114 hedgehogs

Hello all!

I am here today to tell you a tale of adventure, woe, potatoes, and eventual triumph . . . and also of hedgehogs. 114 of them, to be precise.

(yes, you heard that correctly.) 

My cousins came to visit (hurrah!) and while they were here, we girls decided to make some crafts, one of which was painted t-shirts. We originally wanted to make potato stamps . . . 

. . . and we even started taking pictures to document the process. It soon became apparent, however, that this wasn't going to work-the paint came out very blotchy and splodgy and just BLEH. Our efforts spiraled into a cycle of despair involving styrofoam, exact-o knives, and a lot of googling to try to save this project from the crash-and-burn that was already happening. Clearly a new approach was necessary, so we finally decided to just paint the shirts! I was still very attached to my hedgehog idea, so I decided to make a stencil, trace it in pen, and paint over it.

I had fun designing the lil' hedgehog and I actually had in mind something I read from E. H. Shepard about his design of Pooh-I can't find the exact quote now, but it was something about how his eye being just the little cartoon dot so far back in the head made him look particularly Pooh-ish. I'm rather fond of that look, and I thought it suite my little hedgehog quite well. I've decided to name him Ernest as an homage, actually. :)

I'm very happy with my new shirt! Also, now that I have a vector version of my hedgehog design, I'll have to make a pattern with it once I figure out how to do that in Inkscape. :) 

However, this turned out to be more of a "why-buy-the-thing-when-you-could-make-the-thing-in-fifty-million-hours-of-work-for-yourself" project . . . I did some number crunching and found out that I spent about 6 hours on it (okay, 5 hours, 57 minutes, and 12 seconds or 5.953 hours, assuming a constant rate of 3 minutes 8 seconds or 3.13 minutes per hedgehogs at a total of 114 hedgehogs. This number is based on a smallish sample size, but the data points were close enough together that I'm fairly confident in this average.) If I'm being paid $7.25 per hour, the current national minimum wage, that comes out to $43.16. Adding the cost of the t shirt ($5.99) the total cost of making this shirt is $49.15. And that's a minimum estimate, considering that I definitely wasn't working at maximum efficiency the whole time and that I feel like I should be paid more than minimum wage for this. (can you tell AP Calc is getting to me already? We take our math too very seriously here at Something Splendid Studios Inc. Sometimes we forget to think about other things.) 

Anyway! I do feel pretty fancy wearing this shirt, mixed with a certain amount of concern over my life choices in spending that much time on a hedgehog t-shirt. I had fun making it, though, so I think it was worth it.

In other news, I want to start sharing some of what I've been reading or listening to with y'all, and this video is one I've been listening to a lot recently. It's absolutely gorgeous and inspiring and it will fill your day with happiness. :)

Enjoy your week, readers! See you next time.