Denime 66xx World Tour

[Maynard Friedman]

Fantastic stuff Hendsch 

[Hendsch]

Thanks everyone! and Chicote, I'd love to read that book.

[Hendsch]

Alright here are some comparisons from when I had them last:

Forgive my Lightroom skills, I think I might have gone a bit overboard with the color correction the last time I had them (today's pictures are more true to color). Anyway, there is not much difference, but the top block has lightened up considerably, also of note is the difference in the knee from all of our different heights. 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 11, 2017 by Hendsch

[chicote]

wow great photos blake! this fabric seems really stubborn—what's it been, 8 or so months now that these have been worn? in any case i love how grainy the top block is, you captured a lot of wonderful shades of blue there.

funny you make that comment about our different knee fades—i always wince when looking at that horrible white spot i put into the right knee, especially as it was from something really dumb (slipping into a trolley-track while on my bike).

[Hendsch]

No worries about that fall Ian, it adds to the story. Speaking of adding to the story, we had flash flooding today in LA and I had to save my car before it was under water, subsequently the Denime's took one for the team:

[louisbosco]

oh shit. looks bad. everything alright? torrential rainfall?

 

[Hendsch]

Nothing too serious, just a huge storm that rolled through. LA does not do well with large amounts of water.

[Hendsch]

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been a bit sick and out of commission.

Anyway today I went to the Women's March here in LA to protest the new regime and I brought the Denime's along with me:

[Hendsch]

Washed the Denimes and my TCB 60s yesterday:

Also something from my other hobby came from Japan today! Gonna load it up and take some street shots.

[Hendsch]

On another note, it's getting close to the end of the month, who wants these next?

[chicote]

Unless anyone closer to LA than me in BC wants em, I'll give em another go!

[Max Power]

Love your Posts, great stuff Hendsch.

[louisbosco]

yeah australia isn't close to anywhere. all of you win  anyways i've got the roy big bros coming and seeing out dwc, won't be looking to have it just yet..

[Hendsch]

 

On 1/23/2017 at 11:31 PM, Max Power said:

Love your Posts, great stuff Hendsch.

Thanks Max!

On 1/23/2017 at 9:23 PM, chicote said:

Unless anyone closer to LA than me in BC wants em, I'll give em another go!

This might be a bit easier on my wallet, so if no one else chimes in I'll send them your way.

[chicote]

Took delivery of the jeans today, once again... what a pleasant surprise to see them so well faded (and a shock to discover my legs have much less room this time around...)!

Ah, well I still love the fit, tight thighs and all...

 

Sadly I'm quite busy right now preparing some shirts for a couple of art shows in Vancouver this month, and have just taken over the chief editor position at my school paper, so while there may be interesting things happening I can't guarantee I'll always have a great amount of time to tell y'all about it!

However today I have time, paradoxically because I lost a bunch of time—my day of planned sewing was dashed by my sewing machine's belt breaking. I ended up going all over Seattle (was here for a few days before returning to canada tomorrow, more on that later) looking for a replacement and ended up settling on a vacuum belt instead.

works like a charm!

here are some sporadic photos from my journeys around the city:

car wash in sodo, where I picked up my car from the repair shop this morning.

the vehicle of choice of a president I'm rather fond of (why is it here?)

a collaborative mural on the side of a church on highway 99

okay that's all for the time being. thanks Blake for getting these to me so quickly!

Edited February 12, 2017 by chicote

[Hendsch]

Glad they made it! Also glad to hear it was not just my imagination on the tighter thighs.

[louisbosco]

you guys have to stop with the squats

[chicote]

Hi everyone!

Today was my first day back in canada, after an extraordinarily long and snowy drive back from Seattle last night...

i woke up pretty late on account of there being a party in my apt when I got home, and went down to help my friend work on his van:

 

here we were just moving the van's fridge into our apartment's garage.

It's Family Day today in BC, so in the spirit of communality we took the afternoon off work and went to drink some beers at the Smoke Bluffs, which are some crags south of town.

Despite the snow, there were loads of folks climbing!

A shot of the Denimes—really like the texture they've developed now. This is definitely one of my favourite denims, excellent balance between softness and substance, and uniformity and character:

A couple random shots from the ridge:

Now I'm back home making the sleeves for this shirt I'm exhibiting at an art show in Vancouver over the weekend:

(ignore the wig on top)

Tomorrow I'm back in class; this month I'm going to be in a playwriting class which I'm really looking forward to. Hopefully there will be some cool stuff to share from it in the next few weeks!

[chicote]

Hey y'all!

Well, since my last update I--wearing the Denimes every step of the way--have had a really eventful and probably visually interesting week that I have shamefully neglected to do a good job documenting in photos. So, here are some highlights!

i started writing my play for class and am currently about 6 pages in. so far most of what I've got to say about it is, this shit is hard! but really rewarding as well. it's fascinating to think about a problem you're trying to solve in the real world through the lens of a world and series of characters that you've invented. forces you to take a really detached and creative observational perspective, which is quite difficult to do when you're thinking about something that has a tangible urgency or emotional weight to it. anyway, nothing to show on that front yet unless people are interested in like reading a scene or something.

 

Okay, time for some photos:

Squamish on a Saturday morning... This is as bright and dry as it gets most winter days. even with this comparatively nice weather you can more or less guarantee seasonal affective disorder at some point... this blank greyness can sometimes persist for weeks at a time.

putting the final touches on this patch, which I traded this afternoon for a handpoked tattoo from one of my good friends. ill add a photo of that here in a couple hrs once the bandage is off. (wish I had taken any pictures while getting it!)

edit: here's how it looks a few mins after taking the bandage off--bit red still but looks good!

here are some photos from the art show on Friday night--once again forgot to get pics of the whole gallery, someone can just tell me to send the pants back to flash if they feel I'm not doing this tour visual justice...

^amazing pair of paintings with a straightforward statement about what bodies we default to envisioning when we think of a sexualized (or sexual) human being. really cool work!

^a couple of pieces about patriarchal and heteronormative influence in the US. the left is somewhat self explanatory, trump saying creepy and hypocritical shit, and the right is commenting on US culture's distorted ideas of sex, both in terms of who does it and how important/essential it is to have & advertise within a culture.

 

on saturday, as mentioned in waywt, i emceed a great academic conference at my school. not sure how to embed facebook videos but some folks livestreamed the entire event on facebook. i can try and PM a link or something if anyone is interested in watching any of those discussions (primarily about indigenous issues—self-determination, reconciliation vs. resurgence, the value of indigenous vs. colonial ways of knowing [epistemologies] in public education, perspectives of land use/ownership from indigenous vs settler perspectives, migrants and immigrants and how they might differ from the traditional 'settler' archetype, etc.).

 

and then later that night i went out to the chieftain, the diviest bar in town, for what turned out to be a wild drunken karaoke night. the whole place was packed! i stopped counting after getting ten random compliments on my mullet, but it was obviously a pleasing hairstyle to that crowd. even forged a jaromir jagr signature on someone's napkin and took a picture with them hahah! won a couple games of pool, was asked by two different folks where i could buy some crack, and performed an (apparently) rousing rendition of alicia keys' "if i ain't got you", easily the least in-tune musical performance of my life. unfortunately none of this is documented either. but the denimes lived through it, so it's gotta go in!

 

finally, a shot of the jeans themselves!

so many wonderful shades of blue here. i really wanna get into some mud tomorrow so I have an excuse to wash them... can't wait to see this color pop a little bit more!

okay that's it for right now.

Oh actually last thing! The warp threads are wearing away in a little spot on the right knee where I reckon there will soon be a hole. (I was on the ground cutting fabric all week, so this is probably my fault, sorry!). Anyway I was considering doing a little woven or sashiko patch to prevent this from growing, but first wanted to see what you all think. Repair or no repair? If I should repair it, should it be visible or not? Just thinking about the tastes of future wearers here, trying to keep in consideration that people have dress codes and stuff. let me know what you all think!

here's what I'm talking about. nothing to worry about now but could potentially be worrisome by the end of my time with the jeans, especially as im making several more articles of clothing this month and so will spend a lot of time crawling on the ground and damaging the knees of my pants.

Edited February 20, 2017 by chicote

[Max Power]

Great followup to hendsch, and good to see the trump criticism continues.

[chicote]

Hey y'all! Another update from this disjointed leg of the tour (sorry I'll stop being so down on myself)

 

Well, not much to update in the past week, really. I've more or less been writing nonstop and now have 30 more pages of script for my play (including 3 songs!). I will have something to share from it in the next week, for sure, but for now this is all.

 

On Friday, I hosted a pocket-reworking event, where people brought in articles of clothing that they wanted to add pockets to, which also served as an introductory sewing / patternmaking workshop. The overwhelming majority of the participants brought in pairs of women's jeans that—I kid you not—had *no front pockets whatsoever*. Like, they had the cutaway for the pocket, but the pocket stitching just went straight through into the pocket backing; there was no pocket bag to speak of. I think out of the ten or so people who came, eight of them had pants like this. So, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge and be grateful for the spacious front pockets on all of our jeans; even if they're cut way too small for clunky Western hands, at least they exist!

 

And here, now, is a demonstration of the weird microclimates that are par for the course in BC.

Thursday morning: drove from my apartment, where it was sunny and 10 degrees, for a picnic in a park 15km north, and was greeted by snow and a frozen lake.

 

Saturday morning: Drove down the snowy hill outside my apartment to get some tea and ended up flooded by sunlight:

(if you're looking disconcertedly at that green light in front of me, I promise it only turned green right as I took the picture!)

 

And here are a couple shots from today, which was conspicuously free of abrupt weather changes:

Looking out from the Sea-to-Sky Highway, which runs north from Vancouver up through Squamish, where I live, Whistler, Pemberton, etc. further up north. Immensely distracting scenery on all sides, full of exciting twists and steep hills, and seemingly particularly attractive to folks with massive pickup trucks who like to rip up and down the highway at 160kph at all times of day.

 

And here's a kind of distant photo of the Chief, the huge granite mountain that rises above downtown Squamish. This rock rose out of the earth about 100 million years ago and then was split in two when a massive glacier carved out this valley (and the greater Howe Sound) about 70(?) million years later. Anyway, it's huge and impressive and dominates the skyline, and has some of the best climbing routes in the world to boot! Maybe one day this week I'll get up there and take some pictures from the top... we'll see.

[Bobbo]

Good stuff Chicote!

[louisbosco]

keep it up mate. good work! damn i love those windy roads!!

[chicote]

Hey y'all!

another surprise for you:

still snowing!

normally we get one or two big snowstorms a year in this part of BC. If I'm counting correctly, this is #5 of the year. strange stuff...

a shot of part of campus from the top floor of the auditorium building:

deserted!

this is the last week of class for the block, so everyone's working on essays and final projects and stuff. Our class is setting up for a performance of excerpts from our plays--we've been staging and rehearsing more or less constantly since Saturday. but it's coming together!

here's a preliminary version of our stage--there are 5 total scattered throughout this big room. I spent a few hours last night embroidering the canvas on the right there, the title for one of our plays.

i haven't been very engaged during our actual class time and often end up drawing in class. my teacher approached me about that, and instead of reprimanding me asked me to make a map of the event (names sloppily redacted):

anyway, that's tonight!

now i'm in the main building ordering some tattoo supplies with my friend--i'm hoping to start doing handpoked tattoos towards the end of the week.

the view from the stairwell^

That's all for now! Actually not wearing the Denimes at the moment, they're in the wash after a somewhat muddy bonfire in the forest over the weekend. I'm really excited to see how the fabric will look! I might update with some photos from the show tonight, and will otherwise add some stuff when I'm in Vancouver later in the week.

Final note--think this is my second to last week with the jeans, so whoever's interested in them next, let me know!

Edited March 7, 2017 by chicote

[chicote]

Hi everyone!

In case you're wondering, the play performance was magical — so magical, in fact, that I was starstruck--utterly transfixed!--and thus forgot to take any photos. Some personal highlights:

- a sprighty, hippie mother takes her crisis-ridden, middle-aged daughter on a cross-country trip to find herself, and the daughter is ensnared by the impossibly juvenile allure of the lifestyle of a group of climber bums they meet along the way.

- a group of teenage women go to the mall looking to fill out a philosophical school questionnaire and end up stuck listening to the incomprehensible ramblings of a disillusioned college professor.

- a hypothetical future in which the world government believes that the problems of the Middle East are too much to handle, and thus decides to bulldoze the entire thing, pave it over, and start again.

- a pair of hetero swinger couples meet in a café the morning after swapping partners for the night — one couple had a great time, the other couple hated it — and accidentally suggest to one another that they should do it all again, but this time matching partners of the same gender.

- a murder mystery involving a $350 ice cream scoop, featuring an interview with the head detective of the case, who can only speak in phrases in which every word starts with the same letter (and who gradually descends the entire alphabet over the course of the interview).

anyway, it was real fun but as i can't provide any photos or videos i will stop reminiscing about it.

afterwards, several of us went to the chieftain, the grimy karaoke bar I visited a couple of weeks back. the specials for the night (and on most nights, really) were budweiser and kokanee, both of which I managed to get on the denimes, which has, unfortunately, permanently transformed them into a trashy and subpar pair of jeans.

just kidding

anyway here's a shot from in there, at one of the quieter times in the night. i had gotten off stage a few minutes earlier, where my friend and I sang an emotional rendition of "pancho and lefty" to a crowd of swooning college students and old folks.

today I went back on the road to Vancouver to get some pens, thread, and tattoo supplies — the latter of which I'm just starting to get into and am really excited about! here's another obligatory unsafe highway photo.

my first stop: Mt Pleasant, where there's this nice little art store that always convinces me to buy a few too many microns.

cool murals around the way

and this around the corner — thank goodness i hadn't yet had lunch or i would have thrown up!

next stop was the thread store — this aisle was PARADISE when i first came to it a couple of years back. now i'm a bit put off by how much polyester thread they carry, but it is what it is. I only got one spool of thread — an ecru cotton topstitch thread for an embroidered back patch I'm hoping to finish over the weekend.

drove up a few blocks to gastown and quickly stopped at a record store, where I picked up a nice donnie elbert record I'd been looking for for a while!

(on the note of that donnie elbert record:

well, here's my favorite track off it, pretty unoriginal as this was one of his big hits, but it's so great!

anyway, beyond his great falsetto, mr. elbert also played EVERY instrument on this entire album, and mixed and mastered the entire thing as well. serious talent!)

back to other stuff now:

 

and then got lunch! Sorry, I am rather fearful of taking pictures of food, but since lots of other folks here are comfortable doing it I wanted to try. as you can see I made a good show of trying to pretend I was photographing the newspaper article in my other hand. these are two tacos from the taqueria across the way from the record shop — one is pork al pastor, the other is chicken y mole. bit of a weird combo but these are my two favorite sorts of tacos so, oh well.

on my way further into town I was struck by these public restrooms — an extreme rarity on the west coast of North America (I've only seen two functioning ones in Canada, and one in the US). i'm not sure if they are more common in europe than they are here, but I know I never had a problem finding them when I lived in Ecuador and have always been curious about why they're so uncommon in the Western world.

after that, cause I had a bit of time to spend, I stopped by The Shop in gastown. I met TJ and a few other folks who worked there, who were shooting some photos for a new pair of jeans they'd designed and are looking to release soon. They had a lot of cool jeans there—tcb (50s, 60s, 505, 606, bush pants), wh ranch, stevenson, rising sun, mr freedom, etc. — really impressive and well-curated collection of brands that I'm personally all really excited about. Alas, I forgot, AGAIN, to take photos. so the interior of the store will remain a mystery for you all, i guess until you come to vancouver yourself some day.

and here's a cool mural I saw on the way back to Squamish.

 

Edited March 10, 2017 by chicote

[chicote]

continued:

a shot of the jeans in traffic — beautiful colors!

some more photos on the road:

part of the way up, as the sun was setting, i decided to pull off the road for a moment and have a smoke in an old treehouse on the edge of the sound.

some old graffiti'd concrete structure at the edge of the highway, beyond the railroad tracks

a few minutes of walking, and then:

the treehouse! out of nowhere!

here's the view from up top ... didn't stay long, as the wind had really picked up (as you might see from the water)

and some rocks on the way back!

anyway, I'm back now and am practicing tattooing some lemons. thanks for looking!

 

 

Edited March 10, 2017 by chicote

[Foxy2]

great updates!

[louisbosco]

11 hours ago, chicote said:

on my way further into town I was struck by these public restrooms — an extreme rarity on the west coast of North America (I've only seen two functioning ones in Canada, and one in the US). i'm not sure if they are more common in europe than they are here, but I know I never had a problem finding them when I lived in Ecuador and have always been curious about why they're so uncommon in the Western world.

 

 

because you'd either get people who shoot up or meth heads hiding out in them. sure there's a number around perth. but most would avoid if possible.. it ain't the prettiest sight..

[SLAB]

Good to see this thread still going strong. Thanks chicote!

[lance]

Yeah, great updates - god, I love BC, especially from here in FL!   some wonderful memories

Edited March 10, 2017 by lance