making sh!t for your girlfriend since 2007

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soon come

Craft Mart ~ Nov 8 (6pm - 11pm) & Nov 9 (11am - 7pm) ~ Hamilton Artists Inc. ~ 155 James Street North, Hamilton
Halifax Crafters Society Winter Market ~ Nov 30 & Dec 1 ~ Olympic Community Centre ~2304 Hunter Street, Halifax
City of Craft ~ Dec 14 & 15 ~ The Theatre Centre ~ 1087 & 1095 Queen Street West, Toronto

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Week 22: The Love Below

Here's what I've been working on for the last couple of weeks: steamy Valentine's Day postcards made out of those cheesy, bodice-ripping inserts that come in romance novels - for sale at the Love and Rummage Trunk Show next Sunday at The Workroom.
You may be wondering what a Knittah is doing with such smut in her possession. Well, let me tell you. Back in the day when I used to work for the man (or, rather, the Woman) - i.e., a big bookstore selling crappy mass-market genre fiction - one of my greatest joys was stripping romance novels. For those of you unfamiliar with stripping, let me tell you. One of the reasons bookstores even stay in business is because booksellers are able to return books that don't sell within a year back to the publisher, for full credit. Except publishers have decided that returning cheap, poorly produced pocket books isn't worth the trouble and expense of shipping, so they just want the covers of the books as proof that they weren't sold, and the rest of the book is supposed to be "destroyed." Well, in the case of romance novels, once the cover was torn off, I was still left with a glossy, gloriously cheesy insert depicting a bountiful-bosomed maiden cradled (sometimes even carried) in the arms of her fantastically hulking Fabio - I couldn't just throw that kinda thing away, you know? So I started to keep them. Then I started to collect them. Then my co-workers started to collect them on my behalf. Four years later I had quite an impressive stash. I had serious plans for those babies (including decoupaging my entire dresser with them), but somehow over the years they went missing. Luckily I had the good sense to squirrel the top three away somewhere, and they re-surfaced about a month ago.
So here they are, for all your Valentine's Day needs. The whole project is named after Andre 3000's half of the 2003 Outkast double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below as a tribute to one of the greatest (and also, hottest) rappers ever, and also because the The Love Below totally sounds like one of those terrible euphemisms so common in romance novels - you know, things like "throbbing member" and "growing maleness." Those are for real, I couldn't make sh!t like that up. Except really I wouldn't know, because I don't read that kinda stuff.

5 comments:

roz said...

hehe that's so awesome! i can't wait to see them, i especially love the dude with the blonde flowy hair and massive multiple pecks. what a hunka hunka burnin' love.

hubba hubba, hope to see you next sunday!

aboyinaroom said...

i remember the days when we'd drive around in my car, listening to 'hey ya'. it would be on repeat for hours. that's before you dropped the 'i' at the end of kalpnai. i miss those days.

when we were 13.

Ghostface Knittah said...

That wasn't "Hey Ya" you had on repeat. It was "Vivrant Thing." And we were 30.

D-Sisive said...

valentine cards made from our prom pictures for profit? is anything sacred?

M said...

You know, you can read those novels online now. No need for TTC shame anymore ;)