Cat's litter box

Fan photo: Chewbaca

It is so gratifying when someone sends me a photo of one of my bags or purses after they have 'left the nest.'

I had painted a crossbody leather purse to look like Chewbaca's bandolier. Here it is, modified to fit on Chewie himself.

 

 

 

Upgraded.

As a geeky fan-girl, it's nice to have my work featured on a bunch of geeky websites. But it is absolutely thrilling to have a fellow geeky fan-girl send me a photo of herself with a the cyberman purse I painted standing next to a Dalek at Fan Expo in Toronto. 

From Kathy's sweet message to me, "Everyone loved your design.... I was in a lineup for an autograph from John Barrowman... when the 3 teenage girls at the beginning of the line, looked my way and squeeled. I looked behind me... didn't see anything ... and they were squealing about the cyberman purse. "

Kathy of KatKreated is a Dr. Who fan and she has a bunch of great crafts at her etsy site at etsy.com/shop/KatKreated. I LOVE her Tron card.

The force is strong in this one

Let Them Eat Cake Award

I read very few blogs due to lack of time or lack of interest in mostly everything.

The blogs that I actually read give me a lot of pleasure, information or insight. So I have created an award to show my appreciation. To explain the image, you can go here. Or you can just take my word for it that it is a cake, compiled by me. It's about the only thing I make, therefore it's very, very special.

The winners of the Let Them Eat Cake Award are:

The Newtown Pentacle.
Mitch Waxman airs out Newtown Creek and surrounding areas in his photo-rich and fascinating blog. Plus, he's my husband and I think he's amazeballs.
newtownpentacle.com

Elaine4Queen.
Elaine has given me so much to think about over the years in one forum or another. I am enriched daily by her insights. She also has a particularly stunning dog.
elaine4queen.wordpress.com

Dotty Headbanger.
Dotty is a she-hermit. Dotty is mental. Her poetry is on par with the Vogons. I am her British/American translator. Just roll with it. 
dottyheadbanger.wordpress.com

New York Shitty.
Miss Heather has an eye for photography and a will to shit-stir, making her the most valuable Greenpointer that I know. She is fabulous.
newyorkshitty.com

Lucy's Football.
If I actually wrote on my blog, rather than post pictures of bacon and Star Wars things, it would sound just like Lucy's football. 
lucysfootball.com

 

This is why they are endangered.

Your Guide to a Tour of Decay

My Beloved husband in the news. His blog is newtownpentacle.com

By STEVEN STERN
Published: June 15, 2012

Link to original article at The New York Times

STAND on the pedestrian walkway of the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, and you might notice a vaguely ominous red brick tower on the Queens side of the Newtown Creek, looming over the railroad tracks and asphalt plants.

If Mitch Waxman is your guide, he will identify it as the derelict smokestack of Peter Van Iderstine’s fat-rendering business, which first set up shop in 1855. But he won’t stop there.

He will expound on the archaic waste-disposal operations that once flourished on the creek, conjuring scenes of putrescent horse carcasses floating in on barges from Manhattan and docks piled with manure three stories high. The narrative will extend to Cord Meyer’s bone blackers and Conrad Wissel’s night soil wharf — the gothic names of these forgotten businesses rattled off in a distinct Brooklyn accent.

At some point, he will start in on the horrors of the M. Kalbfleisch Chemical Works, eventually making his way to the sins of Standard Oil.

If the city’s dead industries leave ghosts behind, Mr. Waxman is an adept medium.

The Newtown Creek watershed, his field of expertise, is a place where such specters are all too real. In the murky depths of the 3.8-mile estuary, the past haunts the present. Since the creek was designated a Superfund site in 2010, contractors from the Environmental Protection Agency have been dredging and testing in search of that past. The sludge acid that the Kalbfleisch factory sluiced into the water back in the 1830s is of more than academic concern.

Not that Mr. Waxman is any sort of an academic. While the Newtown Creek Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, lists him as its resident historian, his credentials were earned on the street and the Internet, through countless solitary walks and countless nights poring over obscure archives. (“Mitch got that title by proving it, over and over,” said Kate Zidar, executive director of the organization.)

Formerly a comic-book artist and writer, Mr. Waxman earns his living doing photo retouching out of his apartment in Astoria, Queens. Since 2009, he has documented his passion for the creek — in oddly beautiful photography and beautifully odd prose — on his blog, The Newtown Pentacle.

Lately, he has been leading public walking tours of the waterfront for the alliance and other groups, as well as personally guiding anyone else who comes calling. He has lectured to local politicians and environmentalists, shepherded documentary filmmakers around Calvary Cemetery and taught German industrial ecology students a thing or two about sewage. Somehow, almost everyone interested in the polluted waterway seems to find his or her way to Mr. Waxman. He’s become a docent of decay, the cicerone of Newtown Creek.

MR. WAXMAN begins his tours with a well-rehearsed opening line: “This is not the world you know.”

For most visitors, that’s probably true. The Newtown Creek area was once one of the nation’s great manufacturing centers, the waterway carrying more freight than the Mississippi River. Walking around the massive factory buildings of the Degnon Terminal in Long Island City, Queens, now mostly repurposed as warehouses, you catch a glimpse of a lost working-class city only blocks from the gleaming condominiums now rising by the East River.

After World War II, that industrial greatness faded, just as its environmental cost started to become apparent. A 1950 sewer explosion in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was the first indication of the huge quantities of petroleum poisoning the water and leaching into the soil. But the full extent of the damage wasn’t discovered until the late 1970s: At least 17 million gallons of oil spilled over the previous century (more than the Exxon Valdez), much of which, after years of legal wrangling and recovery efforts, is still there.

Mr. Waxman calls the area a “municipal sacrifice zone” — the urban equivalent of the bomb test sites of Nevada. And his tours are meant in part to expose the unsavory infrastructure that has been shunted there. He can name the 19 waste-transfer stations lining the creek and point out each of the 23 combined sewer outflows that disgorge their contents into the water. The lurking danger of the creek’s emanations is a constant undercurrent. He will intone: “The very air you’re breathing is a poisonous fume!”

But despite the toxic atmosphere, Mr. Waxman is clearly in love with the place. Based on the enthusiastic groups that show up for each tour, that perverse attraction is shared by others.

The journalist Andrew Blackwell, who traveled to some of the world’s most polluted places for his recent book, “Visit Sunny Chernobyl,” seemed unsurprised that such a blighted area would hold an aesthetic appeal. Ravaged industrial sites, he suggested, might actually fulfill a longing for nature.

“Part of what people are looking for in a wilderness experience,” Mr. Blackwell said, “is the sense that it’s not a mediated thing, that it’s not made for them. A place like Newtown Creek isn’t a product. It’s supposedly a place that no one wants to go. That almost makes it more wild, makes people feel like they’re discovering something about the world.”

Mr. Waxman’s own discoveries began, strangely enough, as an effort to improve his health.

Until 2006, his life was sedentary and circumscribed, revolving around wife, dog and (primarily) computer. “My friends called me ‘veal,’ ” he said, “because I never left the little white room.”

That led to a heart attack at 39, a weeklong hospital stay and a command to exercise. So he began walking. Headphones blasting Black Sabbath, camera at his side, he circled out from Astoria, exploring colonial graveyards, abandoned factories and, eventually, the Newtown Creek waterfront.

“I started to see all these things I couldn’t explain,” he said. So began the cycle of wandering and research that continues to this day. “The more time you give it, the more stuff you find, and the more questions get asked,” he said.

These questions brought him in contact with a circle of like-minded seekers: amateur urbanists and self-taught historians, railroad enthusiasts and infrastructure aficionados. In their company, Mr. Waxman distinguished himself as someone equally comfortable on the street and in the archive. “Mitch is the type that will go up to a stranger and ask things,” said Kevin Walsh, creator of the popular urban history blog Forgotten New York. Mr. Waxman’s social ease, combined with a willingness to share the knowledge he was acquiring, helped him “make allies among the people who work along the creek,” Mr. Walsh said.

ONE day, Mr. Waxman signed up for a boat tour narrated by Bernard Ente, a maritime devotee from Maspeth. They hit it off, and Mr. Ente, a founding member of the Newtown Creek Alliance, became a sort of mentor. When he died, in April last year, Mr. Waxman essentially stepped into his shoes.

The distinctively apocalyptic spin he brings to his newfound role, however, is his alone. That “sense of looming menace” comes to full flower on his blog. An oddball mix of history, reportage and genre pastiche, it is written in a self-consciously florid prose modeled on H. P. Lovecraft, the cultish writer of pulp horror fiction. Slipping in and out of the voice of a demented antiquarian, the daily posts portray the creek as home to unspeakable, possibly supernatural, terrors.

“You have these buried secrets,” he said, explaining the thinking behind the occult conceit. He’s spotted early-19th-century terra-cotta pipes protruding from bulkheads, antique masonry sewers connected to who knows what. He added: “There really is no telling what’s in the ground there.”

The more Mr. Waxman discovers about the creek’s hidden past, the more he has become an advocate for its survival. Last summer, while out on the water surveying bulkheads with the crusading conservation group Riverkeeper, he discovered and documented a previously unreported oil spill on the Queens side.

His fascination with the darker aspects of the landscape has made him a fitting counterpart to the environmentalists working toward its future. As E.P.A. scientists begin the long process of rehabilitating the waters, Mr. Waxman is engaged in a parallel effort. His work is a kind of historical remediation, reclaiming the waterway’s forgotten role in the life of the city.

“It’s an odd thing,” he said. “The creek has been waiting for me all this time. And I’ve been waiting for it.”

 

Agree, I do.

May the fourth be with you

Designed By Laurence Desrochers

www.behance.net/ldrooch

 

Lastday. Go to carousel to be renewed.

I hear that they're remaking Logan's Run. I just hope that they still have the metalic hand sculpture that's outside Carousel. Because I, like, slaved over this bag for hours this weekend.

 

In which I pull a muscle patting myself on the back.

I've been painting purses. It's fun. I love it. And like all my crafts, hopefully I can sell the end result in order to buy more supplies with which to craft some more.

I started with a bunch of Dr. Who themed purses and some skulls before I came across a really cool vintage purse that demanded to be painted like Boba Fett. 

I posted it on flickr and in some craft/Star Wars/Sci-fi/geekery Flickr groups and it certainly found its market. Social media for the win!

It was picked up by geekcrafts.com from their Flickr group. From there it filered out across the interwebs.

neatorama.com's Jill Harness said "I don’t know about you ladies, but I could sure use a great purse like this Boba Fett one by Catherine Penfold-Waxman."

I'm big in Brazil at garotasnerds.com and nerdice.com where Google creatively translates from Portuguese to English "Catherine Penfold is an American who has a lot of creativity to customize bags. She has customized several exchanges with the theme nerd, but this is certainly the coolest of Boba Fett! Very beautiful is not it? Unfortunately she was a single piece and has already been sold, but the Etsy of Catherine 's other models really cool too."

fashionablygeek.com said "Etsy seller Catherine Penfold-Waxman turned a vintage purse into the Boba Fett masterpiece you see before you."

geeksaresexy.com posted "While this deliciously geeky receptacle has already been nabbed, Catherine Penfold-Waxman makes some other gorgeous geeky girl wear so you might want to check it out"

Over at buzzfeed.com they said "Using a bit of paint and a quick mind, Catherine Penfold-Waxman transformed a mint green pleather bag into everyone's favorite bounty hunter."

rampagereality.com said "Catherine Penfold-Waxman’s custom Star Wars Boba Fett purse might be the only purse that I would hold for my wife while she climbs out of the Sarlacc Pit with me."

The chaps at unrealitymag.com say, "But now I have an example of this that I might use if I accidentally switched genders one day. This Boba Fett purse looks like a normal modern design to outsiders, but to geeks? It’s pretty clear what’s going on here."

dorkly.com keep it simple with, "Stay fashionable while you bag another bounty."

 

The three fortune cookies by which I live my life

This is a photo of my laptop stand on my desk.

Painted Whovian purses. Dr. Who is cool.

I paint. Oh yes I do. For fun and profit. And I love Dr. Who. Yes, I do.

Buy these at my Etsy store. one of a kind, vintage purses with original art.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/catpenfold

 

 

Hey Jude

Smartphone.

Entrance at rear.

Another joyful Willaimsburg find, photo taken by me.

Only in Willamsburg

I found this while taking a walk around the 'burg.

Like.

Hare and Monkey

The Mad March Hare is for sale at $40. The Monkey is priceless.

 

Missing Irate Dog.

Mr Me and I were walking along Broadway in Astoria this weekend and found this mising dog poster on the El train struts.

 

 

Just to prove that this is an original shot, here's Mr Me getting his photo too.

Break out the oxygen destroyer