This is the new location for my craft blog.  The blog itself has become a craft project in it's own right.  There are still changes to come, and all my new posts will be here.

I don't feel right posting without photos ... so I thought I'd tell you the story of how I picked my domain. I registered futuregirl.com when it was still free to register domains. That's nerd-cred, right there. The story of why?  Well, that is just plain nerd.

In 1997, I was living in San Francisco. I could buy premixed henna and cool stick-on stencils for intricate henna tattoos at an Indian import store on Mission Street. The orange-ish tattoos looked pretty good on my hands since I already have orange-ish freckles. Then I had an idea for a craft project:  shave my head and put an henna tattoo on my scalp.  How f*cking cool, right?  My hair was only about a quarter-inch long, so shaving it bald didn't seem like a big deal.  I enlisted a friend to draw the tattoo.



It's stunning how bad this idea was. First, henna does best when staining calloused skin, like your hands or feet. It doesn't work at all on a freshly shaved head, even when it's been sitting on your head, all brown and crusty, for hours and hours and hours. Second, shaving your head with a razor makes your head instantly itchy. Itchier than itchy. Painful, white-hot itchy. And it stays itchy for days and days and days as your hair grows back in. Third, there is a world of difference between a quarter inch of hair and no-hair-at-all. With a quarter-inch of hair I looked human-ish. With no-hair-at-all I looked like a bloated-head alien with pulsing veins on my huge, freaky cranium. I have very pale skin, but the freshly shaved skin on my head was so pale it was almost translucent.

The next morning, bright-bald and itchy, I went to work. I was going to just pretend like nothing had changed. No one was going to be shocked by a girl with no hair - this was San Francisco after all. I was prepared for a little ribbing, but it was entirely possible that no one would notice. That's what I told myself, anyway.

I worked in a big warehouse space that was full of cube walls. Within 2 seconds of walking in the front door I heard someone yell, "Futuregirl!" You could hear it echoing off the ceiling and the walls.  I thought, "What the hell is going on over there?"  Then I realized the yeller was walking toward me, still yelling, "Hey, futuregirl!"  When he stopped yelling, he explained that I reminded him of the girl in THX 1138 (a student film by George Lucas). The girl in the movie (a freckled red-head) has a shaved head, just like I did.

Futuregirl. The word stuck in my head. I liked the way it sounded. When you are in your 20's everything seems like the future. And, really, it is.