The Callouses on Your Hands by Kommando
August 19th, 2009 1:15 AM
I was an adventurous 5 year old. Back in Marsden, a suburb in Logan, the closest you can probably get to an engineered slum in Brisbane.
My dad made his own home brew, cheap beer is good beer and back then he bottled it in large brown tall neck glass XXXX bottles and stored it on an old 80's style bar under the highset house. There was a lot of stuff under that house. the couch the dogs slept on, a cupboard for all our camping gear, a camper trailer covered in junk, dads workbench, all sorts of bits and bobs.
One morning, before school, two days before Easter, the last day of term at primary school, I was downstairs playing under the house with my sister jen. I can't recall what we were playing but I had gone behind the bar and hid. Whatever happened and I decided to climb up on top of it instead of onto the couch beside it like normal, so I placed both tiny 5 year old hands on top of the bar, hefted my small 5yo foot up onto the first chipboard shelf and pushed upwards.
I can't recall if I took another step but the shelf I had stood on gave way, for it carried the weight of twenty large full glass homebrew bottles and the weight of a 5yo boy, being chipboard it wasn't pleased with that sort of punishment and its structural integrity failed and sent all twenty bottles cascading onto the twenty bottles on the floor below it followed in a haphazard fashion by a 5yo boy.
with a crash and smash the boy found himself standing, still standing, in half matured lager amidst a field of broken glass. he looked down at his bare feet and saw his leg, splayed open right the way from an inch above his ankle to just past his knee, dripping blood into the darkening pool of frothy beer. his leg was twice the diameter it normally was with a large 30deg incision down to the, was that bone?
Drew was in shock, it didnt hurt at all. but legs shouldn't look like that. so he navigated out of the glass field and dripping blood on the cement floor from a forceful broken bottle incision that matches his adult handspan to this day, fled upstairs and across the dining room, down the hallway to the bathroom where his mother was showering.
"*BANG BANG BANG* Mummy! I've cut myself!" wailed the child as he hit the bathroom door with all the might a 5yo in shock can muster. blood dribbled down over his ankle and onto the cream carpet.
The door opened and steam poured out off the bathroom, "what have you done?" his mother started disdainfully wondering what her accident prone son had injured himself with now, the nonchalant worry turned to terror as the full extent of the wound was assessed. "Oh Shit!"
With a towel wrapped around her his mother carried the pale bleeding youngster into the dining room and wrapped his leg in a tea towel and held the flapping meat closed. she instructed his sister to fetch the neighbour who arrived promptly and continued to hold the childs leg together while his mother put some clothes on so she could arrive to the hospital not naked.
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time breaks down around here and events dont mate up with any form of timescale i recognise, somehow i was in emergency with a bloodstained teatowel holding my leg closed, then getting a local anaesthetic which would begin my long term aversion to needles and then being sutured up.
i emerged from the hospital with fifteen stitches in a footlong gash down my rather short leg, and another two in my ankle that somehow got injured a the same time. wrapped in bandages i made it home to lie on the couch with my foot on a pouf.
i was supposed to go to the Currumbin bird sanctuary for a school trip today. and we were going camping the next day.
so i spent a week at the bunya mountains in a tent, with my leg bandaged and sutured, bathing it every few days and eating Honey Wheats for breakfast.
I terrorised the local wildlife and ran up mountains, went bushwalking at breakneck pace and worried my parents sick that my stitches would burst, two hundred kilometres from the nearest hospital.
today i still dont know why my scar didnt heal to a thin line but is instead a centimetre wide slash of scar tissue that refuses to grow hair or nerve endings, and hasnt grown with my leg, which is now twice as long as when i was 5. One doctor has said its kieloid scarring, another says its because i have a lot of elastin in my dermis.
whatever it is, I have a big-fuckoff scar on my right leg.
Scar and Vest
My scar and tasking vest. Read on!
Scar
It also heals a lot slower than the surrounding skin, here is a scrape three weeks after the incident, the rest has healed but the scar still has a scab.
Scar
About a handspan long. 9-10 inches or so.
IMG_3609.JPG
outlined
outlined in texta so you can see it better.
Team 0Z Vest
May i introduce, the Team 0Z Tasking Vest.
0Z
Unlined and made from durable drill fabric the team 0Z vest is sturdy and comfortable and able to put up with the rigors associated with tasking, like climbing through sewers, over barbed wire fences and is able to withstand hundreds of thousands of camera flashes.
Logo
Also features a new, refined Team 0Z logo in the SF0 colours square in the middle of the back. With this attention grabbing red Uluru and the bold 0Z lettering, you will never be mistaken for one of those AK0 chumps.
Yeah
Trendy, durable and attention grabbing, with two inside pockets large enough to fit a passport or a cheeseburger. The ØZ vest sets you aside from the other SFØ rabble like GYØ and those putz CGØ members. Get yours today! Offer only available to those in Australia, however the vest is durable enough to be sent naked mail.
Begin
And now: how to make one. Step 1, get a template. here is one of my formal vests to be used as a model. if you can, recruit someone with textile skills, like my sister.
Have a dog handy
A dog is a fantastic companion for vestmaking. Here is Bailey, a rare Pocket Beagle.
Purchase your fabric.
About 3-4 square meters of fabric goes into a vest, with the inside and outside. you can purchase lining fabric to make the inside not stick to your shirt but lining isnt as durable. i went with black Drill fabric. its about $7/m AUD and wont rip without a lot of enthusiasm.
Make templates
Get baking or tracing paper and lay the vest out on the paper, tracing each panel of fabric onto the paper. then cut it out and pin it to your drill fabric. arrange it so you get the best use of your fabric. then cut out the panels in the drill. you can see at the bottom i started working on the patch for the back while jen works on the vest. that blue material is curtain fabric.
Cutting
When cutting the fabric remember to allow for extra, these will be where you sew and when you sew all the panels together it will be inside out, then you turn it right side out, all they sewn seams will be on the inside. hurrah. for the patch, get some light blue fabric, red and darker blue textured fabric paint. print out your logo on a colour printer. then pin the blue fabric flat over the logo.
assembling
pin the panels together in the correct fashion, back to back, and sew a straight stitch down the join. for extra durability do this twice, double stitching is very tough.
Assembly 2
sewing the front and back panels together may prove challenging. see here also i planned on using the curtain fabric to make the lettering, it turned out easier to use puff paint.
Stencil
As stated, pin the blue fabric over the printed logo.
see through
if your fabric is as fine as mine you will be able to see the logo through the fabric, now it is a simple matter of colouring inside the lines.
Sparkles
In this set i made two patches, one for a friend who likes sparkles. i have coloured in the red ularu with Red Glitter PolyMark fabric paint.
Patch continued
Here is the finished Red. you can also use a Silkscreen to screenprint a logo onto your fabric, however i could not find an economical screen or screen emulsion to make my own screen to print with. puff paint was cheap and durable for my needs.
Finished
Do the same for the lettering or stitch your lettering on, the puff paint will require 24 hours to dry at this thickness, opacity and fill. Protip: if you are right handed, work from left to right. its easier.
Patch 2
For this patch i used Polymark Brilliant Red. you can see the prior patch has dried and been cut out. the red glitter paint has dried mosltly clear leaving a deep burgundy glitter. When it comes time to sew these patches onto the vest, sew them on before you sew the two rear panels together, this hides the stitching. use a heavy duty thread of the same colour as the outline, red, and select a zig-zag stitch for strength.
Red Ularu
again, we pin the fabric flat to the stencil and colour it in.
Nearly finished
Here you can see the two finished patches and the makeing of the inner pockets. Remember to sew the pockets and patches on before you assemble the panels as to hide the stitching.
Gratitude
Remember to thank your mother for the use of her sewing machine, and for turning the pool table into a seamstresses bench. thanks mum.
0Z logo
For templates. Thanks for reading.
9 vote(s)
MonkeyBoy Dan
4
Rin Brooker
5
susy derkins
3
JJason Recognition
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Spidere
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Poisøn Lake
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Sombrero Guy
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Ben [Sunshine]
Terms
larrikin3 comment(s)
Why thankyou susy. Dad was less than impressed but still had about 60 bottles that were undamaged. he was a little more concerned about his son butchering his leg tho for you can always make more homebrew.
i guess you can always make another son too.
subsequently he got rid of the bar after that.
I think that the story is true.
I also think that the vest is awesome.
wow
kickass story + impressive scar + a SF0 instructable
I wonder what you dad said when finding out his home brewed not-XXXX was all gone...