where u been?

Ah the insufferable blogger. Knocking out posts with ferocity one minute, defaulting back to confounding silence the next. And always returning with the same sad song: I’m sorry it’s been so long. But I’m back now. I will be good.

They told me Candy was a ditzy blonde. But she’s always got her nose buried in them existential periodicals.

I think anyone who’s been following what I do for any length of time will have figured out by now that these long silences are pretty par for the course, and any kind of apology and promise of reform would be a huge steaming pile of cow shit. So I won’t bother. But just in case you think you’re owed: Sorry for the wait, thank you for your patience. And feel free to tell me to get stuffed.

The last time I wrote was in June, a little over 4 months ago. I had just posted the 6th in a series of monthly collections. At the time I had every intention of continuing to add a new collection once a month. But to be honest I was really starting to run out of enthusiasm and steam. I wasn’t happy with the way the general trajectory was going and was sensing it was time for me to take a breather and start thinking about how I’d like to switch things up.

If you could take a peek inside my hard drive, you’d see that coming up with image ideas is one problem I will never, ever have. But I’ll also never have time in this life to reproduce them all.

For half a year I had been putting a lot more effort into ZBQ’s social media presence- specifically its Instagram and Facebook pages- by posting nearly every day and feverishly working behind the scenes to create evermore new content to share. That meant a schedule of putting together videos, editing photos, creating product shots and mockups, writing posts and also making sure a new collection got created and posted at the beginning of each month. And after 6 months of that pace, I was still seeing little to no gain from any of it: no additional engagement, very few new followers. In other words, the usual sucking void I’ve become accustomed to on these platforms for quite a few years now.

Cell phone pocket on the varsity track jacket. Keep your tracking device dry and warm.

I know they say it takes perseverance to win in the socials game. But these days the whole setup often feels like a frantic, rigged race to the bottom. MySpace 2006 vibes, if you dig. I couldn’t see the point of continuing to spend that much of my time and energy chasing “increased exposure” and yet still coming up practically empty. And I didn’t particularly enjoy doing it all that much in the first place.

In addition to all the social media effort, I was just generally feeling a lot of fatigue from having spent so much of my spare time- a good year or more by that point- in front of my PC. If I wasn’t tweaking my socials then I was probably working on my web site or editing in Photoshop. For the toll it was taking on my eyes and my body it felt like it all wasn’t necessarily getting anywhere useful.

So I turned off the computer for a while and dove headfirst into the wild unfettered world of applique art.

Little Miss Innocent was totally unplanned, but I picked up this issue of Confessions of the Lovelorn at a local comic shop one day and the cover was just begging to be brought to life. I think I started working on it right away. The varsity jacket I made with this applique ended up being the single most challenging piece of clothing I’ve ever successfully completed.

Before I blinked out in June, for several months I’d managed to share a few interesting blog posts about my latest creative obsession: something I termed, for lack of a better term, “applique composition.” Large images, constructed by bringing together different combinations of fabric, thread, ink and other ephemera, all sewn together to hopefully construct some type of cohesive image. This was an idea that had been bubbling in the hot black recesses of the slow cooker I call my brain for several years by this point. So earlier this year when I finally acquired what I considered an indispensable tool for proceeding with the project- a digital projector- I did as I always do with new things and blundered in to promptly make every possible mistake I could manage. Preferably at least 3 times.

The early stages of Earl. I took so many wrong turns on that piece, but in the process learned a lot about different methods for achieving good results. Sometimes in order to do what you should be doing, you need to do the wrong thing a few times first.

Here is a peek at the back side of one of these appliques, to give you some idea how they’re put together. Definitely something evocative about that too.

Spending time in front of my computer was now the furthest thing from my mind. I had to put all my spare time, creative energy and focus into this new process and lay all other distractions aside. As the weeks and months wore on, I was genuinely surprised by just how incredibly time-consuming that process could be. But there was a lot of trial and error: I was developing a new methodology for making images, and aside from a few quilting books I’d picked up from the library, I had very little guidance as to how to proceed. No real blueprint. So you learn by making mistakes, and that process takes up a lot of time.

I was happy to be able to turn 2 of my drawings into appliques this time around. I’ve been drawing a lot over the last few years. This dude’s name is Cedric.

About a month in I realized that my standard old Janome sewing machine just wasn’t doing some of the difficult new tasks I was asking of it, and I needed to upgrade to a mechanical machine. For you sewing nerds out there, I picked up the HD-3000 black edition and it is BADASS. So there were a lot of delays and the learning curve was a pretty steep climb at times. But I also surprised myself by just how much I enjoyed doing it, no matter how long or tedious it became. The pieces were coming together in such an exciting way, any amount of sacrifice seemed well worth it to me.

This is my new heavy-duty mechanical machine. I call him Darth.

What I thought of as a very modest goal of creating 10 pieces soon took over every minute of my spare time, and in fact would continue to dominate my entire existence until, well, Friday afternoon at about 2:00. To be at least a little fair to myself, the appliques themselves were for the most part finished by August. But then I had to set to the task of creating garments to mount them on. And that, believe it or not, took another 2 months. I tried keeping things simple, but that never seems to work out. To be even more fair to myself, I was getting called in to work a lot during the summer. I have 2 jobs, both of which I am on call for, and when it rains it pours. It poured for me most of the summer. But I digress.

In addition to completing the most difficult piece I’ve ever attempted on this round, I also made my all-time favorite piece as well. The DUMILE 2X polo shirt must be seen to be believed. Stick with me, and I’ll show it to ya. Here is some early R&D on that one.

The point I am circuitously making my way around to at last is that these 10 pieces are now well and truly FINITO. I am incredibly proud of them, they are beautiful and they will be posted, one at a time, in due course. I haven’t actually even had a chance to take proper product shots of them yet.

But I’m using this long break in activity to explore a kind of reset for ZBQ as well. Things are going to be different by year’s end: the inventory available online will likely be much smaller. Prices will be going UP. The site will be getting another cool renovation. I’m bound and determined to at long last make a proper gallery so people can visually explore 30+ years of ZBQ history in a pleasant and accessible way, for the first time since like 2012. And, possibly most exciting to me, I’m also working on a whole slew of all-new prints I’m planning to burn into some screens soon, to hopefully keep things fresh as a spring daisy around here for a good long time to come. Because hope, as they say, springs eternal.

I’m about 14 years deep into this sewing stuff at this point, so I’ve got some skin in the game. Things are just starting to get interesting.

As for social media, I recognize that it is still a kind of necessary evil in our world, and I plan to make an honest effort to post at least semi-regularly going forward. Truthfully, it can be a great thing- it’s just not everything. I’ve been looking into all kinds of exciting new platforms that I think are showing a lot of potential, and those ones will be getting more of my attention and time than “the big 2”. You know, break away from the Borg a bit. I think 7 of 9 had the right idea (and a great jumpsuit).