Stay Trashy

Sometimes a craft begins with a meaningful story.

Sometimes you just really want to embroider a raccoon throwing the rock-and-roll sign underneath the words STAY TRASHY.

This was the second kind.

I wanted a raccoon that looked cute and slightly inappropriate rather than angry or overly cartoonish. The goal was friendly little trash panda with questionable judgment.

Basically, someone I would probably enjoy hanging out with.

I also wanted the artwork fairly clean because embroidery has a way of turning a simple drawing into a small engineering project. Every unnecessary line eventually becomes another stitch, another trim, another opportunity for the machine to decide it has had enough of you.

So I kept the raccoon graphic fairly bold, gave him the little rock-and-roll hand, added Stay Trashy above him, and digitized the design for embroidery.

Once it stitched out, it immediately became one of those designs that made me laugh every time I looked at it.

Which meant, obviously, it needed to go on a tote bag.

I love projects like this because handmade does not always need to be precious. It can be beautiful, sentimental, meticulously constructed, and occasionally completely stupid.

Preferably all in the same week.

There is also something especially satisfying about using a fairly serious embroidery machine to spend an absurd number of stitches making a raccoon tell people to stay trashy.

Technology.

For art.

The tote turned out exactly the way I wanted: useful enough to actually carry around and ridiculous enough that someone will eventually stop you and ask where you got it.

And that is usually my favorite kind of thing to make.