Sunday, February 5, 2012

DIY

I am a big do-it-yourself person. If some household stuff is broken I try to repair it myself before calling the experts. A blocked drain, a broken fan, a fridge light that went out, those kind of things. Which is a part of my evolution as a human, I guess. Where does fixing things come in the evolutionary process, you may ask. I don’t know, I was just rambling.

Anyway, the DIY I'm really talking about is the kind of things, you know, like painting your old pair of jeans with REALLY big flowers, making your own calendar and writing love poems on it, sticking matchsticks on a chart paper you’ve put up on your wall, making your own envelopes with silly underwater designs, cutting up your old clothes to make bags out of them, buying buttons of all shapes and sizes and sewing them on on a purse you made yourself, and many more useless things.

I think every girl goes through a beadsy phase in her life. You know, collecting beads, making necklaces, bracelets, sticking them on clothes and bags. Why, I even made a beads bookmark. A string of beads hanging from a rather thick handmade paper. I bought a denim bag from the secondhand market in Aizawl, and that bag went through various stages in the evolutionary process before it exhausted its usefulness and was laid to rest in the garbage. Beaded, rebeaded, re-rebeaded, dyed, re-re-rebeaded, and then redyed. I'm sure that bag must have felt like a guinea pig, poor thing.

A friend and I got “inspiration” from a magazine, took out our old jeans and painted a big red rose on the right leg. People stared whenever we wore them, which for me was about two times. I still have that pair of jeans.

Remember when Mariah Carey cut off the waist band off her jeans? At around the same time I did the same thing (but I was unaware that the diva had done it) because I was getting less space inside the jeans, which was further mutilated (cut it off at the knees) and decorated with mediocre art (a design I copied from a bedsheet).

And fabric paint, oh fabric paint! I've lost count of the number of shirts I’d ruined because of this medium. Not only shirts, bags and shoes were also its victim. Wait, I still have a sample, let me take a picture for you.

                                                          (T-shirt art, circa 2007)
                                                     
And altering clothes! This is not exactly craft-y, but very much DIY. Add/remove a sleeve here, raise the hemline there, cut off the leg, use ribbons and beads and other stuff for decoration, turn a frock into a skirt, a skirt into a bag, and so on.

I don’t know if cutting up magazines and pasting the pictures on a chart paper counts as DIY, but I did it myself heheh. Or doing the same thing with friends’ photos, garnish with a dialogue box and make them say things which we thought were really funny. Ha ha ha.

Long before we immersed ourselves in Facebook, we created our own “Walls”. A chart paper stuck on a wall, and our friends who came visiting would write whatever messages they wanted. A kind of Guest Book. And sometimes we write down the things we did (Eg: It’s 2 AM and XYZ is talking in her sleep).

What else…? Nothing came to mind. So here is the Mariah Carey video where we first saw the waist-band-less pair of jeans.


13 comments:

  1. Kinda felt pity for the poor bag. And hey, that T-shirt looks stunning! :D

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    1. Thank you. That poor bag must be in Bag Heaven now, for all the suffering it went through. And thanks for visiting.

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    2. Thil siam vel i va thiam ve aw. Kei ai in kan nu hian a peih vel a, jeans chu 'mutilate' loh a bar pawh a nei lovang!!

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    3. Hetiang tih neuh neuh lampang hi chu hmeichhia hian kan peih alawm.

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  2. I can relate to this post since i've got mobile skin made by myself.. heres the pic https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/392068_10150372167724211_439350466_n.jpg :-) And that tee looks great!

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    1. Very creative! Looks like a very high-tech skin there. Which reminds me, I used to peel off the cover of cigarette boxes and paste little pictures all over it, kinda like a customised cig box. Now where did I put those...

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  3. btw, being a DIY kinda person is affordable and very cost-effective. Everybaadiii should try being a DIY person.

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    1. Right! It's very convenient for people like us whose pockets are rather shallow.

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  4. Replies
    1. Thank you! Nang hi chu i thusawi hi titak thei bawk a, a lawmawm bik e!

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  5. I bought a DIY book once. There were a lot of instructions, and finally when I followed all everything and did what I was supposed to, I was able to read my DIY book.

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