merch Archives - Nina Paley

Protective Bicycle Amulets

I originally created these for my bike Titania, but got enough stuff to make extras, because selling merch is what made-up religion is all about. Comes with a signed & dated, hand-stapled, 8-page Velosophical prayer book so you can conduct your own bike exorcisms, call for supernatural help on the road, sing hymns, and more.

With this, I think I’m finally done with this obsessive bike side-project, and can get back to animating the Apocalypse.

Masks Now Available to Order

Angel O’ Death masks (screen prints as complete masks and kits) and hand-printed Angel O’ Death and Eyes of the Goddess masks are now available at http://www.palegraylabs.com/seder-masochism . Eyes of the Goddess screen print masks will be available later, once I get a batch screenprinted. Please be patient as these aren’t all sewn and packaged yet. But the materials are all ready, and the production has been proven!

Angel O’ Death Mask Take 3: I’m getting tired

I’m now on my third set of laser-cut acrylic printing plates. Third time’s a charm. Even if it’s not, I’m not going through this again.

Below is design 3 (top) vs design 1 (bottom).

The Angel O’ Death face has become smaller still, so the wings could become proportionally bigger. Honestly I’m not sure I like this, but I’m tired and don’t want to go through yet another design iteration, so this may be it.

Momz sewed this new mask prototype, but I sewed the center seam, because it has to be sewn along the image line rather than the exact quarter-inch-from-the-fabric-edge she sews to. If I make a signed, numbered, limited edition handprinted mask run, I will be sewing all the center seams (and hopefully someone else will assemble the rest of them).

The new plates have finger holes, which are a vast improvement for handling, and work with a registration frame. Even with all the precision laser cutting, exact registration of the image on the pre-cut fabric pieces remains impossible, but this might be good enough.

Behold the glorious print process:

Registering a pre-cut fabric piece in the precision-cut frame.

Using the finger holes to line up the inked plate in the frame, which will drop right into the depression in which lies the pre-cut fabric.

Whacking with the rubber mallet. Whack, whack.

Lifting the plate with the finger holes.

The fabric is now stuck to the plate by the sticky ink.

A little finger burnishing. Not much is needed, as long as I slather on that gooey ink.

The finger-hole plates work fine without the registration frame as well, but then I have to hand-cut the pieces.

Oh, I actually wore one of these masks yesterday, while bicycling to Theo’s laser-cutting bunker to pick up the new plates. I’d been laid low with allergies, sneezing my face off, and thought the mask might reduce my inhalation of allergens. Maybe it did, but I will not bike with a mask again. I got out of breath quickly, and the mask became moist from my exhalations (which I then re-inhaled, hence feeling out of breath, because I’m inhaling my own CO2 instead of fresh oxygen), and when my nose got runny it got even more gross. So, not for biking. But I will wear one for shopping or other indoor public activities I can’t avoid. Still, all this work for something that’s just a drag to wear… No wonder I feel tired.

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: