a walk through central park

hullo friends.  sadly, this post concludes my east coast glove extravaganza.  but don't you worry!  there are more gloves waiting in the wings to be rehabbed and exhibited for the joy of all!

in total, i brought back two gloves from dc and two from nyc, but i have a little secret: i saw lots of dirty homeless gloves in nyc but i couldn't possibly rescue all of them.  some were just flat-out gnarly and i didn't have enough room in my suitcase for a buncha freeloaders.  come on gloves, get a job!  (kidding.. ha..ha..)  but seriously, i rescued what i could!  can't fault me for that.

the two gloves from nyc came from central park and were found not too far from each other.  the first glove was right by central park west and 96th street on a bench.  it's a really nice specimen and (as far as i know) the first mitten-type glove i have found.  it has a faux fur trim and looks like a mitten from the outside, but if you stick your hand inside, each finger has it's own compartment just like a regular glove.  cozy!  genius!

the second glove was on the fence surrounding the jacqueline kennedy onassis reservoir in the middle of central park.  clearly, someone must have left both gloves there for me to find on my walk to the frick collection (an amazing collection of artwork in a mansion that you must visit sometime).

since it was chilly in nyc and i often had cold ears, i decided to turn the furry mitten into a hat for the blue gloveman.  his beady red eyes just barely peek out from beneath the fur of his russian hat.

i'm happy to introduce you to our newest friend:

 Cossack!

boastin', east coastin'

good day to you all.  i can't believe i'm saying this but it sure feels like bikini season is just around the corner.  that's the lovely thing about living in southern california: we have no winter!  now i would not be saying the same for the east coast.  oh, no.  the winters over there are nipply as hell.  i mention the east coast because, in fact, i was just over there for a trip to visit two old friends!

my first stop was washington dc to visit jessica, my friend and roommate from college.  i stayed with her at her and her boyfriend adam's place in virginia and took the metro or drove to dc to see the sights.  my first night in virginia, i experienced my first real snowfall.  it was BEAUTIFUL!  i had never in person seen the transformation that a fresh blanket of pure white snow could make on a landscape.  oh my gosh, it was just gorgeous (i think i said "beautiful" and "gorgeous" about a million times while i was there).  but wow it was cold.  every morning, i bundled up in at least 5 layers to prepare to face the day outside.  despite the fact that my face was frozen, i enjoyed every little bit of dc.

since the weather had turned so cold, it was practically a guarantee that i would find at least one glove during my stay in virginia.  i lucked out and found two during my four days there.

glove number 1 was found on a sunny day when the snow still covered the ground.  adam, jessica, and i drove into dc to visit all the monuments.  adam found a great parking spot right near the lincoln memorial and immediately after exiting the car, i spotted the little beauty.

 jessica, ever the glove supporter, posed enthusiastically as i took a picture.  adam put the glove in the car to wait for us while we went to visit the monument which, i must say, is breathtaking (even with the hundreds of bothersome tourists surrounding it).

jessica and i found the second glove on my last day in virginia.  the snow had finally melted and the weather had warmed, just in time for me to leave.  we had gone to dunkin' donuts so i could see what the fuss was all about and she spotted the glove under a tree right outside the coffee place.  again, she struck a pose which highlights the shimmery glove's fabulosity.  she then went on to tell me that i needed to carry around doggy doo-doo bags so that i would always be prepared in case of spontaneous glove discovery.  she is so wise.

after dc, i ventured on to nyc for four more days and discovered two more gloves there, but you'll have to wait for another day to meet them.

in the meantime, i wish to introduce this sprightly fellow who likes to unwind in the evening with a nice cold sassafras root beer.  if you ever meet him, be sure to compliment his stately mustache (it took him ages to grow it).

give it up for Bonkle!!

80 degree holidays

happy new year, everyone!  i hope you all had a wonderful holiday season full of friends, family, and good food.  i know i sure did!

to begin, i must set up the story.  this begins way back in november, at thanksgiving...
my dear friend jenna and her lovely parents joined my family for a thanksgiving feast at my house this year.  jenna had come from texas and her parents came all the way from ohio.  thanksgiving night, jenna and i had a sleepover at at her hotel in santa monica and spent the next day frolicking around the city.  as our frolicking came to a close, we started our walk back to the hotel and came upon a pile of trash left by some careless hobo, no doubt (it's santa monica).

amongst the pieces of debris, i spotted a diamond in the rough!  an abandoned glove!  hurray!  but aw.. gross.. santa monica glove.  thankfully, i was carrying two bags because i had bought christmas cards and a birthday present for my mom that day.  i consolidated my purchases into the larger bag and used the smaller one to pick up and store the glove on its journey.


fast forward to christmastime.  my good friend marken is back from new york city for the holidays and we are at knott's berry farm with her mom, meg, and our friend beeta.  why are we at knott's?  for a craft fair, duh!  (what?)  well, we are walking around this craft fair, unimpressed with the knick knacks and various homemade crap.  i heave a sigh, expecting to leave the fair empty-handed, when i see a glove relaxing on the floor in a doorway!  yay!  i had no tissues or baggies to pick it up with, so this time i just sucked it up and picked it up with my bare hands and held it daintily between two fingers until i located some paper towels to wrap it in.


fast forward again to 2012 and after the holiday hubbub, i have time to sit down and make some glove dolls.  these two are fairly straightforward and i know right away what i want to form them into.  the santa monica glove is a plain black knit glove but the thumb lends itself so nicely into a long nose.  the knott's glove has cute rubber polka dots on the palm, so i want to highlight that feature.  the pinky and thumb fingers become arms and the wrist hole becomes a mouth.

please welcome 2012's first glove dolls:

             Huell                               and                                 Lon!

quadruplasplosion

ladies and gents, i canNOT believe how long it has been since i've last posted.  it's absurd!  abhorrent!  abnormal!  absolutely unacceptable!  so to make it up to you, i will give you the most glove action you've ever seen here on this blog.

not one,
not two,
not even three,
but FOUR GLOVES!  in one post!

well, i know what you're thinking.  you're saying to yourself, "that liz, she so crazy... how she got four gloves lying around anyhow?"  well, i'd tell you why... but i don't exactly know.  alls i knows is that i found the first dubglove several months back but was unable to turn it into a glove doll because i had no free time whatsoever because i was teaching full-time.  now that i have a little bit o' extra time, i can do fun things like rehabbing lost gloves.  so i apologize at not having photo of the first pair where i actually found them, but i can't for the life of me remember where i found them or if i even took a picture.  i decided that these two gloves, since they were found together, shall travel together all the rest of their days.  i chose to create a rider and his vehicle.  well, without further ado, here's the first pair!


say hi to...  Gianwayne and his faithful Steed!

the second pair of gloves i found just yesterday when wandering the streets of santa monica with one of my best friends and old college roommate, jessica.  i picked her up after she was done with her workly duties and parked my car in one of the many parking structures available in the area.  as soon as we exited the structure, we walked right by two beautiful black knit gloves.

we had to stop for a photo, obviously!  upon further inspection, i discovered that they are the kind of gloves with little flaps for the forefinger and thumb that you can secure back with a button if you need to use touch-screens.  someone totally messed up by losing these babies!  i REALLY lucked out this time!

i decided to remove the thumb and index finger flaps and save them for feet.  i stuffed one entire glove to make a body and attached the feet on the bottom.  i cut the wrist off of the other glove and made a large nose out of it.  the rest of the fingers of the second glove form the remainder of the "comb" on the back of the body.  i think it looks a little bit like a cross between woodstock and snoopy... now wouldn't THAT be a weird couple??


please welcome...
Snoopid!

lub dub, luv gluv

summah tiiimmeee and the weather ain’t freeeezyyyy...

that’s right, it’s summer!  which means no school!  which means free time!

and i have more good news: i’m done with grad school in less than two weeks, so give me a high-five if you see me around.

i found this pair of gloves in may when i took two weeks off from student teaching high school to student teach at a local middle school.  i would smile all the way to school every morning.  whoever says middle school is a terrible place has never visited this place!  i’ve never been so happy to be around 6^th graders!

driving home one day, i spotted a glimpse of red on the roadside.  being me, i immediately pulled over to check to see if was a glove.  it wasn’t a glove.  it was TWO gloves!  hot damn!  i picked them up, skipped back to my car, and grinned all the way home.  two months later, on summer break, i have finally finished the glove doll.

it was so fortunate to find two red gloves, since the majority of gloves i find are neutral in color or leather work gloves.  i decided to take advantage of the color by creating a glove doll that resembled the shape of the human heart.  the stubby fingers look a little like arteries.  to mix things up a little, i put snaps on two of the fingers.  they are fun to snap together and pull apart.

please beat your drum for...

Aorty! (pronounced ar-tee)

chick-hen

hens, glovans, countrymen, lend me your ears!  last month in may, i went up to davis for the whole earth festival.  for those of you that have been following since the beginning of lonesome glove, you will remember that this blog started in davis, california!  it was great to be back in my old college town, especially during springtime.  i had hopes that i might find a glove while up there, and thankfully, i did!  after spending three glorious days in davis at the festival, i was preparing to return to reality.  thankfully, before i left, i found TWO gloves on 3rd street near crepeville.  i clutched the dirty, leafy gloves in my left hand for quite a long time while strolling around downtown.  finally, i stopped in miskha's cafe to get a coffee and a brown paper bag to deposit the gloves in.  the gloves flew back down to los angeles with me and waited patiently for their turn to be rehabbed.  a month later, after i finished student teaching, i finally had time to address the two gloves!

they started off as two black fingerless gloves (the previous owner had cut off the fingers!  how cruel!).  i sewed the finger holes shut, stuffed the gloves, and attached them at the wrist to create a very tall chicken-y form.  one thumb and forefinger stuck out and looked a little bit like a beak, so i sewed them together into a pouty-chicken-kissy-face.  cuuuuuuuuuuute!  cluck.

flap your wings for Hen-ry!!!!

hen-ry has her very own bebby egg.

look at her luvin' it!

SPRING BREEEAAAKKKKK

i apologize for my extended absence.  the past few months have been busy with grad school and student teaching.  buttttt i will not bore you with those things.  instead, why don't we talk of spring?  the flowers are blooming, people are sneezing, claritin never had so many admirers.  life is grand!

so you know what spring means?  SPRING BREEEAAAKKKKK!!  which is how i actually have the free time to make a glove doll and then post about it.  oh how i have missed having free time...

glove 1

i found this glove a long time ago when i was driving home from student teaching.  i spotted one glove near the baseball field in the street outside the school and immediately pulled over to snap a picture and grab it.  i hopped in my car with a big grin and kept driving home, only to spot *another* glove just a little ways down the road, near the curb.  by then, i had driven too far to pull over, so i flipped a u-turn (legal?) and headed back up the hill.

glove 2

after maneuvering through the school's parking lot and then driving out the other side, i was able to head back down the hill.  i pulled over again and retrieved the second glove.  it was the mate of the first!  twins!!  i honestly think the two gloves may have belonged to a student that was practicing sports on said baseball field, but who cares, the gloves were MINE!  MUAHHAHHAHAH!!!


several months later, i actually have the time to make the gloves into something awesome. the gloves are sporty, made of leather and some sort of stretchy synthetic, with nice padding in the palm area.  the wrists had elastic bands with a velcro closures.  i decided to cut those off because i've sewn through rubber before, and trust me it's not fun.

so after cutting off the wrists (that sounds terrible), i cut the fingers (OH GOD) off one of the gloves, leaving the palm connected to a thumb.  i sealed the top part of the palm/thumb to create a head with a very long nose.  then i sewed the fingers on top of the head to make a very striking headdress.  after stuffing the second glove and attaching the head, i added button eyes and a pompom nose. i started out thinking it would be a bird, but it ended up more like a moose dog.  i think he's pretty cute, apart from his massively lopsided face (he has an enormous right cheek that i have concealed in this well-posed glamor shot).

enjoy the new post, because i don't know when i'll be able to post again.  i've miss you guys!
and now, i present to you....

Mooseldorf!!

extra-long spooky post!

happy halloween everyone!  i love halloween because i always feel like dressing up, but this is the one time of year where i can do it without looking like a total idiot.  this year i'm a peacock and i get to stick my hair straight up.  it's awesome.  well anyways, this is a super-de-duper special post because we have two guest gloves joining us today.  my brother steve found the first glove on a dark sidewalk in palms.

 "Murder was in the air.  What other explanation could there be for the haphazard nature of this glove's disposal without the company of it's twin?  As I strode to the apartment of an acquaintance, something about this item screamed that I must rescue it from the sidewalk's cruel clutches and deliver it to my sister for further study and rehabilitation."

here's the second glove, found by my good friend lindsey (see: glove cake) somewhere in orange county.  i'm not fancy and so can't upload this photo from my phone to the computer.  this was the best i could do.  lindsey e-mailed me a story to accompany the picture (edited but left mostly intact)
 Glove Story: Hello beautiful friend, I found this riding glove stranded by its lonesome outside of Trader Joes in Irvine.  I walked past it and did a double-take to make sure its mate and owner were not to be seen.  Of course, I thought of you instantly, snapped a picture with my phone, and picked it up!  Now I'm sure you will transform it into a majestic new creature.

hokay, so since it's october and halloween is next weekend, i felt it more than appropriate to make a spooky frankenstein-ish glove doll fit for the holiday.  i transformed the diesel glove from steve, into a vampirenstein with many legs and two bloody fangs.  ethel, the glove from lindsey, became a spooky spiky cape.  

have you ever seen such an adorable monster?  Deathel will kill you with cuteness!!!  and don't worry, he doesn't bite (unless you aren't looking).

happy halloweeeeeeen!

glovekin!

a fruitful trip

remember how i was hoping i would find a glove in davis?  that didn't happen.  but guess what?  i found TWO gloves within my first five minutes in berkeley.  holy ballzz!!!  jessica picked me up from the train station and i immediately had to ask her to pull over and stop so i could jump out of the car and rescue two prime specimens of glove.  they were beauts, and i stowed them safely in a plastic grocery bag at the bottom of my suitcase for the remainder of my trip.  i finally got around to fashioning them into something this weekend, and i am mighty proud of them, if i do say so myself.  emily, jessica, and caryn, this glovely goes out to you!


behold the lovely little butterfly,












Mariah Carey!

p.s. click the pictures to enlarge them.  this glove has some really nice texture!