Melissa Cameron – In Geometry I Trust

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Hi all, my laptop is still at the fixers so I don’t have most of my programs available, but I’ve been keeping busy with an iPhone game and Microsoft Excel (that’s a story for another post). While I wait, I went to the Gallery open of my friend Melissa Cameron, a jewellery designer. Her exhibition is called “In Geometry I Trust”, and it’s currently on show at a chic, trendy Waterloo gallery, one of many art galleries at the 2 Danks St Galleries.
 
mel-art1

 

What: Contemporary Jewllery Exhibition
By: Melissa Cameron – “In Geometry I Trust”
Who: Studio 20/17
Where: 6B/2 Danks St, Waterloo NSW 2017
When: 28th – 17th March, from 11am – 6pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays

Melissa is a friend of mine from Melbourne, and her jewellery designs are quite distinct. Her inspiration is from architecture and the ideas of geometry that comes within that discipline, so her work looks very detailed and delicate. However, Melissa’s not a “typical” jewellery deisgner – her work is all hand-made, and straddles jewellery design and fine art, so not all of her work is wearable. The work that is meant to be wearable, fragile and complex as they may look, are actually quite durable.

 

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Here's a necklace from one her exhibition, which is for sale there.


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Here is more work from her line, which shows of her style quite well.


 

I don’t wear jewellery much, but I find Melissa’s work a breath of fresh air. She has a style that is quite unique to her, and since Studio 20/17 is a gallery that showcases a number of contemporary jewellery designers, you can see a wide range of jewellery designs here. Comparing and contrasting the different styles, ideas and motivations behind each of the jewellery designers is a lot of fun. Since nearly all of the jewellery designs are for sale, jewellery enthusiasts can also go shopping-mad there.

 

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Outside Studio 20/17. There are other small art galleries all around.


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Some of the other jewellery design works. There were heaps of work by other designers there.


 

You can see more of Melissa’s work at her website. There’s many works of hers that aren’t on display at this gallery, and my favourites are always the intricate non-wearable ones like the ones below. I imagine I’d like to hang one of these on my wall!

 

mel-sieve2010

The Sieve, from 2010


The Fishes, 2011. Antique 800 silver platter, stainless steel. 25 x 100 x 40mm


 

Anyway, the rest of the gallery was also quite interesting. There’s many, many galleries in the 2 Danks St complex, and since we arrived early to the exhibition, we wandered around looking at the other galleries and the artists on showcase. We saw some really wonderful and innovative artwork there! All-in-all, it was the first time I’ve beem to 2 Danks St, and it was a super-fun experience!

 

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Melissa at her Artist's Talk yesterday


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Melissa talks more about her work again.


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Melissa's necklace from an earlier line in action!

Grey Totoro – Free Crochet Pattern

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Hi folks. This week my laptop is in the repair shop, so I’m sitting at a borrowed laptop while trying to plug the latest music single release from my friend Yunyu. It’s Dorothy (I wrote about the teaser trailer here), the first single from her Twisted Tales album, which is a music-manga collaboration between Yunyu and myself.

The official release date for Dorothy is 2nd March, 2012, but pop-culture sites Madman Entertainment, CoolShite and ToneDeaf has had an exclusive, early look at the full music video. You can click on the links I just wrote up, or you can wait until next Friday, when I do my full post on this project.

This week, as promised, I give you the grey Totoro pattern I had from 2 weeks ago. I have the blue and white Totoro patterns here, and given the way this is going, I guess I’ll have to create a new page for “free patterns” very soon.

 
All Totoro head


 

Grey Totoro Pattern

Here’s a list of what I used to make this crochet. It’s not a definite list, so feel free to use whatever you have, as long as it’s appropriate. It’s crocheted in the round, like most amigurumi, so only basic crochet skills are required.

NB. This pattern is created by me, so please give a link back to me if you want to use it or if you want to sell your crochet. Please give credit where it’s due. I should also that I don’t own the copyright to these characters – obviously Studio Ghibli does.

  • White, black and blue 8 ply yarn
  • 4mm crochet hook
  • Two pairs of 3mm black safety eyes – 6060 from Etsy is a good place to buy these
  • Large sewing needle, to sew the bits and pieces together

 

Crochet Abbreviations

Here are a list of the abbreviations I use, and what they mean. These are pretty standard, so if you know how to crochet, this won’t be hard to decipher:

  • ch – chain
  • sc – single chain
  • dec – decrease
  • * – beginning/end of a repeating part of the pattern

 
 
greytotoro1
 

Grey Totoro Body (Make 1, grey)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch*, repeat 6 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 6 times (18 stitches)
Rnd 4 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 2*, repeat 6 times (24 stitches)
Rnd 5 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 3*, repeat 3 times (30 stitches)
Rnd 6 – 10 – sc (30 stitches)
Rnd 11 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 6, 2 sc in next stitch, sc 7*, repeat 2 times (34 stitches)
Rnd 12 – sc (34 stitches)
Rnd 13 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 8, 2 sc in next stitch, sc 7*, repeat 2 times (38 stitches)
Rnd 14 – 23 – sc (38 stitches)
Rnd 24 – *dec 1, sc3*, repeat 8 times (30 stitches)

Stuff the body now, and add 3 mm safety eyes
Rnd 25 – *dec 1 in back loops ONLY*, repeat 15 times (15 stitches)
Rnd 26 – *dec 1*, repeat 8 times (6 stitches)

Bind off, and thread the yarn through the top of the Totoro (if you can), so you can flatten the base. Using a sewing needle, sew a few white yarn stitches around the safety eyes. Then using black yarn, sew the nose on in-between the eyes, then sew the dot mouth on.

 
 
greytotoro2
 

Grey Totoro Belly (Make 1, white)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch*, repeat 6 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 6 times (18 stitches)
Rnd 4 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 2*, repeat 6 times (24 stitches)
Rnd 5 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 3*, repeat 6 times (30 stitches)
Rnd 6 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 4*, repeat 6 times (36 stitches)

Bind off, and sew the white belly onto the bottom front of the Totoro. Using blue yarn, sew seven “arrows” on its chest.

 
 
greytotoro3
 

Grey Totoro Ears (Make 2, grey)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 4 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 2 times (6 stitches)
Rnd 3 – 6 – sc (6 stitches)

Bind off, and sew onto the top of the head.

 
 
greytotoro4
 

Grey Totoro Arms and Tail (Make 3, grey)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 3 times (9 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 2*, repeat 3 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 4 – 7 – sc (12 stitches)
Rnd 8 – *dec 1, sc1*, repeat 4 times (8 stitches)

Bind off, and stuff lightly for the arms. For the tail, stuff heavily. Sew onto the sides and back of the body.

 

And here we have another 2 pics of the three Totoros!

 
 
alltotoro_walk
alltotoro_line
 

Recommendation: Tuesdays With Morrie

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Hi folks. This week I managed to get an iPhone 4S, which was replete with battery problems, until it turned out that it wasn’t the fault of the iPhone. No sooner have I gotten it fixed, then I had problems with my new laptop overheating… I am just plagued with tech problems all this week! Somehow I managed to finish pencilling Chapter 3 of Small Shen, as well as some of Chapter 4, so it’s not all bad news. I hope to finish the Chapter 4 pencils by early March, so I can get started on the inks and onto the middle of the book.

Apart from that, this week I was also fully into… Linsanity!! Somehow, even with all the tech problems, I still managed to watch all the videos of Jeremy Lin’s game-winning streak on Youtube. I was tempted to recommend Linsanity for this week’s recommendation, but pulled back because I’m hardly an expert on the NBA – everything I learned about basketball I learned from Slam Dunk. I may not feel confident discussing basketball, but everyone is getting behind his inspirational story, and the flood of feel-good vibes is leading me to recommend a pretty famous self-help book: Tuesdays with Morrie.

 
tuesdayswithmorrie

Tuesdays With Morrie
(2002, Mitch Albom)

You may already have heard of this book – it was a massive bestseller back in the day, and a friend of mine recommended it to me. It’s one of those books that isn’t hard to read, is accessible, and most of all, is such a quick and uplifting read that you absolutely cannot say no to it.

 

Plot
Tuesdays With Morrie is a non-fiction book written by Mitch Albom, a former sports journalist who has fond memories of one of his university professors, the titular Morrie. Mitch’s life and career was just coasting along when he heard that his former professor was in the grips of a terminal illness, and only had a few months to live. Morrie taught Mitch (and many other students) a lot about life when he was younger, so he decides to visit Morrie regularly in his last month, to document the man’s ideas, beliefs and teachings. What resulted from these trips was the best-selling, life-affirming, “self-help” book Tuesdays With Morrie.

 

 

Why I Recommend this Book
I hesitate to call this book a “self-help” book, because while I like self-help books, this one goes a little bit further than this. It hasn’t got any bullet-point checklists, any motivational mantras or any “life plans”. It is written in the simple manner of a story, where the writer (Mitch Albom) explains his brief-but-memorable history with Morrie, discovers years later that his professor dying of a terminal illness, and then goes off to chat with Morrie every Tuesday until his death. That’s it. It’s not written in a way that’s meant to be bombastic or emotional. It’s simply the words of a very wise man, who has lived a great life and inspired many people.

It’s also not a particularly long book, which can only be a good thing. These days, if you recommend a “great and inspiring” book to someone and it happens to be more than an inch thick, people will sigh and look like they’re on the verge of being hit on the head with the likes of War and Peace. It seems that people want inspiring things to read, but don’t want to work too hard to absorb those words of wisdom, even though 30 years ago they may have wanted to. It seems that a few things have changed since then, but what hasn’t changed is that everyone still wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die. Well, reading Tuesdays With Morrie won’t kill you or even kill much of your time, but it may certainly offer a few pearls of wisdom, if not an inspirational story along the lines of Linsanity.

There’s not much more that I can say about this book, except for an anecdote from a few years back. An acquaintance of mine once asked me for a book recommendaton, saying that she wanted to read something “meaningful”. I asked her to be specific, and she said “no fiction”. I pressed her on her interests, and she said she didn’t want to read anything about history, religion, spirituality, sociology, psychology, science, philosophy, anthropology, or anything that ends with a -logy. But, she wanted to read something “meaningful”. Well, guess what I recommended? Tuesdays With Morrie is a book that manages to fill that tiny void beautifully.

Blue and White Totoro – Free Crochet Pattern

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This week I made good headway on Small Shen, and is halfway through Chapter 3 pencils. If you’re looking for some art updates from this last post I did, I did an interview on sigmatestudio.com where I showed some finished art samples from Chapter 1. Thanks to Stephen for the interview!

This week, I get to put up another free crochet pattern, adding to my budding pattern collection which so far includes the Red Angry Bird and the White Angry Bird. It’s a fan-favourite, the Blue and White Totoros from the seminal Studio Ghibli animations My Neighbour Totoro. If you’re a Hayao Miyazaki fan, you’ll know and love these furry critters. I also have the “large” grey Totoro pattern, which is here.

 

Totoros Fishing

My Neighbour Totoro, with Mei and Satsuki, the heroines.



 

These crochet patterns are quite small, and you can see the size of the Totoros in relation to my hand. The reason why they’re so small is because I don’t want to crochet large amigurumis, since they take up a lot of time. Since the giant grey Totoro is 38 stitches at its widest point, it makes sense that the smaller Totoros are… small. Either way, these won’t take long to do!

 
alltotoro
 

Blue and White Totoro Pattern

Here’s a list of what I used to make this crochet. It’s not a definite list, so feel free to use whatever you have, as long as it’s appropriate. It’s crocheted in the round, like most amigurumi, so only basic crochet skills are required.

NB. This pattern is created by me, so please give a link back to me if you want to use it or if you want to sell your crochet. Please give credit where it’s due. I should also that I don’t own the copyright to these characters – obviously Studio Ghibli does.

  • White, black and blue 8 ply yarn
  • 4mm crochet hook
  • Two pairs of 3mm black safety eyes – 6060 from Etsy is a good place to buy these
  • Large sewing needle, to sew the bits and pieces together

 

Crochet Abbreviations

Here are a list of the abbreviations I use, and what they mean. These are pretty standard, so if you know how to crochet, this won’t be hard to decipher:

  • ch – chain
  • sc – single chain
  • dec – decrease
  • * – beginning/end of a repeating part of the pattern

 
 
whitetotoro1
 

White Totoro Pattern

White Totoro Body (Make 1, white)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch*, repeat 6 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 3-4 – sc (12 stitches)
Rnd 5 – *2 sc in next stitch, 3 sc*, repeat 3 times (15 stitches)
Rnd 6-9 – sc (15 stitches)

Stuff the body now, and add 3 mm safety eyes
Rnd 10 – *dec 1, 3 sc*, repeat 3 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 11 – *dec 1 through BACK loops only*, repeat 6 times (6 stitches)

Bind off, and using a sewing needle, sew a few white yarn stitches around the safety eyes.

 
whitetotoro
 

White Totoro Ears (Make 2, white)

Rnd 1 – Ch 5
Rnd 2 – sc, then ch 1
Rnd 3 – sc

Bind off, then using a sewing needle, sew the longer edges together to make a thin tube.Sew one end together, then sew the other end to the top of the Totoro, to make the long thin ears.

 

White Totoro Tail (Make 1, white)

Ch 2, 4 sc (Magic Ring method) and then sew onto the Totoro’s butt area.
Done right, this will help prop upBaby Totoro

 
 
bluetotoro1
 

Blue Totoro Pattern

Blue Totoro Body (Make 1, blue)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch*, repeat 6 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 6 times (18 stitches)
Rnd 4 – 6 – sc (18 stitches)
Rnd 7 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 5*, repeat 3 times (21 stitches)
Rnd 8 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 6*, repeat 3 times (24 stitches)
Rnd 9 – 13 – sc (24 stitches)

Stuff the body now, and add 3 mm safety eyes
Rnd 14 – *dec 1 in back loops ONLY*, repeat 12 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 15 – *dec 1*, repeat 6 times (6 stitches)

Bind off, and thread the yarn through the Totoro. Using a sewing needle, sew a few white yarn stitches around the safety eyes. Then using black yarn, sew the nose on.

 

Belly (Make 1, white)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch*, repeat 6 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 6 times (18 stitches)
Rnd 4 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 2*, repeat 6 times (24 stitches)

Bind off, and sew the white belly onto the bottom front of the Totoro. Using blue yarn, sew three “arrows” on its chest.

 
bluetotoro
 

Blue Totoro Arms, Ears and Tail (Make 5, blue)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 4 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 2 times (6 stitches)
Rnd 3 – 6 – sc (6 stitches)
** For the arms, sc for two extra rows **

Bind off, and stuff with a small bit of stuffing. Sew the arms, ears and tail onto the proper places of the Totoro.

 

And Viola! Here you have the two small Totoros, next to my hand to show their sizes.

 
blue and white totoro