"She's Crafty" Night

In honor of the great Beastie Boys' song "She's Crafty," the girls (Keri, Anna, Katie, Ingrid, and I) got together at Ingrid's house last night to do some serious and hardcore crafting... namely spritz bleaching t-shirts with homemade designs.

Here's an idea of what we decided to do (I forgot my camera so I'm using random photos from craft websites... I don't know these people from Adam)...

First, we laid patterns on dark shirts. Then we spritzed bleach on them.

We wanted the end product to look something like this...

... a shirt made with random mechanical parts.

See more information here and here, if you're interested in trying the project yourself.

Seeing as I have a zillion t-shirts, but only one that I didn't mind potentially ruining, I made a pit stop at the world's scariest thrift shop... which would be called the "Deseret Industries" second-hand shop next to the meth-addict's favorite grocery story, Fry's, that I've referred to in at least one past blog post.

I assure you that the clientele there might just be made up of the scariest human beings you've ever seen in your life (toothless junkies, miserable screaming children, overweight fast-food-eating trailer home residents, etc.).

But... I was running low on time, it's very close to my house, and I needed to buy ice cream for the party that night... thus, a run to Fry's (and, by convenience, the scary ass thrift shop) was in order.

I found two tank tops, a khaki colored t-shirt, and a black v-neck shirt (unfortunately covered in several long and curly hairs that I had to pick off with my fingernails in complete horror), which totaled the grand sum of $8.00. Not a bad deal, if I don't say so myself... and it almost made having to touch random hair worth it.

We all brought several shirts -- and we had a number of objects to bleach... from gears to doilies to wrenches to cookie cutter designs to grape leaves.

I had the idea to write out Arabic words on a sheet of paper and then cut them out with an Exacto knife. I then bleached the cut out areas.

Here are my shirts...

This one says "Why?" in colloquial Arabic.

And this one says "Love"...

For the record, I'm not the type that would ever wear a t-shirt that says "love" in English (and I f***ing hate any piece of clothing that has hearts on it... and lace or ruffles or capped sleeves and that is pink or featuring any other cute horrible thing)... but I knew how to spell it in Arabic (important, that is) and it's not so schmaltzy written in a cool script like Arabic. Note that I didn't add any hearts on it anywhere though.

I tried to put stars on a navy blue tank top I'd bought -- even though I was gravely worried that it was going to turn out cheesily patriotic -- but it refused to accept the bleach. (Perhaps for the best.) It just stayed navy. Ingrid had the same problem with one of hers (ahem, I mean, one of her husband, Joe's, shirts that she stole out of his closet despite his warnings not to mar his stuff with bleach designs).

This was my last design of the night... and you can tell I did it in the near darkness of Ingrid's back yard...

... because the doily was obviously completely off center.

Thank goodness I only paid $2 for that shirt.

Then we had dinner (Keri brought a Mediterranean salad feast, Ingrid baked chocolate "Wacky cake", and I brought chocolate peanut butter ice cream... my favorite) and we raided Ingrid's bookshelves! She lent me Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (as part of my Victorian moralist summer reading extravaganza) as well as Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which I'll get to later.*

All in all, it was a splendid evening... I hope we do it next month too!

* Reason being... I stopped in to Bookman's used bookstore today and got the following novels (more or less from the same 18th/19th century genre... I'm addicted!) which I feel like I should have read earlier but never did -- and am finding that I absolutely love:

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (yes, I know it's pretty much soft porn, but there's nothing wrong with that... it's a classic!)