Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I feel so crazy bad lately, so sorry about not posting! I have a theory that when I’m on vacation that my body goes into some sort of “ignore all warnings mode”, but then when I get back home, it lets go and all the pain and sickness that has been building up without showing symptoms suddenly gets released and I get knocked on my ass. Since my walking experiment made me feel a little better last time (I’m told it’s some sort of trick where inducing site-specific pain can cause more “whole body” pain to lose focus). Well, yesterday I walked around the city, from my house, across Bloor to Yonge, then down to Queen, and then eventually up Lansdowne and back home. I think it’s about 15km in all, and that was way too much because today I can’t even take a single step without extreme agony.

The question is, should I hair-of-the-dog it and try and force myself to do it some more tonight? On one hand I don’t want to make it a whole lot worse but on the other hand I worry that if I just give up now that it’s just going to settle into this wrecked state and heal slowly, stealing away a week of my life. To say nothing of the fact that I really don’t want to “give up”. I quite desperately need to know that I can force myself to do things if I want them badly enough. So I think later I will try push myself up to a two-day total of 20km. I wanted to write about some of the neurological effects I’m struggling with but I’m not ready for that yet. I find them too humiliating to public admit to so consider this me dipping my foot in the water. And that’s it for now.

Before I start working up the courage to do that I wanted to quickly post some pictures of some of the new jewelry I made this week. None of this is in the shop yet but there’s nothing stopping me from posting it there so I suppose it’ll be there in a day or two. All orders made while I was gone are shipped by the way. Anyway, here are a couple of face rings, one a crude face that I just made as a joke and the other a ring of tiny faces of various expressions:

I also took my “evil clown” ring and made it into a pendant or keychain. I like the way I made the attachment point for the keyring using the gore in the neck…

I also made some “protest rings” that I think turned out well. They’re in two sizes, one large, one small. They come out of the mold blank, and these two below have been carved/engraved with their slogans and then had enamel put into them to highlight it. They can also be painted with slogans since the pewter holds the paint nicely without even needing to be primed (but I like the engraved ones better personally).

The bands are engraved as well, with the large one saying “IDEAS WON’T GO TO JAIL” and the small one saying “SINNING BY SILENCE MAKES COWARDS” (paraphrased from Lincoln to fit better). Similar to those ring, and also in large and small sizes (look carefully and you’ll see they’re different), I made a pair of TV rings. They could also be painted or even just have stickers applied for the mood of the day, or are nice left as-is…

And perhaps inspired by my recent vacation (although it’s not really the right region of Mexico for Day of the Dead celebrations), I made some Day of the Dead inspired winged sugar skull rings. The wings fit really comfortably over the fingers and even though these are massive rings they are surprisingly comfortable to wear. I’ve tried to make them look like handmade ceramic, and these ones below are both slightly plated with copper and bronze although they also look quite nice painted (click these links for photos by the way).

Finally, I made some “fan art” rings. Because these are based on other people’s art — other people that I hugely respect and enjoy — I can’t in good conscience add these to my shop unless they give me their blessing, but I still wanted to share them here. First of all, I made some Transmetropolitan (you can read the first issue at that link) rings based on Spider Jerusalem’s glasses. I can’t recommend this comic highly enough, and if you like this blog you’ll love that comic because there’s a lot of overlap — similar politics, futurism, body modification, etc… I am a huge fan of it and almost everything else Warren Ellis has done.

I just hope I’m more like Spider than like Fred Christ. I am worried that Fred Christ has the same hope.

The other fan art is for Canadian author Jeff Lemire‘s Sweet Tooth (again, click that to read issue one). I was actually introduced to this comic by my eight year old daughter Nefarious, who was a fan before me, but now I can’t put it down as well, and every time she sees me she asks if I have any new issues for her to read. I’m hoping that she likes this ring because I made it with her in mind. The ring on the right is copper plated if it’s not obvious.

Anyway… Now to seek some salvation by breaking my body some more.