hEY

I am still alive.

I promise.

Crazy dream

My nephew keeps drawing this.

I don't know what it is. But it has several transformations. Sometimes the mouth is on sideways, and sometimes there is nothing written on its forehead. And most of the time it doesn't have a friend. It never has the same amount of legs.

Lately, he's been having what he refers to as a "crazy dre-eem" in which robots come to our living room and steal all of his toys and his Grammy, who ends up melted in the garage.

Crazy dream indeed.

School Yells

I found this in a box of stuff I got from my neighbor's auction. The Amsterdam High School mascot was apparently a Dutchman. And the colors were black and red.

If you click on the image, you can see it larger, so I'm not going to retype the entire thing, but some of my favorites are below, for various reasons.

Suzy Q and truckin' on down

Come on Amsterdam

Go to town

I always wondered about "go to town" (on the sheet, it says "got to town," but the "t" is erased. Sort of). What does "go to town" actually mean? I know it's always got some kind of either violent or sexual connotation when the old timers say it, but I always wonder where it came from. As in WHY it has that connotation. My grandfather used to say it. He would say it about people eating fast, someone getting blown up / defeated / murdered violently in a movie. I really still don't get it but I'll pretend.

Big chief, Little Chief,

Papoose Squaw

Amsterdam High School

Rah ! Rah ! Rah !

What does this have to do with Dutchmen exactly?

Signal Shift,

1-2-3-4-5

Come on you Dutchmen

Skin em' alive

Do Dutchmen skin people alive?

I'm assuming (and this is Amsterdam, so that could be my problem) that since the town is called Amsterdam, the obvious conclusion would be that the "Dutchman" as a mascot comes from having the town named after the city in the Netherlands, but as the Dutch cut diamonds and grow tulips and stuff, stereotypically anyway, which is where we get mascots, it doesn't make sense.

I googled "dutch papoose" and the only thing that came up that could possibly connect the two was a dutch tanker that was later renamed the Papoose, which had a habit of wrecking into things.

Unless it has something to do with the Dutch colonization of what's now NYC, and the American Indians that lived on Manhattan Island, and somebody back in the day morphed them.

I wouldn't put it past them.

Illustration Friday: Caution

This is Adelaide. She likes Pea Soup.

She always burns her tongue.

{the shop is painted. pictures coming soon}

My Hand-bound books

This is probably my favorite of all the coptic-stitched books I've made. It's really rather large, and I know it's going to make somebody an excellent sewing journal. There are 100 pages in the book (20 in each signature) and the signatures are wrapped in colored paper to divide the book into sections. This and eight others are left in my Etsy shop.

Illustration Friday: Wrapped

2nd week in a row for me completing and posting my Illustration Friday. It makes me feel good to just make something for fun. I don't know why I immediately thought of swings being wrapped up too high to swing them when "wrapped" should have inspired me to illustrate presents or candy, but this is what happened.

2010 is 1971 and that makes me happy.

Disclaimer: This post is very cheesy, and though I usually don't do cheese, sometimes it is necessary to indulge the urge to be happy and spread sunshine.

Friends are good. Especially the kind of friend who can go to a yard sale and see something and think, "Oh wow. Cindy would love that." And that's the kind of friend Shaun is.

Yesterday, he went to a yard sale and found me a calendar from 1971. It's a cloth calendar with three cats on it, and it is absolutely ridiculous how me it is. It immediately went up on the wall in my newly-painted, almost-finished, almost organized office space/studio space/press room.

Though it's fabulous all on its own, and though it makes my inner Cindy want to do cartwheels that the outer Cindy cannot hope to do, the coolest thing about it is that 1971 is the same as 2010. What luck!

Oh, happy day.

Shaun also hung up my Cindy Train for me the other night, above the door leading out into the showroom (which is not finished yet, but should be soon.)

Get on board!

We were cleaning out the games closet one night (still not done) when we found this train. I initially thought that it would have been Bobby's, and never expected it to have any name on it, but when we pulled it from its dusty bag (my grandmother loved to pack everything in plastic bags), not only was it in perfect condition, but it was also very obviously mine.

I now have a new theory about the place from where my love for all things illustrated in the style of Alexander Girard and his contemporaries comes. It's from being a baby with this train on my wall. I imagine that I used to love looking at it. Though I don't know why the baby has to chase the train with all the big kids hanging out the window. Or why the baby has no pants on, but is carrying a suitcase.