Okay! I've taken pictures! I probably won't manage to do this every time someone sends me something, but I'd really LIKE to, and I'm overcompensating today...

I got this incredible, hand-dyed purse in the mail yesterday, from nocturnalpurple , whom many of you probably know from her posts here. You can see her DeviantArt page here: http://unokitsune.deviantart.com/

It's lovely and big, and I have already taken it out for a test-run. (Last night was the kindergarten concert.) It has a window where I can add the latest artwork to show off (she included some of her own with the purse!) and big pockets for phone, etc. It's not only hand-dyed, but all hand-sewn, and from her own design.

Here, without further ado, is Monsieur Thrifty, helping me out by modeling the purse:




M. Thrifty and I don't take the greatest pictures on the fly, but we do our best. Thank you again for the bag!

So... people send me presents. This befuddles and thrills me. And I don't deserve them at all, because I am the absolute WORST (wurst? mmmm...wurst. ) at sending thank-you notes. And the reason I'm bad at taking the five minutes it might take to write a thank-you note? Oh, get this. I just worked it out myself. I procrastinate with them, because I'm so terrified of getting it "wrong." I am usually so bowled over by whatever it is I want to say "Thank you" for, that I have no idea how to express my true feelings properly. (Gosh, I'm such a sensitive little snowflake!) So I usually go and get it über-wrong by freezing up and not doing anything. Well. THAT'S productive, no?

No.

So, I'm going to turn over a new leaf! Yes! (Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...) I'm going to do my thank-you's right away, even if I don't do them right.

And to all of you that I have frozen up on in the past? I am sorry! I love the stuff people send me. It's just that...well, I'm kind of terrified of the World. I'm working on that.

What I'm doing: fooling around with social networking sites. (I made a "Kaja & Phil Foglio" fan page on Facebook!)

What I SHOULD be doing: lettering tonight's page, which I should have done ages ago. (It's not like I don't know what it says...)

What Phil is doing: drawing something that he thinks is funny.

What Phil SHOULD be doing: finishing the cover art for Volume 9 so I can send the info to Diamond.

Because I am a great big scavenger, I picked up a little cabinet the other day. Around here, one way we recycle stuff is to leave it by the side of the road with a "free!" sign on it. (Did you know that a "kaja" is a Scandinavian jackdaw? Yeah. I found that out when I visited Sweden back in '96. Hah. Maybe that's why Great-Grandma didn't like her name...*) But yes, I dragged a busted cabinet home. It was so lonely there on the sidewalk... Phil was rolling his eyes at me until I shocked him by telling him that I actually had a PLAN for it already. (That isn't always the case, sometimes I'm just thinking: "I can use this somehow! Yay!")

Anyway, it needs work, but it is just right for a base to the lovely doll house that Master Payne built for my daughter a couple of years ago Christmas. The girl wants to decorate it to look like the Haunted Mansion, but with touches of pink. (She's got that whole pink and black thing going.) We have really cute little Jack, Sally and Zero dolls that are just the right size, but the whole thing will really benefit from having a cabinet underneath for keeping extra toys and furniture out of reach of the dog. Because, you know, "Woof! Dog eat everything!"

Like I need another project. Still, I even have a tiny plasma globe--it will make a fantastic light fixture. And the Muppet Labs action figures came with some great lab equipment that will fit right in. No, really, the doll house belongs to my daughter. I just help play with it.

*Hm. Edit: I should point out that I actually like the name, especially since I found out what it means. So very appropriate...

Whoo! It's been a while since I logged in as myself. (I've been logged in as girlgeniuscomic for the sake of convenience, but I finally fixed the network so that my work machine can talk to the internet again. Whew.)

My beloved TypeStyler is back! Aaaahhh! I am so very happy. Typestyler choked and died when the Mac went to OSX, so yes, it's been a while. Obviously, I've been doing all right without it, and I also like Art Text, but Typestyler was once one of my favorite tools, and I'm glad to have it back.
The only problem is that it isn't recognizing my old serial number as a TS serial number. Weird. And here I kept it all that time...

So, I am very much behind in posts. Let's start with Steamcon. Amazing! Many of my friends who are less...shall we say... into the things I like (cough, cough, manga and video games, cough) wandered through, and were later wondering out loud why they enjoyed Steamcon more than they usually enjoy conventions. That one was easy. They stripped away all the extras, and cut straight to the tasty Victorian-flavored costumes and "historically-influenced" gadgetry. And Tea. Always tea. Of course my friends who are mostly into historical costuming and vintage everything loved it. Of course they did. I loved it, too.

Next. Windycon. This will probably need its own post. Or series of posts. And I don't have much time tonight. But if I wait until I have time to write about EVERYTHING, well, that's why I haven't been writing a lot. I sort of get bogged down in the sheer volume of things I want to say. Blah.
Oh, peachy. And, in fact, now I must go deal with the real world. Back later...

We're leaving early tomorrow for Windycon. In the meantime, here are my children:


The best part is that Alex keeps watching this over and over again, and it makes her laugh like a loon. Hm.

I was going to only show my monster table when I was working on something interesting, but, in the interest of full disclosure, here is what my table looks like today. It's desperately in need of a clearing off, especially since I have some things I want to get done before Windycon.

Steamcon was absolutely fantastic, and I'm thrilled to hear they're planning to do it again next year. I've got the first day we can apply for dealer's space marked on my calendar. The art guests were Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, whose long-awaited book Boilerplate is finally out. As soon as I can pry it away from Phil, I look forward to reading it. He keeps going on about how amazing it is. I can't wait to find out for myself!

Halloween was madness. Experiment #1 wanted to be Death. But not just ANY death, he wanted to be Death from the Discworld. So I made a little Death of Rats to go along with him. Unfortunately, the Death of Rats isn't quite finished, because while I was working on him, three pallets of books arrived unexpectedly in our driveway, and no help was nigh. (We expected them early this week, and they really ARE supposed to call first...) So Phil and I moved the whole mess ourselves. Fortunately, the rain had stopped, and it was a gorgeous, cool autumn day. The wonderful truck driver actually backed into our driveway and helped us drop the pallets right where we needed them, so at least we didn't have the usual "fun" of carrying the books up the driveway. So, yes, the new reprints are in. Now to get volumes one, two and three reprinted, and nine in print. Gah. It never ends!

Anyway, the Death of Rats was finished enough to thrill the kid and be adorable for trick-or-treating, but I want to finish him properly before I post pictures.

Experiment #2 was a pirate queen, because she's ALWAYS a pirate queen. So her outfit only needed minor repairs and tweaks. Whew. This year, I got her a little Folkmanis parrot puppet. So cute!

Here's the whole picture, I had to crop it when I made my LJ icon. Phil drew this a while back just for fun. We're still wondering what "Maid of Win" would be like...

Edit: Oh, and also I suppose we can blame... TOOO MUUUCH MAAANGA! (As if there is any such thing...)

So, yeah, I've been bad, and haven't been posting. But I have a new idea, and I'm feeling like I can say a lot now...

So, here's the first shot of the mess all over the workbench. The picture was drawn by Phil, using one of my more cliché subjects (heh.) I messed with it a bit and painted it. Phil did the snow. He also did some touches on the bear that I think improved it greatly. He's just amazing.

I will indeed be posting the final painting for you all to see, but not right away. It's the cover to the Windycon 36 program book. After that, I'll make it into a wallpaper or something. We'll probably try to do prints, too, but we're so pressed for time! Gar!

Also, we'll be at SteamCon this weekend, in the vendor's area. Hooray!

Finally, I dug out the photo light that I didn't remember we had, and got a decent shot of this amazing collection of figures sent to us by Meghan. We've been having a huge amount of fun with it.

People send us wonderful things, and I never get around to showing them to the World... but that's about to change!

I haven't been doing so well with the "Diary" thing, but I have a new inspiration. I've found the lights, rearranged the Studio, and now I think I would like to show you around our house. Mosly, I'm going to concentrate on "What's on the Slab."

The "Slab" is actually my beloved "Monster Table": an old art-school workbench that I bought many (many) years ago at a second-hand shop in Seattle. It is so old that some of the newspaper bits stuck to it (school glue is tough stuff) date back to WWII. It's the right size and shape, one could use it to take a nice nap...or build a creature.

( Worgh! More than you may want to know about our studio rearrangement! )

Oooh. Look at this wonderful thing... I wish I lived close enough to pick it up myself.

Phil calls that whole flashback scene: "Tarvek Sturmvoraus, Boy Detective." I can't stop laughing over the whole thing. Heh. Poor Tarvek. His life sucks. Anyway, back to the point of the post:

We got the page count wrong on the first edition of Volume Six of Girl Genius. So, in the second edition, we fixed the problem by adding two new story pages. We're quite happy with them as story pages, (especially the way Cheyenne colored the wordless page, well, you'll see...) and we're also quite happy to have the lovely picture of Agatha's giant announcement over Sturmhalten restored to a double-spread.

If you have a copy of the first edition, don't buy a new book, just download and print the high-resolution PDF file on our Free Stuff page over at girlgeniusonline.com. (Includes an explanatory cover letter and the double-page spread that was chopped in half in the first edition.) Pages with word balloons are 600dpi, those without are 300dpi.

I will be posting these in the comic, as well, if I haven't already, but, well, considering I've been meaning to post the new pages for download for months, now, I thought I should do that first. Gar.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the new pages!

Here's another shot of our puppy, she's now about six months old. She has just eaten the end of a rather nice Indian scarf. She likes to shred things, and I left it within reach... now it looks like it's had some adventures. With my clothes, that's not such a big deal, but I had better watch what I leave around unless I want free distressing on all my clothes.

Okay, so, with the help of my friend Google, I'm looking up synonyms for "cad," and I come across a hit for "cad bane." This sounds intriguing, I'm thinking it's some awesome brand name for mace, or a small ladies pistol from the Victorian era, or something similarly fun. So I go look.

Aw, it's just a character from Star Wars. Oh, well.

I'm currently hanging out at Spiderweb Software, but everyone has gotten involved in Wii Sports Resort, and I don't much feel like sitting around watching people's backs as they play video games. Ha. It looks like fun to play, though, I might pick it up later. I am feeling fat and lazy and full of lovely cake. Mmmm.

I am sad to report that we are down to only one cat. Our old cat, Zeuxippe, finally gave it up today. She had been on the way out for a long time, but it's still sad. When we first got her, she could fit completely in Phil's hand. Igor is going to be confused for a while, I'm sure.

Ack! I just noticed the baby sleeping on the window seat...about two feet away from me. I heard a little snore, and looked over, and... a small human! Yeek! I remember babies as being, I don't know, noisier.

I haven't reallly got anything else to say at the moment, maybe I'll wander over and see if there's anything left on the veggie tray...

The San Diego ComiCon is nearly over for another year.

( Here are EVEN MORE pictures Cheyenne e-mailed to me: )

Yarg! That was a lot of them! Oh, the awesomeness!

So, here's what I was actually doing a search for, if you're interested. The American Girls "Kit's Aviator Doll." My daughter just got the Kit doll for her birthday, and she loves it. It looks like her. (She's named her "Mimi" though. I kind of hate it when toy companies do all the imagination work for you, so we didn't get into the whole "backstory of the toy" thing.)  This little aviator is actually a tiny doll for the main doll to hold. My friend calls this series "Grandma Bait."  I see what she means.

I SWEAR this is NOT what I was searching for... but it completely cracks me up. I give you the Dieselpunk Halloween Costume of the Year... the Sexy Aviator!

(As though aviators aren't sexy enough...)

Phil just called from San Diego and asked: "What have you been saying in your LiveJournal?!"

Apparently I've given the impression that I've been running through the house tearing things up with a crowbar. I haven't, but I didn't tell him that. Hee!

As you may already be aware, Phil is at the San Diego ComiCon, along with Cheyenne, Savannah, Alice and Carol. They're at booth 1331.

( Here are the pictures that Cheyenne has e-mailed to me: )

Also, now is a great time to check out the jewelry at Rivkasmom.com: she's got some very lovely pieces, both Steampunk and otherwise. And she's got a free shipping deal going on now: details about the current incentive can be found in this post over at steamy_stitches.
(As someone who is also currently scrambling for cash, I feel the need to, I don't know, wave at someone else in a similar situation...Something like that. Ha. Anyway, go look at her work. It's pretty!)