed for knowing too much. Unable to put up enough of a fight to save her own life, she suddenly becomes a vicious vigilante in the afterlife. Everyone can see her, she still exists, she's just also dead. And some woman wants to kill her for being too beautiful. And she hates men, unless they're offering her sex and protection. She's written like the authors have heard of feminism, but only about ten seconds of a full conversation about it while passing cleverer people on an escalator. For some reason she's always trying to lure people in with her aggressively sexual wiles, then killing them. She even had her own magazine paired up with Witchblade, but it was like sitting a stripper next to Darcy Bussell and calling it Classic Dance Monthly.

Never, ever read Ghost.

You just can't get away with it these days, though; there are whole comic book labels focused on promoting just female creators, whole sections of comics set up to target the female market, and they're starting to bleed through. I've become a sort of dealer, handing out copies of Transmetropolitan and Umbrella Academy to anyone who shows an interest. Honestly, I could have the tropes discussion for hours but ultimately its futile, because they're dying out on every level.

Look at Criminal Minds, a TV show that tried to write out two of its female characters and replace them both with a young, blonde, new one. They immediately set up a potential romance with fan favourite Dr. Reid (which, if they had any concept of how fangirls work, they should have recognised as an immediate mistake). The decision makers cited 'creative differences', but were heavily undermined by the other outspoken and disbelieving cast members. Fans became actively involved too, and the question was raised about if they would ever do that to the male characters. Someone along the line, who I can only assume was fired, blurted out an offhand statement basically saying of course they wouldn't, they matter. Uproar ensued and they hemorrhaged viewers to the point that they were forced to write the two original characters back in and phase the new one out. Success!

I ultimately credit Joss Whedon with a lot of my life choices and beliefs because his shows let me grow up watching stories that weren't about a girl fighting crime or a man seeking revenge, they dealt with issues so far beyond gender that it never even crossed my mind to have issues about it. I know he wasn't a comic author back then, but he is now. The people who are the target market for both TV and comics grew up with him and writers like him too, and they're the new decision makers.

The status of women in the comic world may look bleak, but its changing so very fast. After Fable 2, Fable 3's main character was a woman on her quest to become a saviour. Kick Ass's Hit Girl is only a kid and is more powerful than all the female sidekicks before her. Change is there, its just rapidly becoming normality.

0 Thank you, please try again later

Well, I didn't manage to get a single piece of the Versace for H&M collection since their website crashed magnificently. By the time I got through (4 hours after launch), there were only wrong sizes or things I didn't want left.

I had the rest of day off, so I spent it browsing various fashion websites trying to scratch my clothing budget itch. Eventually I made my way to ASOS - where they're currently in the middle of a 29% off boutique sale - and bought a couple of pairs of unusual tights, and this lovely little number:

You have no idea how long I've been looking for a bell sleeve top, and this one's perfect. I can see myself wearing it with a sleeveless vest, preferably cardigan style, or some massive jewelry.

Speaking of outfits, I should be photographing mine regularly soon, since my room is almost finished! The paint is dry, the floor is varnished, and the wallpaper is hung; all that's really left is to fit the shelves, desk, and electrical fittings. Oh, and curtains, which I'm hoping to make from fabric with thick red and white stripes. I don't want solid colour, but I also don't want to draw away from the heavy pattern on the feature wall.

Hmm.

Oh well, I'll just whip the sewing machine out and see what happens!

0 Curl up and dye

My hair and I are constantly in battle. One minute it's wavy and soft, then in the blink of an eye it's scraggly and greasy. Sometimes my fringe will be obedient, but usually it curls off in mad directions. I shan't even speak of the colour.

(Actually, I will.)

My hair has been several colours now, from fairly tame beige-blonde and dark brown to deepest black and firetruck red. For some months I had bubblegum pink flashes hidden in the sides of my bob cut (which I enjoyed) and once had long, side parted, purplish hair with blond highlights (which I really did not).

Now, I want something so different from what I usually have. For starters, no fringe. My fringe has been a stalwart part of my hairstyle for nearly ten years now - side, full, shaped, it has always been there to hide behind. However I was gifted several great vintage hairstyle books for my birthday, and something became quickly apparent - long hair that can fake a fringe is more versatile than an actual fringe.

I'm on a quest to completely change my look, to refine it and make sure that even if I'm dressed for comfort I keep my style, and I think the best way to do this is set a goal. Mine is a future date with BLEACH London. They are home to some of the most in-demand stylists in the fashion world, and Pixie Geldof appears to live there.

My particular favourites are the grungy yet soft dye jobs, involving pastels and pink.

I like that the look could change depending on what you wear - prim and proper with work clothes, or ruffled and undone for a night out.

Even though I'm avoiding a fringe, I absolutely love this style. I reckon a similar effect could be achieved with coloured slices side and front, rolled into a quiff type fringe. (I think I hate the word quiff.)

Subtler style, yet still very effective and a bit haunting.

These highlights are brilliant, and would look lovely mixed into fishtail braids or plaits.

I've had my eye on this one for a while. Most of my decorating and design is dedicated to red; my bedroom has victorian library red walls, my favourite lipstick is a dark, fiery colour, and most of my clothes revolve around varieties of rouge. So naturally I want blue hair. Still warm, not too dark and not too bright, dark roots melting into blonde, then gradiating from light to dark at the tips.

Is that too much to ask?

Before I book, I need to save money, and before the money I need a price. For just the virgin bleach and toner it works out at £170, however I want to check about what condition my hair should be in, and if the gradiating colour is extra. The overall cost isn't really an issue considering how much I must have spent on hair colours that weren't really perfect, but I need to know how much to write on my money tin.

0 Crochet, hooray!

Last night, I had to pack up all my art supplies to make room for my parents' new sofa. It didn't bother me at the time, but earlier this morning, a mild sense of dread set in.
All my art supplies are boxed up.
All of them.
In boxes.

Aargh.

This has, however, highlighted an important problem I've had for a while; my desire to carry on my academic studies has completely paralysed my ability to actually make anything useful. My attention has gone fully into crochet, with me crafting everything from jellyfish to bleeding, severed zombie fingers. Little of this is useful for my portfolio, but I've always just thought, 'well, my art table is right there, when I have the time'.

My drive just isn't there; I keep worrying and fretting about how very wrong it all could go, and all the ways I could be rejected. This is natural of course, but artistic block still just creeps up on you.

So, I have a plan - to use crochet for a better purpose, like a poorer and less ambitious Batman. I must learn to design my own pattern, and make something truly portfolio worthy.