| i shot tom morello for the district long beach weekly last weekend. it was fun! if you see the magazine somewhere, pick up a free copy, but i think they are only distributed in/around long beach... this is the shot they picked to be printed.
as i was thinking about what else to say i realized i never told you LJers that we're moving to portland. yeah! for reals. in august. so life is incredibly busy at the moment. getting ready for the move (saving money, getting rid of stuff, and just tons of little things that need to be done), lots of crafty stuff (contributing to the sampler, working on a pattern to submit to knitty, hoping i got into felt club), people keep wanting more and more zines (i'm not complaining, but i'm sorry if i haven't sent you yours yet), and then photo stuff has been happening (just found out i'll be showing photos in a gallery space in long beach soon, shooting for the district, shooting a wedding in august for a college friend...), and then of course my full time job on top of everything. yeah, so much on my plate, which is a good thing, but tough. i'm sorry that i've been a terrible friend and haven't really been in touch with anyone for such a long time. i want to hang out with people in LA and SD before the move.
ok i'm at work so i have to stop writing now... | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| gahhhh! my freakin website has been down for three days and i'm getting reeally pissed about it! i got an email from someone in need of headshots, wanting to see my photo site, and i had planned to email zine stores in portland with my zine site before going there this weekend, to see if they want to stock them....... and i've been getting a steady flow of zine (and other) orders lately, so my site being down really sucks!! dammit!
ok enough of that, i just had to let it out.
a couple days ago i mailed out my first ever batch of contributions to the sampler! i'm really excited to be getting involved with the sampler, i've been hearing about it on podcasts and reading about it in blogs for awhile and it's really super rad and neato and everything else cool. yeah.
here's what it is: the very awesome creator marie gathers tons of contributions (and promos - business cards, postcards, buttons) from crafty/indie business people like myself, then she sorts them all out into packages of handmade goodies which she sends out to the subscribers, and to media people. and then the contributors also get a package, which i'm soooo so so excited to get!! it's such a great concept, i'm so happy that it exists - the subscribers get a bunch of rad stuff in the mail, and get to find out about neat stuff for sale that they can check out through the promos, and the contributors get advertising (every single person receives at least a promo, even if they don't get a sample), possibly their name out to media people, and also rad stuff in the mail! yeah it's cool.
for my first time, i contributed only 25 items (i plan to do 75 next time) - 15 wristbands/cuffs, and 10 zines. since i was so excited about it, i took multiple photos of each wristband and posted them all on my flickr, but i'll only show you my favorites here.
( individual band shots back here ) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Knit A Claw - Tracy And The Plastics | | Subject: | spinnnnn | | Time: | 06:43 pm |
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| first, i finally paid for a pro flickr account, username -leethal-, so i've spent the last several hours at work organizing all my photos into sets and collections. fun stuff!
second, i spun yarn!! i got a spinning zine a couple weeks ago, then i ordered a starter kit from an etsy seller which came with a spindle and 4 different colored chunks of wool roving. on thursday night after work i tried it! here are the results:
( a few more shots ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| so, i first read about dying yarn with kool-aid about three years ago, when i still lived in san diego, and i bought the kool-aid and everything, fully intending to try it. mostly because you can only dye 100% wool yarn, i never actually got around to trying it, until now! sunday night, actually. i had a sudden moment of motivation and decided to break out the little packets from my craft stash, and a big chunk of the brown yarn i'd unraveled from a thrifted sweater awhile back, one of the only wool yarns i have. well, after that first try, i wanted more, so i grabbed a skein of sage colored wool yarn my mom gave me - i wasn't super into the color, so i thought i could make it more appealing. i divided it in half to make two batches...... ok i'm gonna cut now to tell my tales of dying with pictures, of which i took maany!
( there's a sneak peak of what's to come ) | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| well the trip was a bit of a failure - as in, we failed to reach our destinations, due to extreme weather conditions ("mess in the west" as the weather channel so eloquently put it). we made it as far as yreka, ca, where we had to spend the night, snowed in, and think only of survival on the way back down to san francisco through flurries the next day. oregon was closed. so, we spent the whole week in san francisco, and some time in oakland/berkeley and santa cruz. slept on a couple friends' couches + wood floors, and stayed a few nights in nicely shitty motels. our main activity was walking around searching for rad stores and delicious food, and we very much succeeded at that!
we came home with this massive pile of stuff:
and, i also made some neat things in the car, including this hat:
( more about material items! ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| i made this 2 volume mix for my valentine. it was originally going to be just 1 cd, but it turned into 2 parallel versions of each other....
 | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
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that's it! it's sewn together with a recycled cardboard + photo cover. all the copies are made and cut, they just need to be bound, with i can just do a few per day when i have time, or as orders come in... my costs added up a bit more than expected - almost $60 for the copies and the photo covers. that's for 100 zines, and then there will be paypal charges and shipping costs, so i figure it'll be about $1 per zine cost. hopefully i'll sell enough to make up for like half of it at least... i'm selling them for $2 each (including shipping). anyway, money is not an important factor here, of course... i'm gonna be giving away a bunch of them - i'm sending them to my favorite magazines, podcasters, craft world people, etc.... so many (SO many) hours of work went into this, and i'm super happy with the finished product, i think it's pretty rad, so i hope some other people do too. i can't believe i actually finally did this - i've been thinking about/planning on making a zine for soooo long!! part of me thought it would never really happen...
oh yeah, and the website + blog are all up to date, and linked to from leethal.net. there are some sample pages on the site. i'll be posting things from the zine in the blog every so often, so keep checking back if you are interested. whaddya think? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Oh No! Oh My!-The Robot Ate Me-On Vacation (Disc 2) | | Time: | 07:09 pm |
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| my zine is getting so close! tomorrow (my day off) is my dedicated zine day - all zine, all day. my goal for the release date is the 8th, i think i can do it! the blog is up and running, and i've added a bunch of fun links to the links page. wordpress is rad!
that's all i got for now. except for this quote: "i was a performance taco." | | comments: Leave a comment |
| hah! i've been using my computer here at my new store for a couple weeks now, just to edit in photoshop and work on my zine, and just now it magically found a wireless connection, with no password needed. yeah! i wonder how long it'll last.... i'm pretty happy for now at least...
so speaking of my zine, it's coming along so well, i'm really pumped. (that's a weird word for me to use, i know, but it's true.) i'm so motivated, i've designed an accompanying website and i got myself a wordpress blog for it. (i have yet to set up/customize the wordpress, it's some complex stuff!) i got angela correa to make a contribution for issue #1 (which she hasn't submitted yet, so i'm excited to see what it is!) and the rest i'm doing myself (except for a comic by pete, and some other pete help). for future issues, i'll be asking you all if you want to contribute anything... i just wanted to get the feel of it first with the first issue. yeah. fun stuff. yay!
i've been taking photos whenever possible, so i have many more to show. they are all on my flickr. i'm just gonna post them all here on the same entry, so beware, there are gonna be a crapload of photos behind the cut! first, additions to my faces series, all taken along 4th street a block away from where i live.
( fun with reflections, and other neat things... ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| ok i have so many photos building up to post. they are all on my flickr, but i'll try to post them here over the next couple days.
i got my d80! last week, on thursday, so i've been playing with it every day. and then when looking through my flickr pictures, i realized i never posted my vegas photos from way back in november! oops! so, i'm gonna start with those; you'll have to wait to see d80 shots.
these were all taken with pete's (then) new nikon L3 point and shoot camera, which did a really good job considering it's a fairly cheap little camera. i did take a few film shots also, but i never got around to editing/uploading those - which is the reason i never posted these in the first place - so i'm not gonna worry about that right now.
( vegas baby, yeah! ) | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| oh man, i meant to post these pictures days ago and then on sunday night i ate some bad shimp and spent all day monday sick (very sick) and have been recovering (and working, at the same time) ever since. ok so, here are pictures of some super rad christmas presents from my main squeeze!
  
( morre pictures! ) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| i've seen some good, although quite disturbing, movies lately. pan's labyrinth was extremely creepy, gory, nightmarish, and sad, but i liked it a lot and recommend it to anyone who's up to it.
 
( somemore visuals )
and i saw delicatessen for the first time. i know, i should have seen it years ago, but i didn't. it's one of the maaaany dvds we got from tower in the last couple months of closing sales.
 
i couldn't find any images from the scene i thought was the most disturbing, unfortunately. ( some other good movies i've seen recently, also with pictures, so i'll cut ) | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| last minute reminder - if you're in the la area come to bazaar bizarre tomorrow!! (that's saturday) i will be selling all my leethal stuff, along with like 100 other rad vendors. great for gift shopping - so much stuff you'd never find anywhere else.
in addition to all the supercool vendors, there's also a whole second floor with make-it-yourself craft tables, and this thing where you bring old clothes to donate and get to pick out other people's clothes they brought to reconstruct into new stuff. i read there's gonna be someone from project runway helping out on the sewing machines for that.
it's at the shrine expo center, near usc, from 11am to 7pm, and it's 2 bucks to get in. it's so worth the drive and everything, it's a seriously awesome event. all the info is on the baz biz website. i hope to see some of you there!!!! | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| i'm so excited about saturday, and nervous too of course, but the excitement is overpowering the nerves.
yesterday, on my last day off work before the event, i made so many things... rad soft mitts with striped snakes, two watches (one band made with sweaters and the other with t-shirts), two hats (an angry kitty and a white owl), a photo album with striped tie accents, a scarf made with two ties and a sweater, a cuff with a pocket for money or whatever, and a two-sided apron made with t-shirts (bingo paradise on one side and positive panthers on the other). and pete and i have been making tons of colored 7" vinyl bowls - like 30 of them, so cool.
someone bought a cd case from my little etsy shop last night. not to complain because it's a good thing, but it was terrible timing - i want to have as much as possible on saturday, so that means one less item, and now i have to take time out of my last few days to pack it up and ship it out. but still, it's always good when someone buys something from me.
i also have custom orders piling up already, so as soon as christmas madness is over i'll have lots more projects, which is cool. oh yeah, i'm starting a zine too. i'm super excited about it, it's gonna rock, i'm planning on having the first issue done by feb 1st hopefully. more updates on that as things develop. ok back to work now. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | CraftyPod podcast | | Subject: | hmmm | | Time: | 10:30 am |
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| i had a dream last night where i went to a fabric store and found a rad purple paisley fabric which i bought, but the fabric was also a snake that was trying to bite me....
maybe my subconscious is telling me to work with only recycled fabrics. or maybe i've just been sewing too much.
oh yeah, i just thought of where the snake part probably came from. my coworker showed me this the other day, pretty freaky. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
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