Meet Rooff - a cotton flannel daschund the size of your palm. He's a friendly little dog, who likes to wear gumboots and lick his little friend Max to death. He likes to play with yo-yo's, and one day hopes to ride a unicycle.
Skittykittycino thinks he gives great piggyback rides.
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If you've been paying attention, here's what happens next. You go back and re-look at the two photos above, closely.
Done that? Ok, now read on.
- Did you notice the ears are a little funny, they need to sit better, and they have peculiar little square edge corners to them.
- If you looked extremely closely (with a micro microscope, I don't expect that much devotion from you) you'll notice a pin sticking out of the dogs bottom. Was this a bizarre sex experiment gone wrong? Did Rooff have a slight accident and need repair work?
- You may have noticed Rooff is blind as a bat because he has no eyes, but that's ok because he doesn't have a nose anyway so can't smell the lamb shanks cooking for dinner.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about experimentation, and things we make/do being shown even if they're less than perfect because it shows an ability to be strong about oneself and shows a desire to progress, master, perfect and just be big enough to write and say, yeah I got it wrong, but hey, here it is anyway. It's a terribly fine line between a success and a not so successful project, and we tend to only post about the wonderful picture perfect pieces to get the ooh, ahh reaction from people, because afterall we're exposing ourselves to the internet, and in a very controlled environment, therefore we can control what you, the reader, will accept as a great piece.
I've been thinking for a long time about how we portray ourselves in our blogs. We say we do all this for some sort of freedom of expression, an ability to let go, to show our stuff to an appreciative audience. But subconsciously we're all editing our thoughts, posts, concepts, to make each post incredible, and each object incredible.
What intrigues me is the following:
- I could have stopped the post after the second photo, sent it into web heaven, and let the comments come in.
- The chances are, each comment would somehow tell me how cute Rooff is. Because I made Rooff sound quite sweet and cute, and I gave you some cute distraction photos with another cute little lady kitty, taken at cute angles. That's a lot of cuteness.
And none of you would be the wiser. Because you see, this cute little dog called Rooff, has a dark secret. He's a complete an utter failure.
In the middle of the photo is a split. At this point in time there are no less than 11 of these splits, and 1 gigantic split which could very well behead the poor guy. I actually got tired of sewing the splits up, badly, after the third one, when I stopped and realised that what started as 4 splits, was now 9 and growing. This dog appears to be too big for his innards, even though he's only just stuffed enough to stand up. Perhaps he just has big bones.
The truth is, the material should have been perfect for him, but because it's such a little dog, with some tight corners, I should have sewn him by hand. Instead I sewed him up by machine, and didn't think that the flannel would fray and the weave would disintegrate so much, and so didn't leave a big enough seam. The machine needle ripped the weave apart, and any area under any sort of strain - basically every seam on this one - is coming apart. I kind of thought about this, and thought I should have done it all by hand, but, just for you Cari, I couldn't be arrrsed, decided to cut corners, and machine sewed it and I paid big time for it. I now have a half hearted dog, which I can't quite bring myself to bin, but who is falling apart, and looks a little ragged around the edges, and could do with some eyes, but that to me suggests he deserves eyes, and if I put eyes on him he'd then be a real live toy, and that just doesn't sit easy with me. Maybe I could accessorise him with loads of quirky buttons...
