Doodle: Your Friendly Officer Sea Lion

by Ariela

Have you ever found yourself in the unfortunate situation where you related an experience of oppression and no one asked you to corroborate your position with carefully vetted studies?

Have you perhaps expressed genuine anger while discussing repeated infringements on your boundaries and basic humanity, but none of your friends would step up to the plate and tell you to check that unbecoming behavior lest you wreck your argument?

Do you ever find yourself wishing that someone would pick up that slack?

Never fear! Everyone's favorite member of the friendly neighborhood Tone Police is here: Officer Sea Lion!

The Tone Police are one of the great peacekeeping* bodies of debates everywhere, and recent recruit Sea Lion is already distinguishing themself in the line of duty.

Tone Police Officer Sea Lion is a tireless interrogator, ready to ask the same question many times to catch their unwilling interlocuter in a misstep. And of course Officer Sea Lion will never hesitate to hold you to their standard of civil discourse.

*Where "peacekeeping" is defined as maintaining the status quo.

What ever would we do without the Tone Police and Officer Sea Lion? The world will probably never know.

</sarcasm>

Officer Sea Lion was inspired by watching K. Tempest Bradford deal with pushback on Twitter about her Cultural Appropriation Primer.

Officer Sea Lion is under the Creative Commons license, so please feel free to Share and Enjoy with attribution.

New Greeting Card: Yarn Fanatic Greeting Card

by Ariela

Let the yarn devotee in your life know that you support their habit. Send them our new greeting card encouraging them to collect more yarn.

Protip: You could even accompany it with a gift of yarn for extra brownie points.

How it Came to Be

As Terri mentioned, my brain sometimes makes odd sideways leaps that result in art projects. This inspiration did not strike in the course of a conveniently recorded IM conversation, so I can't quite recreate the path I took to get to this. Since it involves yarn, I feel quite comfortable positing that Terri was the inspiration/instigator.

I was bound and determined to keep the two figures on the card gender-neutral. As we stated in the Fiber Artist's Oath, anyone can be a fiber arts devotee.

Like all of our greeting cards, the Yarn Addict card is available singly for $4.00 and as a pack of 6 for $20.00.

New Art Print: Fiber Artist's Oath

by Terri

The oath is the perfect gift for the fiber artist in your life. It's also a great treat for your own craft room wall.

How It Came To Be:

It all started with an IM conversation:

Ariela Housman:	isn't it a shame that geeks never knit and i would have no reason whatsoever to make geeky knitting art
Terri Ash:	Not a single one
Ariela Housman:	.... KNITTER'S OATH!!!! aaaah, why did i never think of this before?!?1

I'm an avid knitter, to the point where I have assembled plans to open a yarn shop.* Naturally, this meant talking to Ariela, and thus the above conversation. Ariela's brain is amazing at making cross-connections, and she'd been working really hard on the SysAdmin's Oath. And so the seeds began sprouting. Since Ariela sews rather than knits, she knew that the theme needed to be expanded. In addition, we wanted to recognize every form of fiber arts we know the geek world embraces - knitting, spinning,** needlepoint, weaving, sewing and crochet. Thus, the Fiber Artist's Oath.

The text was a collaborative effort between the two of us, which we then ran by other fiber artist friends to make sure we hadn't left anything out.*** After quite a bit of culling, we still ended up with the longest oath that we've ever made. Ariela asked me for suggestions for tools to include in the border art, and really managed to fit most of them in. The art is similar to the other oaths on the site, but you will notice a distinct lack of curves and tangles emblematic of the other oaths.**** This is because after making both the full Cordthulhu and the mini one contained in the SA's Oath, Ariela was tired of trying to create tangles that look both aesthetically pleasing and pleasingly random and balanced. This is quite the difficult task, and we don't get art if we push the artist too hard. It's possible that there might have been tangled yarn if Ariela hadn't been banging her head against the other art, but the process was making her more than a little itchy. So in the end, the art is comprised of the tools and raw materials that fiber artists use.

The Fiber Artist's Oath is available for $45. 

*You'll start to notice a theme around here - neither Ariela nor I are very good at limiting ourselves to one project at a time. I'm a little better at it, which is why I'm the resident killjoy for Ariela's grand dreams.

**That person in the back of the panel with the weird rotating thing making thread - they're spinning.

***Turns out we had - neither of us had thought of repetitive stress injuries.

****You'd think they belonged here - yarn gets tangled a LOT.

New Greeting Card: Take Care of Yourself

by Ariela

A spoon-clutching little dragon is now ready to help you tell people you care about to care for themselves!

How it came to be:

A little while ago my friend Caitlín Rosberg remarked,

Sometimes I just horde my spoons in my fists like a treasure-hungry dragon and wave my hands at the screen going "nooooo noooo they're all mine noooo you can't have them."

(Spoon Theory is a method of explaining the expenditure of mental resources. It was coined by Christine Miserandino to explain how living with chronic illness depletes one's mental and emotional resources.)

Because my brain works the way it does, this sounded like perfect fodder for a greeting card admonishing the recipient to take care of themselves. After much doodling, this doleful little critter emerged.

I know dragons in various Asian mythologies don't tend to be portrayed as hoarding creatures. But the English-speaking SFF world is already over-saturated with European mythology and I am not interested in perpetuating that trend. But a soup spoon, a wooden spoon, and a measuring spoon are not much of a hoard. And voila!

Like all of our greeting cards, the Take Care of Yourself card is available singly for $4.00 and as a pack of 6 for $20.00.

Dispelling two common myths about calligraphy

by Ariela

When I tell people I am a professional calligrapher, I get a lot of different responses, everything from "Wow!" to "That's a thing?" But two comments I hear the most are "I could never do that, my handwriting is terrible!" and "You must have a lot of patience." 

Today I would like to put these misconceptions out of their misery. Or at least try.

Misconception number one: you must have good handwriting to be a calligrapher

I can't speak for all calligraphers, but when I do calligraphy, I use a completely different process than when I am writing anything else. My equipment is different, the way I hold the pen is different, and the motions I make are entirely different. I have a sneaking suspicion that if my brain were scanned while I was writing a shopping list vs. calligraphing a text, different parts of my brain would light up.

My calligraphy is relentlessly regular. My actual handwriting is actually all over the map. When I am writing slowly it is reasonably neat, but when I write quickly it gets sloppy very quickly. Here is an example of something I jotted down for myself recently:

Yes, I scribbled the date and location of Troi and Riker's wedding on the back of an envelope.

Looks totally different than my calligraphic hands. (Honestly it looks like a combo of my parents handwriting.)

If you want to learn to do calligraphy, it doesn't matter what your handwriting looks like. You must be able to hold a pen for extended periods; hold your hand steady; draw a short, straight line; and draw a curve. If you can do that, you can learn calligraphy. Some people, for many good reasons, cannot do these things. And while this might also lead them to have less legible handwriting, poor handwriting is not the reason they wouldn't be able to do calligraphy. Correlation not being causality and all that jazz.

Misconception number two: you must be really patient to do calligraphy

I have a hard time not scoffing whenever I hear this one. I'm a very impatient person. Perhaps not more than the average person, but I can only see what goes on inside my own head. Really, I am not patient. What I am is tenacious, perfectionist, meticulous, and stubborn as all get-out. If all  you see is me sitting, making stroke after deliberate stroke with my pen, yeah, it might look like patience. But it's being fueled by something very different.

In one respect I suppose it is kind of true that you must be patient, in that calligraphy is not a craft that you can pick up quickly. I had been doing calligraphy as a hobby for seven years before I apprenticed to a professional. I went through 3 months of apprenticeship before I was even allowed to do the smallest bits of jobs for clients. I did small professional jobs for two years before I started doing bigger ones. Even now it takes a while to complete any one piece.

So yeah, I spend a lot of time perfecting my craft. But so does any artist. Or author. Or athlete. And probably lots of other professions starting with other letters. But I bet that Yo-Yo Ma, N.K. Jemisin, and Serena Williams don't get told "Wow, you must have so much patience" in response to their explanations of their careers, even before they became famous.

So just because you are an impatient person, don't think that you cannot do calligraphy. Sometimes it will be hard and boring, yes, but if you want it enough, it will be worth getting through that time to get to the reward at the end. 

How My Sinuses Feel in Allergy Season

by Ariela

Allergy season has arrived early, and this is how my head feels.