Tea for One and an Arm

It's another thrilling wall display.

This time we're selling a paint your own tea set kit.

An ill-lit longshot.

The Pot. Thanks Van Gogh.

The Cup.

And thanks again. The nice thing about Van Gogh is that if something doesn't look quite right you just add more paint. He kind of just had the one trick.

And a close up of the head.

Fashion Design Kit

So, the big negative comment in my performance review was "we think you spend too much of your time lurking behind the register with your scissors and whatnot" and the solution was to move my table into the middle of the floor and make me craft there, like a performing chimp.

The first thing I did was open this fashion design kit.

The fabrics are mostly acetate, and the dress form is so shapeless it's hard to tell the front from the back (hint: there's a seam down the baak), but it's actually kind of a decent kit in that it encourages creativity rather than achievement. Parents and grandparents do not always agree with that model and I hear a lot of "she can't do that" and "if it's not easy she'll just give up" and "where are the instructions?".

Anyway there's a giant column behind my table, a white monolith in the center of the store, so I've taken to making relevant cut paper displays and mounting them there. 'Cause what else am I going to do?

So without further ado (and there has been rather a lot of ado) the clothes line display:

I've nearly filled the sketchbook and at some point I'll "borrow" that and scan the drawings.

Sundries - Met Store edition

This is what I do all day: I stand on a Terrazzo floor, talk to ladies from the midwest about their grandchildren, and build displays.

Cut paper skyline.

This is a two foot high wood veneer block at the top of the stairs, I put children's books about New York City on it. Sometimes people buy them.

Squirrel.

This is a portable easel with drawers full of art supplies. This is what it looks like with art on it. Why a squirrel? Why not a squirrel?

Photoclip Mobile.

Yes, it's poorly photographed. And yes, it's been up for eight months and has not contributed to the sale either of the mobile or the jar full of pompoms, pipe cleaners and streamers from which the elements are constructed. But dammit it's the first thing I made when I got to the children's department and you're going to look at it. You can see the owl at the center (giant pompom, pipe cleaner, card stock). I'll take better pictures of everything else.

Glambrella.

This an under-lit corner between the t-shirt display and the handicapped elevator. It's where we display over-priced, poorly made color-it-in crafts for 8-11 year old girls. The crafts have slightly disturbing conspicuous-consumption overtones and anti-feminist undertones. I scaled up the patterns on those projects, drew them in Sharpie and colored them in with color-change markers. It brightens up the area nicely. I've code-named it "Operation: Lure Children into Dark Corners".

More coming. I've photographed my big (i.e good) displays too and I'll be posting them soon.

Wonderbaby!

It's my very first sweater. I'm not being modest and I'm not looking for praise: I've done a lot, a lot of knitting, I've made mittens and hats and scarves and socks (not very successfully) but I was worried about making a sweater with it's seams and closures and whatnot.

So I decided to make a tiny sweater for a tiny person, which would be faster to knit and require less yarn investment. Then I found out that Linsay and Shane were making a tiny person and almost simultaneously I found this pattern at practicalpolly.blogspot.com. But it was for a full sized person so I adapted it. And that's the story of my sweater.

This is the front!

And the back!

And a close up of the snaps. A successful result of much squinting and hand-wringing and asking for advice from people who where sick of hearing about the stupid sweater.

Open snaps. To accommodate a giant baby head.

Wrist bands of power!

Just in case a knitter wanders onto my blog I'm including the charts I made for this sweater. I think they're accurate, and that they have enough information... if not please comment.

Actually I think there are some pretty big problems but I'm not going to figure it out unless I know somebody wants to knit it. So let me know.