The Blue Night Blog

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Summary: with new pricing and display policies, the US Goodwill charity risks alienating the very collectors and upcycler artists it has been using to gentrify its brand identity. When I was a kid, thrift stores were forbidden territory. My mother had a not-unfounded horror of thrift stores as vectors of disease and infestation*. She also…

Read More Goodwill Loses Relevance?
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Okay, now I can share the insanity that helped lower my bank account and rebuild my bead supply. In late March and late April of this year, I was lucky enough to buy the combined bead troves of two amazing women. I know their names but am protecting their privacy and legacy. One is in…

Read More Bead Hoard!
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Swarovski crystal (and its imitators) are having a resurgence in fashion right now, in gem-embellished clothing and shoes, jewelry, fingernails, and even architectural elements. But Swarovski…the real thing…is rather pricey. The cheapest I’ve found is around $3 to $6 for 144 pieces of 1 to 2mm ‘flatbacks’, the glass gems most easily fastened onto surfaces…

Read More Harvesting Heat-Fixed Crystals
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Nineteen years ago I moved into the lower-rent end of a pricey Phoenix subdivision, courtesy of dual incomes and the dot-com bubble bursting at just the right time. The backyard went from Bermuda grass and gum trees to a minimalist sweep of gravel, Indonesian statues, and oleander. It’s always been the stepping stone to something…

Read More New Walls, New Windows
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A heads-up, dear readers. The Blue Night Blog will be undergoing some much-needed updates in the next few weeks. So if things look a little strange, or the blog is offline, don’t worry. I’ll be back to annoy and dazzle you soon enough. What’s in store? Changes in art: I’ll be updating my RL gallery…

Read More New Things On The Horizon
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Around lunchtime last week, I looked up at the sky and thought, “Hey, those look a LOT like wall clouds. And that sky has a color I haven’t seen since Portales*. Oh, look, that hubcap-shaped cloud is…” Rotating. Over the next 45 seconds, this elegant funnel dropped out of the clouds. It skimmed northeastward, the…

Read More Accidental Stormchasing
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I’ve been so busy with art and a new manufacturing job that I have completely neglected the Blue Night blog. Sorry, folks, I’ll try to carve some time out for bloggy stuff. In the meantime, I really love my job. First, a PSA: If you know someone going through a traumatic and dangerous breakup/divorce/etc, make…

Read More Rants from a neglected blog
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I guess 2019 will be The Year of the Hat for me. I love beading. I like hats. Don’t know why I didn’t stumble into hatbands before, but I’m here now. The Alexander Hatband was commissioned a little over a year ago by a good friend, a New Zealand-born sculptor moving away from Arizona after…

Read More Alexander Hatband: Finished!
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The vanity publishing industry has taken a beating the last few years, due to bad publicity (Tate Publishing!) and the ease of self publishing. But there are still plenty of suckers out there so uninformed, lazy, or paranoid enough to make easy prey for the remaining vanity publishers. What’s vanity publishing? In short, a vanity…

Read More Local Interest and Vanity Publishing
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I make books, many of them out of cloth. Making a needle book is something that had never occurred to me before last weekend. This is the result: a 7×4.5×1.75″ vintage-inspired fabric needle book. Needle books are a popular trend among the craft and home-sewing crowd. Here’s a good tutorial for one that did inspire…

Read More Needle Book
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Finished! Inspired by Tarnhelm legends, the myths of Hermes, and the Celtic (not Viking) winged helmet, this wearable art cap softly shimmers with bronze ribbon and metallic bead accents. I had a few false starts with the beadwork, and I’ll be getting a clearer picture of the front. But in general, I’m really happy with…

Read More Dieselpunk Valkyrie cap
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I live near a fairly affluent area with generations of rich teenagers and retirees. This means that Good Stuff appears in my local thrift stores. For the past few years, I’ve been collecting interesting fabric hats, with an eye to adapting them into gonzo wearable art pieces. The second* fiber art project of 2019 involves…

Read More First look: Dieselpunk Valkyrie
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I didn’t stop making book art sculptures in 2018. I just held off documenting them on this blog for a while, mostly for time constraints. Rocketship 1 -5  2.75×1.75×1.5” See more here: http://www.cranehanabooks.com/blog/2017/12/18/rocketship-fiber-art-books/ This edition of five accordion-fold books celebrates the (first?) Space Race, that of the 1950s and 1960s. Six pages, with title and colophon on…

Read More 2018 Book Arts & Text-Based Art
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How many times have we heard ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness’? At best that’s a warning to value the non-financial things in life. At worst, it’s a ploy to convince poor people to be content with their lot. Money *can* buy opportunity, or the chance to maximize opportunity. It can buy time. Fox mouthpieces mocked Alexandra…

Read More Art On A Kitchen Table
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Matthew Whitaker, the new Acting Attorney General, may act on his threat to stop the Mueller investigation by bleeding off its funding. Whitaker has been chasing a state judicial appointment since Trump got into office, and doing it by dangling himself coyly on TV and social media so that The Orange One will ‘notice’ him…

Read More A GoFundMe For Mueller?
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Well, podcasts, videos, websites, merch, etc. I’ve added two sites to my Links sidebar under ‘Webcomics & Podcasts’: ‘Stuff To Blow Your Mind’ and ‘Overly Sarcastic Productions’. Stuff is a deeply nerdy and affectionate podcast look at fiction, history, and myth…through a scientific and scholarly lens. It’s great for any fiction writer wanting to get into…

Read More Two Amazing Podcasts For Writers
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This single strand necklace: Just became this multi-strand freeform necklace, with the addition of two more chains interwoven with the first. There might be some more orange beaded flowers, but it’s mostly finished. Maybe. This is what happens when I don’t get rid of art projects: they get rebooted. Happy Halloween!

Read More Orange Orchids (rebooted)