Yo Gabba Crafty!

Okay, so yes, obviously I need to change the name of this site to "I PIMP FOR YO GABBA GABBA", I know. But this one actually isn't exactly about the show....it's about Emily's favorite new dress!



Presenting -- the Brobee Dress! Somehow I bent time and space to sew this up for Emily while we were working...

How it happened is this: a little while back, we got our season 1 crew shirts. Emily kept asking if she could have one, and so I decided to turn one of them into a dress for her! No pattern, I freehanded it on paper and then draped it on her dressform (and I have to tell you, having a dressform for her made making this a breeze!), and I was really happy with the result. The contrasting bits are some cotton blend jersey that I thought would match, the main body of the dress is all cut from a M sized shirt. I was even able to cut around the logo on the back, thank goodness for today's oversized shirts! The dress has been a huge success -- too huge, in fact. She would wear it every single day, no joke, if I could somehow let her. It is going to wear out long before she grows out of it. After we get back from Toronto I'm going to see about making a Muno dress from the same pattern, this time there's no shirt so I'll probably applique him on.

Speaking of getting back, we are packing up as I type and getting ready to leave for the Toronto Comic Art Festival -- we're looking forward to the semi-vacation and hope to see some of you there!

And if you're not going, don't forget to tune in next Monday to the premiere episode of Yo Gabba Gabba! I'm not 100% sure what ended up in which episode, but I think one or two of the segments we worked on will air next week.

See you next week!

(update: I've finally finished up a Yo Gabba Gabba dress how-to entry, if you're looking for tips on making your own, check it out!)

Milk & Cheese toys are (almost) here!

One of our very longest-running projects has been this set of vinyl figures of Evan's Milk and Cheese...seriously, it's been years, but I won't bore you with the saga. Suffice it to say that after much work and agony on everyone's part, the figures are really truly done at last! We have a set from the first casefull and they came out even better than I had hoped. And I'm very happy with the printing on the box, which was worrying me a bit. The rest of the figures are just about to start wending their way over and will be shipping from SLG at the end of September. Preorders are being accepted now right here, and US orders get free shipping from SLG. On your whole order, so you can throw in a book or two while you're at it.

Now where we're going to put a load of these giant boxes when we get the rest of ours, I do not know!

Yo Gabba Goodness!

For those of you interested in YGG, especially if you have little ones in the house, Nick Jr already has their Yo Gabba Gabba! web section up! There are clips, a Brobee game, coloring pages and...if you have a color printer WHICH I DO NOT you can print out t-shirt transfers and masks of all five monsters! (I do think it's lame that you can't download them, just print them...I'm sure there's a workaround for that though). See supposedly home-made Brobee tee above.

Indoctrinate your children now!

Yo! It's Gabba Gabba time!

As Evan has posted, what has kept us so busy lately is a job on Yo Gabba Gabba!, a show for pre-schoolers that will be debuting August 20th on Nick Jr. You may remember my posting about this ages ago a few times, little did I suspect we'd end up contributing to it in any way! We had originally done some design work for a live-action segment, but the bit turned into an animated segment, so now we're doing all the character designs, backgrounds and key poses as well as semi-storyboarding it. Pretty fun, if hectic. There are two big reasons we are thrilled to be working on this show:

1 - Christian Jacobs, the co-creator, is a long-time friend of ours. We are all mad excited to be working together on something finally, we originally met because we were going to work together on something years and years ago. I'd like to add that Christian is truly Super-Rad, of all the friends and acquaintances of ours who ever said "hey, if my show gets picked up I want you to work on it!" he is the only one who ever actually called us up to work. YOU RULE CHRISTIAN!

2 - we love it! if we had nothing to do with it, if we didn't know anyone involved, we would be crazy about this and dying to watch it with Emily. It is so much fun, and has so many 80s references both visually and musically...DJ Lance Rock looks like he escaped from the Groove Is In the Heart video, for one thing. As it is, we are nuts about everything we've been lucky enough to see so far...and so is Emily. Of course we are most excited to see our drawings come to life, but everything we see is really cool. And for those of you who don't have a little one, the bands alone are worth tuning in for. I mean, Cornelius! Wow!

Anyway, don't take my word for it, get a taste of it for yourself:



Learn more:
YGG Production blog
E! sneak peek (with Tony Hawk)

And we hope you'll tune in on Monday, August 20th!

ha ha on me...

So, what I get for thinking I was free and clear is....more trouble! The bad tooth flared back up again and now, finally, fingers crossed, I think I can say it's all over (except the rest of the 2nd course of antibiotics and the cleanup appt at the dentist's). Whew. That was a bad one. And I speak from experience. So. NOW I'm back. Expect me to start finishing off that post list soon.

ghosts of mocca

It's a few weeks past now, so no reason to go in to detail, but Mocca was a lot of fun this year. We only planned for me and Emily to go on Saturday, but Sunday she got upset that we weren't going so we threw clothes on and went along, and it was lots of fun. Both days we saw lots of people, got new sketches in her sketchbooks, and ate yummy dinners. She was super and had a great time. I meant to take some photos of her to match up with the ones from the past two years, but forgot..and all I got were these shots of her playing behind the gauze curtains. (On a side note, she got nice bentos both days! But I didn't take photos....)

Emily got a paper doll set from M.K. Reed, a comic from Abby Denson, and an Owly giveaway comic which she is IN LOVE WITH. (So much for the "wordless adventure" aspect - we have to actually tell her the entire story, in fact she wants to hear it every single night!) We also got some adorable comics from adorable Todd Webb which I haven't read to her yet, but I think she will be loving Tuesday Moon. We've already bought our table for next year, so maybe we'll see you there!

what has been up...

lots, but mainly: wretched, wretched dental trouble. To make a long story short, trouble began just as my regular dentist shut down for a long vacation. I thought I could wait it out, but I couldn't. Spent a couple days trying to contact my regular guy (they said to call if there was an emergency) but no dice. Called the dentist I'm assigned to through our coverage. Who wouldn't see me, because he was going on vacation for the 4th. Called my plan, who called around and made me an appointment, and transferred me to the new office so I could go right away. As I guessed, I needed a root canal. asap...and it was now July 3rd. And everyone was going on vacation. I managed to get an appt for the following Monday (I was offered dates as far away as July 26th!) and stuck it out...finally, the root canal got done, the pain from the actual root canal faded and now for two whole days I've been pain free again.

So that is where I have been. In pain.

Other things (which almost all have posts sitting in draft mode right now which will be finished soon):

loads of cool stuff in the mail!!
MoCCA was great! [check!]
The radishes never turned into radishes, we tried again, and guess what? They were attacked too! It looks like we may have saved a bunch of the seedlings though.
Emily has a pet snail.
We have been working on something very cool which we can tell you about shortly. [check!]
Emily's half-birthday rolled around and was loads of fun. I made the fastest thrown-together cake of all time.

so, more on all that soon. see ya!