For starters, nothing is louder than two cats with an empty food bowl. They’ll amuse themselves for ages waiting for someone to bring the food. Doing things like using chainsaws, running into furniture at top speed (repeatedly; I guess it’s fun for them), knocking things over, finding the one cat toy with a bell in it that you’ve forgotten to confiscate and carrying it through the apartment at a trot, turning into small elephants and chasing each other around the room, etc.

Even after you feed them, however, they now KNOW that you’re awake. So now it’s time for them to start caterwauling at the door (what? You’re an INSIDE CAT. You go outside on a HARNESS. And you’ve never been outside in any way at 5 FREAKING AM. What play date are YOU missing?), eating at high volume (CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH), cat-fighting for fun and profit, or scratching at any one of a thousand exciting objects including:

They’ve gone suspiciously silent now. I can’t see them in the darkness beyond my laptop screen. They may currently be plotting my doom.

Secondly, there’s nothing ON at 5 AM. Not even HBO has anything good. Every single channel is either infomercials or cartoons… which says a lot about what television thinks of the intelligence of the average insomniac. We must be easily amused or easily persuaded into buying overpriced crap we don’t actually need from people who smile too much. Also note that most children’s cartoons now are simultaneously better drawn and worse drawn than the ones around when I was a kid.

Ahhh, I remember that halcyon time. Before the days of the internet, it was! If you wanted fanfiction, you had to write it yourself! And if you wanted to buy anything you had to leave the house and walk ten miles! Up a hill! Both ways!

And we were *proud* to have it!

And usually I think I have too many webpages I habitually read each morning. At 5 AM you discover there never is enough webpages. Some of them even go missing. Maybe they’re still in bed, where yours truly should be.

I’ve no idea when my body decided that six hours or less is an appropriate length of sleep.

Thirdly, a Crochet Lite H hook makes a very passable magic wand in a dark room.

Well, it’s 7 AM and the husband’s awake finally. Time to start the day. Wish me luck…

Tags: bless me yarn art, cats, courage, dusk, insomnia, midnight, sleep

Holidays tend to be problematic for me; I always find myself overstressed and hyper-vigilant. I’ve had bad things happen around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sometimes other people are so concerned with having the perfect time and presenting the perfect image that one’s best just isn’t enough, not even near enough.

In this holiday season I have to find the reason. I have to find the joy in it again, and define these days for myself in new healthy ways.

I’ve decided that finally for once I need to sit down at Thanksgiving and figure out at last what I’m freaking thankful for.

I’m thankful I have a roof over my head. Things have been up and down all this year and a few times I wasn’t sure if we’d make it but in the end I have a roof over my head, the husband, and the cats.

I’m thankful I have my wonderful patrons. Their love, interest, and support has often times been the difference between Rent and No Rent, or Food and No Food. They have had faith in my abilities, delight in my talents, and trust that I will follow through and repay their hard-earned money with my best efforts. I try every day to deserve the honor they give me.

I’m thankful that I have the cats. Rarely anything helps more than coming home and getting a loving headbutt kiss from Midnight, or having Dusky climb in my lap, up my chest and refuse to move until he’s been cuddled tightly, fitting his head under my chin. Thank the gods for good smart loving black cats.

I’m thankful that I have yarn. I have soooo much yarn. My stash is sizable. Any time of the day or night, when inspiration hits I can go to it and nine times out of ten find exactly what I need to make what’s on my mind. It overflows my cabinets and breaks the hanging wardrobe we bought for its prodigious size, but I love it, and it’s all mine.

I’m thankful that I have a vision that drives me. I live to have a hook in my hand; I live to be making new things that the world has never seen before (or old things in completely new ways). I live to fill my house with color and texture and vibrancy. I live to someday fulfill the dream of having a yarn shop all my own.

I’m thankful most of all for my wonderful husband, the family that the gods have given me. He’s been with me for years and I love him more every single day. He’s shown me what it means to have a real partner. He’s shown me what it’s like to be really loved. There was a lot of sturm und drang when we first got together; it’s passed over us like a wave over the ocean. Once you get below the surface, all is calm. We’ve sacrificed a lot to be together; in the end I measure all that I’ve given and I count it cheap. He is the reason for my season, all my seasons.

Happy Thanksgiving, mo anamchara. Most of all I’m thankful I’m loved so deeply by you.

Tags: bless me yarn art, cats, dusk, holidays, midnight, patrons, RealJob(TM), stress, the husband, the stash

Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. Dogs gotta hunt.

Vox gotta crochet.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this position, but if you have you’ll know what I mean. Ever done something and known immediately that this is what you were *created* on this earth to do? Ever felt that heady rush of knowing that you are a unique shaped peg in a unique shape hole — right where you need to be, at the right time, saying the right words, making the right motions? As if the universe itself could find no better thing for you to be than exactly what you are?

Serendipity. It all suddenly gels.

Sometimes I get that feeling. I know yarn. I love yarn. I can make yarn jump through hoops, sit up and beg. And while I can intellectually contemplate being bored with yarn and/or running out of ideas in about a few hundred years, I can’t actually imagine it.

If you haven’t had this marvelous feeling, I pity you a little… but I envy you too. Sometimes it’s the most frustrating emotion in the world because it drives you. It whips you like a merciless charioteer until you drop in your traces, covered in sweat and fatigue.

Today I finished a design that’s been bothering me for at least two years now: sturdy, realistic butterfly wings. Today it was like the angels singing — everything came together, and I fastened them to the doll, and they were PERFECT. And with that rush of absolute glee came three or four more ideas fast on its heels. A door has opened in this magnificent labyrinth of my own design, and there is MORE behind it.

You gotta do what you’re born to do. Anything else is a crime against your nature.

But sometimes it’s a necessary crime.

Exhilaration doesn’t always put money in the bank account. Serendipity doesn’t always pay the rent. It’s an unfortunate side effect of society that an action performed only *very well* sometimes pays much more than one performed in *absolute genius*.

Buddha does come back from Nirvana, to do what must be done. I’m glad that I can provide for my family. I’m glad that I have a RealJob(TM) and I can get rent and food and clothing and fuel and insurance and pay off old debts.

I’m also glad that my passion pays for itself, and more besides.

Ever got that feeling, that you were made for *something*, and that you’d finally found out what it was?

Tags: bless me yarn art, crochet, gonzo, life, RealJob(TM)

This is not a city for depression.

The beginning of a depressed state starts almost like a bad horror film. Everything goes flat and two dimensional; events around you are simultaneously less important and more painful. Time draws out into slow motion. Movements are profound but lacking real meaning.

There’s no escaping it, this self-involved masochistic trip. The mind in its dull desperation seeks to blame others, but there really is no one else. This is a walking Purgatory. This is an ambulatory Hell.

You watch other people move through this flat paper-doll world. You envy them their normalcy; you as three or four dimensions of solid melancholy are covered in ten thousand papercuts, oozing.

Sounds so incredibly emo, I know. But that’s because it’s in words, and language for all its usefulness is no more than trite in the end. Words don’t press into the reader’s mind the feelings described; words don’t put you into my shoes.

If words could do that, a fair amount of people in my past would be far more understanding than they actually were.

Voices blend. More than one person talking at once turns into a meaningless susurration; a vibe edging towards menace.

Sometimes the phobias rise up. One gets suddenly very mindful of how many people touch the bathroom doorknob, the time clock, the microwave. The food stalactites in the microwave left by other careless humans begin to terrify — each one is a little dagger of contagion waiting to plunge into your harmless lunch. There are things left in an office refrigerator that have evolved to join the Old Ones, sleeping in long strange ages, hopefully unmindful of the light from the door.

You can hear the coughing and sneezing and snorting and hacking and sputtering of those around you. You can smell the stale reek of cigarette smoke on their clothes. You have no choice; you must be here in the plague pit with the plague victims and eventually be physically assaulted by the plague virus.

Your stomach churns. The burn from the acid, from the anxiety and melancholy made manifest, gives you flashes of hot and cold. Maybe the over the counter medications in happy manic shades of pink calm your guts for a few hours.

Maybe the Fear is too much.

Somewhere there’s an island for me. There’s a beautiful place with warm weather, and a wonderful empty beach as far as the eye can see. There’s caves with plenty of shelter, and an inexplicable supply of safe food, food that I can have. And there’s the husband, and some cats, and the Yarn.

So. Much. Yarn. More yarn than a woman could crochet in ten lifetimes.

And there’s nothing to do on this island but eat and walk and love and crochet. And there’s no one else on this island but those that cause no harm.

My body’s in the City; my heart and soul are on the Island.

Tags: bless me yarn art, depression, medicines, The City

Alrighty, it’s the end of the year and what that means for business is that I have only SIX commissions left before I close my list for an indefinite period of time. When I reopen them in 2010, I will have fewer commissions at a higher fee.

So if you’ve ever wanted any of my works, now is the time to secure your place. Current starting price is $55 for my regular commissions, and $10 shipping within the US. You can also get rush status (within 3 months of receipt of payment) for an additional $30 per rushed item.

When I have the six commissions or we reach December 31st 2009, my list will be closed until I finish my current commissions — at this point, probably at least until July – October 2009. When I reopen, my base price will start at $100 per commission.

So email me at voxmortuum @ gmail.com to let me know what you’re wanting and we’ll work out the details.

Tags: bless me yarn art, commissions, crochet

Today will be a rather general post, because frankly I’m feeling like I don’t have enough medication today. I had something planned for the day but after 3 hours solid of driving, 2 hours of laundry, enough emotional ups and downs to make an amusement park full of roller-coasters… I just don’t have it in me right now.

Yesterday was a bit more exciting. I think I like Cherrycola Red Heart Yarn. I think I like, MORE THAN like it. I think I’m in love with it. So I’m working on an afghan with it. Only problem is, I only had 3 skeins of it and I needed more like another 15 or so.

So the husband and I went on The Great American Yarn Hunt. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid –

Sorry, I spaced there for a minute and thought I was going to Vegas. We didn’t actually have any of that. But what we had was a rabid desire to find Cherrycola.

We went to:
1 Walmart
2 Michaels
1 Hobby Lobby
1 Joann’s

And at Joann’s we hit the jackpot. Not only did we find Cherrycola… not only did we find 15 skeins of it… it was ON SALE. Usually I don’t like Joann’s because their selection of yarn (at least, the location in my area) is not the most choice, but this time they did right by us.

Now that’s gonzo. *grins*

Also at Joann’s I got a skein of Williamsburg Print (also Red Heart) and 4 skeins of Sensations Rainbow Boucle in Red Print.

Now, working with the Rainbow Boucle, I can tell you that the yarn itself is a dream. It goes along just fine with my trusty I-hook, it’s softer than unicorn farts (which are pretty darn soft, take my word for it) and all in all just a total delight to crochet… UNTIL IT KNOTS.

Because of all the little boucles (I assume that’s what they’re called), it ties itself into little knots due to the terrible friction deep in the heart of a yarn skein. And you have to GENTLY ease them apart or the whole thread just breaks. Luckily I’ve only had this happen once; I have a way with yarn.

Sooooooo… projects for this next week:

Finish up Pyramid Head from Silent Hill
Finish Reno from Final Fantasy 7
Finish up something INCREDIBLYFREAKINGPINK.

Then take some pictures and ship some things out. Oh, and that whole RealJob(tm) thing I’ve got to do until I can buy my own yarn shop.

Tags: bless me yarn art, crochet, Final Fantasy, gonzo, pyramid head, the stash

Bless me, Yarn Art, for I have sinned. Tonight I bought a LOOOOOOTTTT of yarn. I mean a LOT a lot ALOT.

Let me recount my crimes to you:
2 Skeins Linen
1 Skein Melonberry (new color!)
2 Skeins Cherrycola (another new color!)
1 Skein Light Raspberry
2 HYOOGE Skeins Coffee (it’s for a project. I’m serious.)
1 HYOOGE Skein Buff (I make naked people with it. And then I clothe them.)
1 Skein Shocking Pink (and yes, it is.)
2 Skeins Marrakesh (yet another new color!)
1 Skein Tea Leaf (is it new, or just new to me? Don’t know, don’t care! FOUR new colors, a ha ha ha!)

And now all I can do is sit around clutching my expanded stash and chortling like a junkie.

I don’t normally buy this much yarn in one go; tonight I will say five Hail Red Hearts and ten Our Dye Lots.

I’m assuming the glass of blackberry wine I’m having may have something to do with all this.

I have a secret: I hate to weave in ends. I’ll do whatever I can to avoid it. When I’m doing a flat piece, I crochet over the ends. When I’m making a doll, I pull the ends inside the body.

It’s called “Crochet”, not “Crochet for a little while and then weave in several thousand tails.”

I also hate to sew things together. I would always rather crochet them together, as in the case of doll parts or afghan squares. If I wanted to flip a needle through something over and over, I would have taken up cross stitch, needlepoint, embroidery, hard drug abuse, etc.

Tomorrow I have dubbed “Finished Object Friday”, and will post accordingly. FEAR MY MIGHTY FINISHED WRATH!

Tags: bless me yarn art, crochet, the stash