Personal blog for M. Alice LeGrow, freelance comics artist and full-time ambassador to the Snake People.
So I’m at my folks’ house right now visiting and getting Kickstarter reward stuff together and getting my car repaired and WHAT HAVE YOU. And as I always do when I visit my parents, as I have done for the last 20 years, I went to check on the pickle rock.
The pickle rock is a small rock I painted in art class in middle school (it sort of looks like a pickle) and then hid in an antique clock in the drawing room, inside the glass door. That’s where the pickle rock lives, and every time I come home to visit, I make sure the pickle rock is safe and sound in its hidey hole.
But my mom and sister, who KNOW about the pickle rock, suddenly took offense during this trip to the pickle rock being in the clock! They want me to take it out because they think it will damage the clock, which hasn’t run in 20 years and isn’t about to start, and anyway the pickle rock is inserted through a tiny hinged glass door on the front into the very bottom of the clock, where it’s not hurting anyone. Now they want to evict the pickle rock! Can you imagine? This year is the 20th anniversary of the pickle rock being in the clock! It would be a shame to kick it out now. I wouldn’t even know where to put it.
Pickle rocks aside, I wanted to tell you about a club my friends Carrie, Krys, Morgan, Moira and I are in, called the Shiny Sharing Club. The Shiny Sharing Club was started because Krys owns a beautiful rhinestone costume necklace and matching earrings, and sometimes she would share it with me so I could wear it with cosplay outfits. So in return, I would share some jewelry of mine with her for HER cosplay outfits. Then Carrie, Morgan, Moira, Krys and I started trading cosplay beading and jewelry supplies, trading stuff we didn’t need for stuff we would need for upcoming costumes (especially when we all did our Seven Deadly Sins group for SDCC last year, because all our costumes required SO much embellishing!). After that, we formed the Shiny Sharing Club, where we trade shiny things (like beads, broken jewelry, trim and vintage stuff) with each other, for costuming purposes.
Also, since I use vintage stuff to make my Etsy jewelry, they will sometimes send me stuff they find that might be useful for that (Carrie and her mom love rummage sales, so they always pick me up extra jewelry stuff!). And in return I make them things from the leftover stuff, or buy them shiny stickers and other trinkets. This year I was able to save up a bunch of the leftover jewelry from the rummage sales and make Carrie a big ole gold venetian mask with lots of costume jewelry embellishments.
And of course, if we see something shiny and cute in the store that reminds us of our friends and is only a dollar or two, we buy it for them to share later!
The Shiny Sharing Club is an institution based on sharing and friendship. Wouldn’t you like to start a Shiny Sharing Club of your own?
