Threadless: Accepted.... and then rejected.

I submitted this entry to Threadless about a week ago. At the time I thought I was onto a genuine winner, covering as I was the requisite bases of indie nerd, saccharine smiles and fresh fruit referencing. The design is a subtle allusion to the mnemonic used by guitar teachers across the apple eating world, instantly recognisable to those familiar with a six-string, beguiling and entrancing to anyone else (drummers, say).

But then once it went up, lenoircouture said:

"i thought they were the sticks for caramel apples waiting for the apple"

Which hurt a bit. But then imbrilliant said:

"i thought it was pasta."

and shakethesheets said:

"i thought they were chopsticks."

and then, after all that, MadMike twisted the knife by saying:

"I had no friggen idea what this was about."

What a tragedy.
My performance was so ridiculously low I got taken out of the running but two days in. Later I think I saw someone pointing and laughing at me in Costcutter.
If you want to see the whole sorry story, you can click on this below. It's what they give you to put on your blogs and myspaces to get you friends to vote for you, but for me, having lost, it's just a sad reminder of defeat. An advertisement for my failures.

But despite all that, this does represent a milestone: it's the first thing I've ever really made in Illustrator. See that pattern round the sound hole? (The bigger circle, behind the pasta) I made that pattern, all by myself. It's all quite neat and satisfying, but most excitingly it's quick: I sketched this idea on the bus and within an hour of my getting home, it was done and submitted. (Trust me, that's quick.)

All my posts are coming up in facebook now. Isn't that weird?

No sex please.

A sketch of Britt Ekland, from an old Vogue cover.


Symmetry means beauty, I hear, so here we go. Strangely transfixing, isn't she? A bit like a piggy Billie Piper, which is nice.

Give a shit

Some sketches I uploaded whilst I was at work last week. Temping in a really lax office killed my bloggery because when you can theoretically get paid for doing something, you never want to do it for free. As I was essentially free to piss around on the internet all day at work I didn't want to come back to piss around on the internet at home. But then when I was at work I was eternally scared of getting fired for constantly revising BBC news stories, and the comments, in case they came up in some wacky bonus round in the Tuesday pub quiz and not sending the important letters I was asked to send. A fear of confounding my case by appearing to be in the midst of some elaborate other internet-based project and being sent to sort out the stationery cupboard for the next two weeks meant I never really did any blogging. It's a similar logic that led me to saving any toilet action for when I was getting paid to sit still, and going to bed farting and uncomfortable. I guess that's the price of getting paid for doing something you love.

I'm ready for my Spanish holiday this Summer.


This is the reception where I was working. Sometimes I hung out here because the receptionist was nice and sometimes brought in treats like snowballs (those old-fashioned chocolate and marshmallow things, not rounded lumps of crystalline water ice) or lemon drizzle cake (which seems to be rather fashionable recently. Or at least, Charlotte and I made one last week, and then there was a feature on Woman's Hour about them. Does that count as fashionable? I haven't read Vogue or The Face recently, but LDC is probably on both covers).


We got Glastonbury tickets in the end. Sophie here is probably reading about LDC.


The office.


Camberwell Church Gardens, where I ate my LDC and packed lunch.

mailmeart.com

First, I'd like to strart this blog-post with the usual blog-post opening apologies for the recent lack of blog-posts. I have no excuse (clearly I haven't spent the interlude drafting and re-drafting this blog-post opening).

Nor have I any nice annecdotes to fill the gaps. Oxymoronically I'm basically permanently temping, which despite being utterly thrilling and absolutely brimming with hilarious blog-worthy story-stuff, hasn't left me with any annecdotes I want to detail here. This is partly due to a vestigial guilt from my merciless, um, let's say "satire" of my last office placement (which remained up on screen after my departure), and also partly to do with the fact that I 've told everyone in my new office the details of that exact folly. Now they're positively looking forward to me leaving just so that they can see what I write about them all on here (but only for that reason, mind). So if you want to hear my tales of hour long shits on company time or how my office neighbour hums as he types, then ask me in a pub sometime.

One productive thing I have done whilst working here (yes, I'm at work now) other than earning £8 and then spending £10 an hour online is to cover a whole envelope in a doodle. Now this is standard desk jockey stuff I know, but being arrogant I've deemed mine worthy of entrance into the mail art project at mailmeart.com. It's fairly self explanatory: all the entrants get put in an exhibition online, and eventually offline, and there are some prizes too.

Here is my envelope:



And here is the letter I put inside it (I couldn't quite bring myself to put it on the headed paper):