Infest the Waters: A blog about design, life and making stuff

Renovation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wallpaper Scraper

after wallpaper scraping
By On February 19, 2012 In House Renovation, Life With No Comments Permanent Link to Renovation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wallpaper ScraperPermalink

One reason I haven’t been making all that much stuff lately is because, shortly after the new year, I embarked on another project.  I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “My God, what is wrong with this woman?  How many projects does she need to have going at one time?”  The answer probably falls somewhere between 5 and 10.  Seriously.  Otherwise I feel like I’m being lazy.  No doubt it’s a character flaw.

So here’s what I’m doing.  I’m renovating my back bedroom.  It’s the last bedroom that needs to be redone, and I will be psyched to have all the rooms–save for the bathroom–finished on the second floor.  My house is old, so the typical things that need to be done in each room are taping and spackling, painting, refinishing floors, and running electrical to add outlets.  But before all of this can happen, there’s the wallpaper scraping.  And after the wallpaper scraping, there’s more wallpaper scraping.  And just when you think you’re done, you remember that the ceilings have wallpaper on them, too.  And then you wonder, “Why the fuck would anyone WALLPAPER THE CEILING?”  (I’m told that this was common practice earlier in the 20th century, but really, unless you’re suffering from a severe case of poor judgment or recently had a lobotomy, why on earth would you choose to wallpaper the ceiling?)

Continue Reading →

The Burden of Making Stuff

Tandem Bicycle Notecards
By On February 9, 2012 In Life, Making Stuff With No Comments Permanent Link to The Burden of Making StuffPermalink

Now that I’ve embarked on this new plan to make more stuff, I find myself at a crossroads that I’ve come to before.  As someone who’s not terribly into accumulating stuff (even cool, handmade stuff), I find myself asking the question, “Why am I making this?”  Last week, I got sucked into the vicious cycle of surfing around Etsy and alternating between feeling tremendously inspired by the things I find on there and feeling excruciatingly awful about myself because it seems as though everything I come up with has already been done.  The latter feeling is a slight variation on how I used to feel when I was painting growing up–as though every good concept for a painting had already been painted, so why even bother?

Of course, this kind of thinking is totally useless, especially if you’d prefer to spend your days doing something productive, instead of just balling yourself up in a corner and feeling like you’ve never had an original thought in your life.  But I think it does point to a larger question:  What’s my motivation for making stuff?

Continue Reading →

Illustrate 2012: January

Illustrate 2012: January 2012
By On January 31, 2012 In Illustration With 1 Comment Permanent Link to Illustrate 2012: JanuaryPermalink

I have a cat problem in my neighborhood.  Or rather, I have a human problem that has caused an abundance of feral cats in my neighborhood.  You see, my neighbor has set up a kind of a cat hotel on his front porch.  He doesn’t do the responsible thing and make sure the cats are spayed or neutered, but he provides shelter and food for them.  As a result, we have a feral cat problem in my neighborhood.  They regularly defecate in my vegetable garden beds and my front yard.  It’s not as bad as it was a couple of years ago, when the front of my house smelled like the barn I grew up down the street from, but believe you me, it’s still bad.  Very bad.

I used to love cats.  I even subscribed to Cat Fancy magazine in middle school.  But now I have come to loathe them, and I am not the least bit sad when my German Shepherd catches one in the backyard.  Really.  I still like other people’s cats (okay, except maybe Elsa, who’s just plain ornery), but the feral cats need to go.

Tangentially related, I have launched a project for 2012.  Inspired by TubaDan’s song-a-month project in 2011, I have decided to complete an illustration a month for 2012.  My plan is to do all the illustrations in pen and ink on high-quality watercolor paper.  I have managed to get the first month in just under the wire, and I feel like it needs a bit of explanation.  But first, here it is.

Continue Reading →

Crafting a Wedding

DSC_0147
By On January 31, 2012 In Design, Life, Making Stuff With 1 Comment Permanent Link to Crafting a WeddingPermalink

Last October, I got married.  Like a lot of stuff in our lives, my fiancé–now husband–and I didn’t want to do things like everyone else.  Specifically, we didn’t want to feed into the wedding-industrial complex that says you need to buy, buy, buy and spend, spend, spend for an event that represents only several hours–albeit several wonderfully amazing hours–of your life.  It’s a racket, really.  So we set to work crafting a wedding that was about us and not stuff.  As you might expect, this meant making a whole lot of things for the wedding, often from reclaimed/reused items.

While we were planning the wedding, a number of people commented that I should be blogging about all the stuff we were doing to make our wedding as sustainable as possible, so that other people could see how it can be done and be inspired to do the same.  The problem was that, while that sounded great in theory, I really didn’t have a whole lot of extra time to be doing something like that because, well, you know, I was planning a wedding.  So instead, I figured I’d save it all up until some later date to share with the world.  That day has come.  I invite you to take a little trip down recent-memory lane with me and see how we put together a handmade wedding that was about us–not stuff.  (Fair Warning: This post is a little long, so if weddings aren’t your thing, you might want to stop right here.  And if you don’t want the details but like wedding eye candy, you can just scroll through the pictures.)

Continue Reading →

A New Year, A New Website

By On January 17, 2012 In Life, Making Stuff With No Comments Permanent Link to A New Year, A New WebsitePermalink

Welcome to my new website and shiny new blog.  I’m hoping this will become a place to share with you new projects that I’m working on, as well as thoughts on things in the title of this blog–design, life and making stuff.  I’m not really into New Year’s Resolutions, so let’s just say that one of my goals for 2012 is to make more stuff.  After becoming a crafting maniac for the wedding back in October (and oddly enjoying it…what does that say about me?), I realized what was missing from my life: making stuff.  So again before Christmas I started making gifts for friends and family.

I find that making things is a real stress reliever for me, in addition to the satisfaction I get from being able to point to something and say, “I made that.”  I also like being able to handcraft things I need or want instead of feeding into our mass-produced consumer culture.  It felt good to give gifts that had been crafted out of reused materials from Ben’s house or the newly-opened Resource Exchange, and it was gratifying to see people’s positive responses to receiving these gifts (either that or they were just being nice).  It seems like the handmade/crafting movement has really been taking off in recent years, so what I’m doing isn’t really anything new, but hopefully it will be a little inspiring to whomever happens to wander by this blog.

I’m looking forward to getting going.  I hope you’ll join me on the journey.