summer 2024 roundup
a forced break from comics but not from making things
At the end of spring semester, I called a meeting with my professor Tillie Walden and asked her what I should do over my summer break to improve my cartooning. She advised me to take a break from making comics. My hand, recently injured from Too Much Drawing, agreed with this plan. (It took six weeks of strict rest and then a steroid injection to fully recover.) The rest of Tillie’s advice:
Read. Read middle grade prose. Old favorites, new releases, youth librarian’s recommendations. Read, read, read.
Which inspired Maia’s Self-Imposed Summer Reading Program.
I couldn’t ONLY read books, though! I also made (non-comics) things! Here’s the round-up:
I started with this duo-tone screenprinted canvas tote for a friend’s birthday.
Summer isn’t traditionally the time for knitting, but since I was on a No Comics regimen, I catapulted myself into other crafts that didn’t seem to anger my drawing hand. I made these matching hats for my niece and nephew (it’s winter in their hemisphere). Here’s the pattern.
I made fingerless gloves for myself with local alpaca yarn. (pattern)
…aaaand another pair, for my comic-book-school-little-sister Fernanda whose power colors are pink & black.
I had leftover yarn from my purple mittens so I made a hat to go with them; I’ve been eager to level up to colorwork so I chose this pattern and added a second skein of yarn (black, alpaca, extremely soft) as my other color. This is my very first colorwork project and I am 100% sure that sweaters with bugs on them are in my future.
AND. I finished this cardigan, which I started over three years (!) ago. This project was a really big challenge (turns out sweaters are way harder than scarves and hats??) and I got myself into many, many stitch-uations while working on it over the course of that three years. Big gratitude to everyone who rescued me when I hecked up, and an especially huge thank you to Eleanor for holding my hand (sometimes literally) through the ENTIRE process, from picking a pattern to final blocking. If knitting were a videogame, knitting this cardigan jumped me like six skill levels, and I can now identify and solve my own knitting mistakes about 80% of the time!
In other yarn-related crafts: I made a bunch of soot sprites to haunt the corners of our apartment.
And of course, paper stars to go with the soot sprites.
Here they are all hung up in our kitchen/living room!
Apparently this wasn’t enough paper star art for me, because I also folded kite paper window stars, as welcome gifts for each incoming first-year student.
And I did some watercolor paintings! Two commissions, three gifts.
This one was a birthday card for my housemate & pal Ollie (O.K. Stevens) featuring the characters from their work-in-progress middle grade graphic novel! I love these goofballs and I’m so excited for everyone else to get to meet them once Ollie’s book is out on shelves in a few years! (We’re manifestinggg)
And in comics-adjacent projects, I put together the first volume of what will likely be a series of mini-zines of recipes!
School starts in a week and I am equal parts excited and terrified. Which is pretty much my standard operating mode, so, it’ll be fine, right? IT’S GOING TO BE FINE