It started innocently enough with a call from the organizers of the CreativFestival in Toronto asking me if I knew who Rick Mercer was. As a longtime fan of This Hour Has 22 Minutes the answer was a huge YES!!!
To help raise money for the Sick Kids hospital in Toronto, celebrities have donated pairs of jeans that they have worn and the CSNF team has sent the jeans off to various artists to decorate so that the finished jeans can be auctioned off on Ebay later this month.
So guess what arrived in the mail last week?? Rick Mercer’s jeans!! Now how cool is that that a pair of this funny guy’s jeans come back to the Maritimes to be decorated here in Moncton, NB?? He was born in Newfoundland after all, so he’s a Maritimer through and through.
Since these are men’s jeans, they can’t have too much in the way of beads and sequins or frilly lace. Rick Mercer is far too manly for that!! After much doodling and revisiting some of the clips from his Talking to Americans series, I decided that these needed to be a TRULY CANADIAN pair of jeans!
I also just couldn’t resist putting in some fun things such as the One Tonne Challenge somewhere on the seat of the pants. He was the official spokesperson for this campaign to save energy and help stop global warming until the new government did away with the program!
So off I went to some local craft stores in search of supplies. It was like turning a kid loose in a candy store!!! I decided in my sketch that one leg of the jeans would be more woodland based and the other would be arctic, with polar bears and an igloo (our Capitol building needed to be protected from Global Warming don’t you know?)
I decided to try to tie in into his show in 2 ways. The first is that it will say “These jeans have 22 buttons” on one leg and I will sew on 22 little buttons in a pattern. Far less girly than beads or sequins! The second tie in was to start this blog and try to only spend 22 HOURS decorating these pants. Of course telling a creative person to limit their time is rather like trying to put a moose through a turnstile in a subway, but it is worth a try.
Once I had decided that there needed to be polar bears on one leg, I thought that I would get incredibly creative and felt a piece of wool!!! Off I went to rummage through my knitting stash and I knit up 2 squares. One was real wool by itself and the other was the wool knitted up with a totally artificial fibre in the hopes that it would create an interesting texture once felted. I am a slow knitter, so I didn’t count this or the felting process in my 22 hours.
Felting was fun, but the results were quite chunky and probably WAY too thick to appliqué onto a pair of jeans.... so maybe I will make a little felt polar bear that tucks in one back pocket as an added bonus.
There you have it...... the creative adventure to decorate Rick Mercer’s jeans has begun!!!
To help raise money for the Sick Kids hospital in Toronto, celebrities have donated pairs of jeans that they have worn and the CSNF team has sent the jeans off to various artists to decorate so that the finished jeans can be auctioned off on Ebay later this month.
So guess what arrived in the mail last week?? Rick Mercer’s jeans!! Now how cool is that that a pair of this funny guy’s jeans come back to the Maritimes to be decorated here in Moncton, NB?? He was born in Newfoundland after all, so he’s a Maritimer through and through.
Since these are men’s jeans, they can’t have too much in the way of beads and sequins or frilly lace. Rick Mercer is far too manly for that!! After much doodling and revisiting some of the clips from his Talking to Americans series, I decided that these needed to be a TRULY CANADIAN pair of jeans!
I also just couldn’t resist putting in some fun things such as the One Tonne Challenge somewhere on the seat of the pants. He was the official spokesperson for this campaign to save energy and help stop global warming until the new government did away with the program!
So off I went to some local craft stores in search of supplies. It was like turning a kid loose in a candy store!!! I decided in my sketch that one leg of the jeans would be more woodland based and the other would be arctic, with polar bears and an igloo (our Capitol building needed to be protected from Global Warming don’t you know?)
I decided to try to tie in into his show in 2 ways. The first is that it will say “These jeans have 22 buttons” on one leg and I will sew on 22 little buttons in a pattern. Far less girly than beads or sequins! The second tie in was to start this blog and try to only spend 22 HOURS decorating these pants. Of course telling a creative person to limit their time is rather like trying to put a moose through a turnstile in a subway, but it is worth a try.
Once I had decided that there needed to be polar bears on one leg, I thought that I would get incredibly creative and felt a piece of wool!!! Off I went to rummage through my knitting stash and I knit up 2 squares. One was real wool by itself and the other was the wool knitted up with a totally artificial fibre in the hopes that it would create an interesting texture once felted. I am a slow knitter, so I didn’t count this or the felting process in my 22 hours.
Felting was fun, but the results were quite chunky and probably WAY too thick to appliqué onto a pair of jeans.... so maybe I will make a little felt polar bear that tucks in one back pocket as an added bonus.
There you have it...... the creative adventure to decorate Rick Mercer’s jeans has begun!!!
posted by Jennifer at 9:30 AM
1 Comments:
I loved how you compared rushed creativity to a moose squeezed through optical turnstiles! While it might be possible, it would definitely not be that great compared to an artist's work wherein the proper amount of time was spent.
Post a Comment
<< Home