rips

Halloween Costume Series Day 6: Scarecrow Costume with Torn White Blouse and Patched Red Polka Dot Skirt

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Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

My husband and I split a CSA share with another family we know, and ours is with the Community Farm of Ann Arbor. (CSA stands for community supported agriculture; basically you pay for a share up front then over the course of the season you get a part of whatever vegetables are grown. For example, our share this week included sweet potatoes, swiss chard, broccoli and twenty bell peppers.) This week, they announced a “goods and services day,” where people could come to show and sell the things they make. I had to go anyways to pick up the share, so I thought, well, why not?, printed off a bunch of paper dolls and brought my drawing materials to the farm. I was the only one who showed up with anything, but it was great to be in the barn working on my dresses, and Annie (one of the owners of the Community Farm) loved them, helping to make up for my complete lack of salesmanship. I think the question I got the most is how I make a living off of them — the answer, of course, is that I don’t, it’s just a hobby. (The text ads do make enough money to cover hosting and replacement colorless blender pencils, which is very nice.) Second most common question was “why paperdolls?” for which the most true answer is, I’m pretty bad at drawing just about anything besides clothes, and I love drawing clothes enough that this doesn’t bother me.

If you like today’s scarecrow costume at all you can thank Annie for saving it; I got about a fourth of the way through sketching it out and was looking at it rather dubiously, but she thought it was so cute, so I kept going with it, and I think it turned out all right. Being on the farm made me think of things like scarecrows, and certainly I had enough reference material for the straw… You can thank Brian, too, for the bird. That’s the first thing he said when I showed it to him, that it needed a bird. Such insights are why I keep him around!

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Urban Dead zombie couture

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I play a game called Urban Dead, a browser-based, text-based, player-versus-player zombie apocalypse game. If you play as a survivor, you spend your days hoarding ammo, freaking out about the barricades of your safehouse coming down and often getting killed in your sleep by another player anyways. Those of us who play zombies have much lower stress in our unlives: we have fun and dine on brains. (You can enjoy the benefits, too, if you already play as a survivor! Just stand outside and one of my zombie brethren will hook you up.)

I play one character and I think that before the outbreak, she was a leasing agent. (Having felt rather like a zombie at points during my time as a leasing agent, it’s funny to me.) She used to wear pastel suits and comfortable shoes, and her smile was as non-threatening as it could be. Now she’s overcome her problem of weak, splitting nails with a set of admirable claws, and she’s quite interested in high-density housing units and commercial properties. Her favorite green suit is, alas, a little worse for the wear.

I suppose that in real life, however one chooses to apply the term to a zombie apocalypse, the outfit would be more dirty and torn and less green. What can I say? My time drawing mermaids didn’t prepare me for this. Although… it was nice, for once, to not have to worry about accidentally smudging the red into another color.