Studio Log: Starweek Thirteen

• Studio Disaster of the Week: Winter.

It's not really Chicago winter until your gate freezes and locks you out of your apartment where your pipes are frozen and bursting and leaking icy water through your kitchen down through three floors so you have to turn the water and heat off and use your cats as earmuffs in order to survive the 48 hour period during which your landlord is too busy Christmas shopping to call a plumber.

So it's officially Chicago winter.


As soon as you plastic your window, an icicle forms from your faucet... But if we didn't have horrendous winters then everyone would move here and then the rent would be too expensive. It's not a frozen tundra-- the frozen tundra is merely the BOUNCER keeping this city EXCLUSIVE. #crazyfromthecold

• Studio Outing of the Week (Because we were LOCKED OUT OF OUR HOUSE... DURING A BLIZZARD):

We went downtown to show our poor North Carolinian native houseguest around town, for lack of access to a warmer haven. Unfortunately, there was a blizzard that day. We had fun anyway. Here is Nelly, Nora and Amanda seeking temporary shelter from the gale beneath Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (known colloquially as "The Bean").

• Studio Jam of the Week: Darren Chris(s) Colfer doing "Baby It's Cold Outside"

• Studio Projects of the Week:

1. Holiday Decorations!

Nora made us both Christmas stockings and snowflakes for the studio!



She also made one of our house elves a holiday scarf.


2. Plants: We repotted all our houseplants this week. They're much happier now.

Ripley HATES gardening.


Some of our plants were overdue for real pots, as you can see.



The whole studio smells like Christmas tree and paperwhites!

• Confusing Discovery of the Week: Cheap AND tacky? Sign us up!

• Movie of the week: The King's Speech (All of your favorite british actors in the 1920s anglophone equivalent of a modern day bromance! Lovely. And we at The Burrow love a good stuffy British king crying frustrated tears).

• Studio Munch of the Week:

• Kitty Photo of the Week:

Pawwwwww.

Studio Log: Starweek Twelve

• Studio Projects of the Week:

1. Eff You. The Ukulele Cover. We just happened to have the camera rolling while we were just, you know, hanging out as usual.
(just kidding. We did like 14 takes).

Eff You (Ukulele Cover) from Lucy Knisley on Vimeo

2. We made a new T-Shirt! It's got a ZEBRA on it. Buy yours here!

• Kitty Photo/Studio Mail of the Week:

This week we got some lovely mail containing two BRILLIANT cat portraits from our new favorite person, Amy C! She totally NAILED them! Thank you, Amy!

PS: If anyone would like to send us more amazing mail, we are HAPPY TO HEAR THAT. Email us. LIKE RIGHT NOW.

• Studio Munch of the Week:

VICTORY PIE! Nora made a lovely buck off the Stump Pillows at the Lillstreet Arts Holiday Sale/Party, so she went downstairs to the Lillstreet pie cafe and bought us a WHOLE PIE. We'd have taken a photo of it before we ate half of it, but there was no time in that nanosecond to get the camera.

(Sour-Cherry Cinnamon! Holycrap good.)

• Studio Obsession of the Week MONTH:

MORE BUFFY. With season 3 completed, we move onto college and the continued awesomeness.

Let the FANART COMMENCE.

Click the image below for the ENORMOUS computer background version.

T-Shirts to follow... Next week?

Studio Log: Starweek Eleven- Flying Solo Mini Post!

Hi, you guys: it's Nora! This week has been a little quiet around the studio. Lucy has been in New York for the Thanksgiving holiday so I have had the Burrow all to myself! I've been getting a lot of "work" done (and by "work" I mean "Netflix watching, hot chocolate drinking and sock knitting"). But don't worry: there are still cats here to take photos of.

• Studio Project of the Week:

By popular demand, the stump pillows debuted in last week's post are now available on my etsy! Buy one for your house! Drawn by Lucy and Hand dyed! Hand printed! and Hand sewn by yours truly! Chicagoans can also buy pillows (as well as other sewn items) in person at the Lill Street Textiles Holiday Party and Sale next week! December 3rd, from 6-10pm. Stop by and say hello!

• Studio jam of the week:

Lykke Li's "Little Bit"


No seriously- I have been listening to this song non-stop for, like, four days now. It's a little bit, a little bit, a little bit catchy. Love!

Cat photos of the week:

Sun Bunny!

Perched and clearly thinking: "I miss my real mom and need much consoling."

Hope you all had great Thanksgivings! Catch ya' next week!

Studio Log: Starweek Ten

We've had a hard work week here at the studio. Punctuated by the usual nerdy outbursts and midnight movies. How are YOU?

• Studio Projects of the Week:

1. Stump Pillows! Hand-drawn, hand-printed, hand-dyed and hand-sewn (BY HAND!), these pretty little pillows will be available to buy from Nora at the Lill Street Holiday party/art-sale (December 3rd, 6-10pm).


2. Marsupial Cloth Stickers and Applique Patches! Drawn by Lucy and printed/prepped by Nora! These will also be sold at the Lill Street Holiday party/art-sale.

Nora will also have bags and other items for sale at Lill Street (which is an awesome arts center in Chicago).

• Studio Happening of the Week:

We hosted a little Pre-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1 screening get-together. We made tiny sexy pies, cockroach clusters, butterbeer and pumpkin juice!

Our Butterbeer Recipe:
Cream soda
A few drops of artificial butter flavoring (from the baking section)
Coconut rum
(Mixed to taste)

Our Pumpkin Juice Recipe:
Apple cider
Canned pumpkin
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
(Mixed WELL)

We hope you had a great HPWeekend, everybody!

• Studio Jam of the Week: "Mean," by Taylor Swift

(Our apologies; there are NO better videos of this song...)

• Studio Munch of the Week: EGGS BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH!

• Studio Obsession of the Week:

Because Lucy was too devoted to The X-Files as an adolescent to stray to other television, she sadly missed the Buffy Boat. So now Nora has been giving her a long-overdue education in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's coming along quite well. We're up to the third season, and should graduate to Angel by New Years.

(Sub-obsession: ALL OF WILLOW'S CLOTHES)

• Kitty Photo of the Week:

Have a smooshface week!

Studio Log: Starweek Nine (or Eleven... Depending)

So we missed a couple weeks there. Sorry! Holidays and illness and travel prevented us from sticking to our regular update schedule, so we'll try to make this post EXTRA GREAT to make up for the missed weeks.

• The Burrow hosted a Halloween studiowarming shindig!

It was a really fun time. As we'd been planning for a while, we constructed a photobooth and backdrop in our Room of Requirement (our tiny back room where we make art/take photos/grow plants/do interpretive dances). It involved lots of shiny fabric, spray paint and twinkly lights!


The cats really loved their new "underwater" fortress.


Here's what we did for the actual photobooth mechanism:

A spray-painted cardboard box with a hole to fit a camera on a tripod, which was connected to a remote shutter release button.


We spent a good deal of time figuring out how to light the damn thing (neither of us are photographers), but in the end it looked pretty great, and people seemed to have fun taking lots of awesome pictures.

This is our friend, Katy, as Mustache Ghost.

Later that weekend, we ventured out of the The Burrow to parade our costumes around the city of Chicago.


Team Burrow on location!

Despite the FREEZING COLD, we took the scooter around town.

It looked something like this:


(but with helmets)

• Only a few days after Halloween madness, The Burrow took a field trip out to Easthampton, MA for New England Webcomics Weekend, where Lucy was exhibiting work (and Nora was assisting).

Photo by Magnus Champlin

The show was great-- lots of awesome comics people and fun times.

New England is the capital of diner dining, a food form that we (as good North-Eastern girls) love and revere. So first on our list in jolly old New England was a trip to a for-realz boxcar diner, complete with table-juke (of which Lucy was very fond).


Nora is from the area, so we bunked with her parents and regressed into 14-year-old cable-tv-loving basement dwellers for the parts of the weekend where we weren't at the comics event. Which leads us to...

• Studio Obsession of the Week/s: BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH
  
  
  With Martin Freeman as Watson, Mr. Cumberbath plays the new Sherlock Holmes in the BBC Masterpiece Mystery!'s Conan Doyle adaptation.

We stumbled upon the first episode of this three-episode series on our first (of three, conveniently) nights in Massachusetts (where Nora's folks have actual TV, whereas we have only internet TV). WE PROCEEDED TO FALL. IN. LOVE.

GO and watch this amazing series-- it's available free online for a limited time on PBS.org! THEN GO ON AND TELL US THAT YOU DON'T LOVE IT.

And to read more about our new favorite person on the earth, we particularly like this blog's profile: Geeky Girls Love Sci Fi

• Studio Jam of the Week: Darren Chriss singing Teenage Dream

As if all that wasn't enough heartthrobby excitement for two weeks, we were DELIGHTED to discover that one studio obsession, The Very Potter Musical, was crossing over with another studio obsession, Glee. (Darren Chriss played Harry in the VPM). So in our minds, this is just Harry Potter singing a love song to Kurt; our favorite character on Glee.

• In Horribly Heartbroken at Hogwarts Kickstarter news:

We've reached our secondary Manatee goal for the fundraiser. To celebrate, we bought our plane tickets to Orlando! EEEE! You can still reserve your copy of the comic and donate to the studio on the kickstarter site until January 8th.

We're very excited.

Studio Log: Starweek Eight

• Studio Project of the Week:

As you might expect from two such compulsively crafty individuals as ourselves, Halloween has always been kind-of a big deal for us. This week we spent some time glorying in our past halloween triumphs (or our moms') while we worked on this year's couture creations.

Clearly.... Just... Well, I think it's obvious that we haven't changed much.

It's a serious and grave undertaking to decide on what to be for halloween. It only gets SERIOUSER as we get older.

A good halloween costume is warm, comfortable, flattering, funny and a little scary. We took all of these elements into consideration as we pondered the very important choice of this year's costumes. With our powers of BRILLIANCE combined, we had the ultimate revelation that we should be... A SQUID AND SHARK (hammerhead).

See a butt(fin)load more photos of these, the only outfits we will ever wear again, on our flickr pages: Lucy's and Nora's.

• Studio Obsession of the Week:

We recently tracked down and rented entirely undervalued and out-of-print movie, "The Legend of Billie Jean." If you have a crazy indie movie store near you, GET YOU THERE and rent that mofo.

It's the story of a girl and her brother (Helen and Christian Slater) in the eighties who ride a scooter and get into trouble so they run away and have crazy fun scary awesome haircutty times. Then they get comeuppance from mean grownups and move to Vermont (spoiler alert!).

We were so empowered by this brand of eighties rebellion (it involves ONE long dangly earring! ONE!) that we decided to make T-Shirts to memorialize our Billie Jean Love.

• Studio Jam of the Week:

From the Legend of Billie Jean soundtrack, and featuring the aforementioned one-dangly-earringed haircutty awesomeness, it's Pat Benetar's "Invincible!"

• Studio Happening of the Week:

We were tipped off from Nelly that the Steppenwolf Theater was liquidating their costume and props shop, selling off a bundle of crazy items for one dollar each! So we grabbed our intern and hustled down there, where we braved the crowd of crazy theater people to get our hands on some weird and awesome stuff.

You can see a selection of these items on display in our murder credenza!

• Kitty Photo of the Week:

Are you guys excited for Halloween?

BECAUSE WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR HALLOWEEN!

Studio Log: Starweek Seven

• Studio Projects of the Week:

1. Thanks to lovely generous people, we've reached our goal for our Heartbroken at Hogwarts project! You can still get the comic and donate to the project, though-- The more we make at this fundraiser, the better the comic and the trip will be!

2. Nora just finished printing a whole batch of Burrow T-Shirts! So if you've already ordered yours, expect it in the mail soon! And if you haven't yet, look how pleasing they are!

• Strange Studio Impulse of the Week:

It was on sale. Now we have a bathroom valet. Tips accepted.

• Public Defacement of the Week:

• Kitty VIDEO of the Week:

Week Six; Not for the faint of Hogwarts!

This themed post has been brewing in The Burrow for about four weeks. Once we moved in together, it was only a matter of time until our collective Harry Potter love would boil over and erupt in a volcano of molten crazy art. And well guys, yeah that's totally awesome!

• Studio Projects of the Week:

1. ANNOUNCING A VERY EXCITING PROJECT! Please follow the link to find out more!

Heartbroken at Hogwarts

2. The Burrow Studio Store! Featuring a bunch of collaborations we're cooking up, including T-Shirts, Screenprints and items to benefit our HHH project.

3. Check out these creepily amazing taxidermied house elves (elfs?) we made! You can see how we did it by clicking here.

• Kitty Photo of the Week:

When Linney feels a little insecure, she likes to get all her favorite objects together and arrange them all around her just so.This photo fits with the theme because that orange stripey sock is one of Nora'shand-knitted Ginny Weasley socks!

• Studio Jam of the Week: A Very Potter Musical

This is actually our studio jam of the YEAR.
I think our cats are sick of us playing this soundtrack by now.

Finite incantatum, y'all.