merch « Nina Paley's Blog

Evolution of a pin design

First I wanted it to be 1.25″ tall, and a cut-out shape:

But this would snag on clothes, and bend. So I came up with this:

But it looks like a bottle opener. Plus the Chinese pin-making company emailed me back that a cut-out like this would have to be at least 2″ long. So instead of cut-out details I designed for 1.5″ hard enamel:

But then I thought to make the details shiny metal, and the main area color, with a thicker outline that would make the pin more stable:

But then I thought, why not make the details another color, with gold outlines:

But then I thought, hey why not put a sun in there, since the Great Mother gives birth to the Sun:

Then I made a bunch of different Sun designs, finally settling on this one:

Et voila:

MotherSun_Pin

Except the sun shape needed just a little bit of softening, so I exported it as a PNG, re-imported it to Moho (where I’ve been doing all this designing), and auto-traced it. Et voila:

And that’s what I hope to have made in China, until I change my mind again.

ONE DAY LATER: I changed my mind again. Now She’s a little stouter and has crescent instead of full moons. I made so many slight modifications to the shape I started to go crazy trying to decide, because each had its strengths and weaknesses. Eventually I had to just commit to one, so here’s what I just ordered 200 pins of:

New “Prehistoric Goddess/Female Figures” Quilts

These and more at the Seder-Masochism Merchandise Empire.

Angel O’ Death Quilts

Finally available for sale at the Seder-Masochism Merchandise Empire.

Bee Goddess shirts

The Bee Goddess from The Golden Calf (Return of the Goddess) is available on Teespring shirts until September 17. All proceeds support me and the Seder-Masochism project! (You can also make a tax-deductible donation and get your name in the credits.)

Chad Gadya embroidermation finished at last!

After a little over a year and a half, and many interruptions, we finally finished our embroidermated short, Chad Gadya. While we were working on it (actually I was working, Theo was procrastinating) this other embroidered short came out, but there are differences. Thanks to Theodore Gray’s stitchcoding in Mathematica, we weren’t restricted by (invariably crappy) off-the-shelf software. This allowed us to automate beautiful iridescent stitches and preserve them from frame to frame, so the resulting animation really looks like moving embroidery.

Every single embroidered frame you see here is available for sale, signed and numbered and one-of-a-kind. Only 9 months ’til Passover!

Chad Gadya will function as a sort of “intermission” in my feature film Seder-Masochism, marking the end of the Passover meal but just the beginning of the Israelites’ trials in the desert.

Update: Theo’s post on the technical side of stitchcoding embroidermation.

“It took a while to get all this code right, but of course it’s crucial that it cover every possible case, because when you’re doing animation, it’s not about getting one frame right, it’s about having an automated process that always gets every frame right, not just once, but every time there is an iteration of the animation requiring a re-render of the frames. We must have generated tens of thousands of frames (just generated the files, not actually stitched them!) before it was all looking good.” Theodore Gray

Update 2: All the stitching files we made for this are Free (CC-BY-SA) at archive.org! Download ’em and stitch ’em out as you please. They’re PES format; wish we had something better, but all embroidery formats suck.

New Merch! “This Land Is Mine” Silk Pocket Square

A fine haberdasher asked me to design this fine 100% silk 13″ x 13″ pocket square with designs from This Land Is Mine. They are very fancy! $45-a-piece fancy, which is what fine haberdasherous silk pocket squares go for. Buy yours here.

Product Description

“This Land Is Mine” pocket square: millennia of violent territorial disputes distilled into a charming, non-violent, 100% silk 13″x13″ pocket square. Square made in France; history made in the Levant. (Alternate video link at vimeo. Note: pocket square does not play video.)

Laxmi Devi quilt

Here’s what I’ve been working on the past couple weeks:

Yep that’s “Laxmi” from Sita Sings the Blues. Cotton fabric, polyester batting, polyester thread. 52″ wide by 72″ high – twice as big as any of my 4 Elements panels. I might sew some shiny gold sequin things coming out of Her open hand to symbolize the gold coins that are often shown pouring out of it. Continue reading Laxmi Devi quilt

Sita Limited Edition Signed Soft Sculptures

These aren’t dolls, or toys, or cushions – they’re SOFT SCULPTURES. Why? because regulatory capture means the cost of registrations, licenses, and fees to legally call it a doll are beyond anything we could possibly afford.

ONLY 30 IN EXISTENCE! SIGNED AND NUMBERED. BUY ONE HERE FOR $50.

These limited edition soft sculptures were hand-appliqued, beaded, and embroidered in India by the craftswomen of Ubuntu at Work; each unique piece is signed in embroidery by the woman who fashioned it. Because of the cost of registrations, licenses, and fees to legally import them already stuffed, they were sent unstuffed to New York, where I and my colleagues lovingly stuffed each one with polyester fiber-fill and sewed them up by hand.

Bliss Blood, Bill Benzon and Karl Fogel help stuff and sew

That way, if calling them soft sculptures not dolls/toys/cushions, and including this “WARNING! DANGER! NOT FOR CHILDREN! UNREGULATED ITEM MAY CAUSE CHOKING, EXPLOSIONS, OR APOCALYPSE!” is not sufficient to avoid a lawsuit, it is I, Nina Paley, who will accept the liability, rather than Ubuntu at Work.

Stuffin' 'n' sewin'

While stuffing and sewing are exactly the sort of labor the craftswomen of Ubuntu at Work desire, and do efficiently and well and affordably, regulatory capture of stuffed goods in the U.S. ensures they won’t get this work, and established legacy toy corporations with legal teams will hire slave labor to make corporate crap instead. Therefore this is a LIMITED EDITION of only 30 soft sculptures. Each one is also signed and numbered by me, Nina Paley.

Made of cotton fabric; cotton and polyester thread; small glass beads; polyester fiber fill. About 15″” tall.

WARNING! DANGER! NOT FOR CHILDREN! UNREGULATED ITEM MAY CAUSE CHOKING, EXPLOSIONS, OR APOCALYPSE!

Shahjahan, Mubeena, and Saiqa, who sewed, beaded and embroidered the shells, see me finish them. They're in Bangalore and I'm in New York. This evidence of our collaboration kind of blows my mind.

Continue reading Sita Limited Edition Signed Soft Sculptures

The Mimi & Eunice Book is Now Available!

Order it by clicking the new “Store” tab at mimiandeunice.com.

“I laughed out loud!…[The Intellectual Pooperty cartoons] are very very funny….however, if you could inform readers that this naive concept doesn’t correspond to the laws that actually exist, it would avoid encouraging them to believe that it does.”

—Richard Stallman

Here’s a photo of the book surrounded by more copies of the book with pages open in seductive poses:

“Shiva” shirts

Now at the Merch Empire:

Sita T-shirts: help me choose colors

Funny how I have all these Sita Sings the Blues T–shirts, but none with a picture of just Sita herself. I want to remedy that. The question is, what color should the “Sita” shirt blank be? Colors I’m considering are: black, pink (“raspberry,” according to the Bella shirt co.), or creamish-tan. Which color should I choose?

As always, click the thumbnails to see larger images. Also: I put the “Sita Sings the Blues” logo on this design, but I don’t have to. Would you rather have a shirt with the logo, or without? So far none of the shirts I sell have the logo anywhere, making them kind of artsy and mysterious. Should I continue that trend?

Here’s the design superimposed on the photo of a model wearing the Bella scoopneck “raspberry” colored shirt:

In related merch news, I’m finally going to produce some “Shiva Natraj” shirts. These will be blingy gold foil on beautiful shades of purple that I know are awesome: women’s “currant” and men’s “eggplant.”

But do please help me choose a fabric color for the “Sita” shirt. Thanks!

New Merch at the Merch Empire!

Handmade silk bags by Ubuntu@Work!
Laxmi Pins and Necklaces!

Women’s Laxmi shirts in “currant”

Stainless steel water bottles!

And lots of other men’s and women’s shirts, DVDs and CDs, and accessories for your scarce-goods-consuming pleasure.

Sita PAL

My/QuestionCopyright.org’s Sita PAL DVD is finally available at the Sita Merch Empire!

The PAL format is for European, African, Australian, and many Asian DVD players. (If you’re in North America, stick with NTSC.) Other new PAL distributions are also coming soon in France and Switzerland/Germany via Sita’s distributors in those countries. Stay tuned!

Sita water bottles?

Originally I was going to get something much cheaper, but I was just too enamored with this stupid expensive blank bottle. Now I have to decide: Which design? “Sita Namaste” or “Peacock Phonograph”?

These suckers, should I order them, are stainless steel, BPA-free, and laser engraved. They’ll cost me about $10.50 a pop ($8.29 + $1.20 for the engraving + $50 set up charge, not including shipping), meaning they’ll sell for about $20. Crazy I know, but apparently that’s what people pay for these things.

I’m going for the 18 oz. size because it seems more convenient to stash in a bag and carry around New York on foot than the bigger bottles. My merch philosophy is I only make merch I’d actually want and use, and the smaller bottle fits that bill.

I do bicycle in the warmer months, so I might make a “Sita” silkscreenable design for a 25-oz steel bike bottle too.

Sita Soundtrack now available!

You can buy it right now at CDBaby. Soon it will be at the Sita Merch Empire (where we’ll get more profit per sale), but with today’s snow it may take a while for the initial shipment of CDs to reach the order fulfillment warehouse.

In semi-related news, I mention the soundtrack on this podcast interview with the CommandLine. I was all worried about being inarticulate, but actually I said some smart stuff. Thanks to Thomas Gideon/cmdln for asking smart questions, making smart comments, and making a smart show.

Oh, and DC was fun! I spoke at American University. Great audience, great hosts. (And AU’s IP Law Clinic did all the initial legal research on the Annette Hanshaw songs I used in Sita Sings the Blues, for which I am forever grateful.) During my visit, everyone in DC was still talking about their weeks-past “snowpocalypse,” even though the snow was mostly melted, just some patches on the sides of the streets. I thought, “big deal, I wish we’d gotten more snow in New York.” Then I came back to New York just in time for a snowpocalypse here! I have a lot more sympathy for DC now.