Jellyfish are the new owls

So I've been working on this theory that, in terms of the hot new indie-craft animal mascot, jellyfish are poised to knock owls off their twee little branches. I love owls as much as anyone else raised on Tootsie Pop advertising and "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute" environmentalism, but there's a saturation point for everything and owls may have reached it.

Anyway, I wanted to be on the early side of what I'm predicting will be a jellyfish explosion, craft-wise. (I just looked on Etsy, and found 44 pages of results for "jellyfish," while "owl" yields 842 pages.) I've been embroidering some baby t-shirts:




I'm not super happy with either, which probably has to do with the fact that the t-shirts themselves were bought secondhand and most of the composition is a result of trying to cover up various mysterious stains. (People whose babies I may be giving these shirts to, please know that they are, in fact, washed and clean. I'm trying to avoid buying new t-shirts from American Apparel for myriad reasons — shady labor practices, sleazy-ass CEO, vomitously sexist advertising, etc.) — but no one else seems to sell blank t-shirts.)

I actually don't think jellyfish will ever outpace the owl as far as craft iconitude, for the same reason the octopus (Etsy page count: 190) won't: jellyfish are fucking terrifying. Have you ever seen one? Even the dead ones I've seen give me the shivers. Even the baby dead ones. And if you've ever read Starring Sally J. Freeman As Herself...well, the Man O' War scene is like the prepubescent girl's Jaws. (Unless you also saw Jaws as a prepubescent girl, in which case you, like me, probably haven't been a fan of oceans since.) That's why these jellyfish are smiling. And, you know, made of thread.