They asked me if I would participate in Science Night and present an activity that combined science and art, so I’m doing snowflake cutting. I’ve wanted to teach a little class on this for a long time, actually. A lot of kids don’t seem to know about how much fun we had making things with our hands before the internet.
This poster presentation took a ridiculous amount of time, like 8 or 10 hours. It would have taken a quarter of that time and looked much sharper if I made it in Photoshop but it’s more fun making imperfect things with your hands.
I only made a couple real mistakes and I was able to mostly fix them.
i took like 2 dozen photos of this little ornament I made for my mom and none of them came out very well, so I’m just posting this one with the caveat that it’s not a very good photograph. But I think it’s a pretty cute ornament.
Originally, I wanted to buy something like this, but I couldn’t find anything I liked well enough. Everything was either very ugly or very overpriced or both. And I’m not saying these are perfect, but I like them better than most of the things I saw in the stores, and I liked the price better as well.
The hummingbirds bodies are polymer clay, about an inch and a half long, and their beaks are wire. I found an old mother of pearl earring that looked kind of like a wing, and then threw in that purple bead for good measure. The designs are painted with acrylic paint. I found just enough of this red ribbon to hang this ornament, and then to tie a bow on the box that I put the ornament in.
I find that fascism is really crushing my creative spirit. It’s hard to take pleasure in making things anymore. It feels like work. There’s not a lot of joy left, but I also feel like if I don’t make things, then the fascists win.
I’m very satisfied with this project, which took about 90 minutes. (It’s not quite done; the feathers aren’t attached to the hat yet.)
The Coyote and I are going to a goth masquerade ball and I have a very cool outfit put together but it seemed like I should add a top hat to match him and to enby it up. So he ordered me one, but it turned out to be a large, when my head is extra small. And it took forever to come and when it got here I was not impressed with the little feather that came with it.
Obviously it needed a big silver feather! Obviously there were some good ones on Etsy but none that could be delivered before the ball, which was annoying until it hit me that I could easily make paper feathers with materials already in my workshop. Just 3 kinds of sparkly metallic specialty paper and matte medium.
To be extra fancy I sharpened the scissors on a whetstone before beginning.
So here it is. And I will be the most magical dragon at the ball. Although I still have to figure out how to attach my mask to my glasses. Because I went to this masquerade last year in a different mask and I couldn’t see a thing all night. The new one is lace and can probably be tied on.
I didn’t used to think of this sort of thing as art—it’s not like I made the beads; I just tied them to a piece of stretchy filament—but I suppose that’s like saying a painting isn’t art because I didn’t make the paint.
Probably I’ve mentioned this before, but I spent DECADES of my life hoarding art supplies. My family didn’t really value art (they said they did, but they didn’t; they valued capitalism and they didn’t think art was part of capitalism so therefore it was not as important as anything that resulted in a regular paycheck) and when I did receive art supplies it was impressed upon me that they were both expensive and frivolous and I must not waste them because nobody was going to replace things that I used up. And when I moved to my new place at the beginning of the pandemic I vowed to stop hoarding (what was I saving this stuff for anyway) and (after throwing out bags of unused but dried-out paying and markers) I began enjoying my massive collection of every kind of art supply.
Soooo…
Last Christmas I mentioned to the Coyote that I wanted the kind of tiny cut glass prism suncatcher that made rainbows everywhere. And he, being him, gave me 20 of them. So I had the idea to make an unconventional kind of beaded curtain with them, so my whole house would be filled with rainbows every day.
To that end I dug through the 2 drawers labeled “beads and shells” in my studio, and then went through the rest of the house, and came up with every little thing that could possibly be construed as a bead, and a few things that definitely weren’t beads in any sense but whatever, I’m going to tie them to these beads anyway. Then I sorted them by theme and tried to “tell a story” with each strand.
Some of these elements are quite old; many of them are things I’ve been carrying since the ’80s and a few of them are likely much older. For example, one of the “beads” is a broken ring that might be jade or malachite or turquoise and probably belonged to one of my ancestors. And then some of the elements are very new: the metal horse was randomly given to me by an artist at a street fair last year. I didn’t buy any beads for this project. Everything here was already in the house (except for the tension bar I used to hang them, and also I had to buy another roll of stretchy filament when I ran out halfway through). There’s old earrings and discards from the Bear’s shop and broken wind chimes and little art pieces I made in the ’90s and have kept in a box since then…
Here you can zoom in and see all the details.
If I had just used beads I expect this would have been easier and more relaxing but tying a bunch of random objects did make it a bit more complicated. Worth it, though, I think. It’s not really apparent from the photo, but I also used 12 colors of embroidery floss to tie them up so there’s another rainbow even when the sun isn’t shining through them.
For me, it’s harder to make art in a trashed space. I’m not comfortable doing it in a perfectly clean one either, but my brain doesn’t function as well if things are very messy, and frankly, my house had not been clean since before I had covid, which was a year ago. I paid Miss Kitty to do 5 hours of deep cleaning this week, and I did about 10–15 further hours, and then I was just standing there in my perfectly clean house looking at my perfectly empty table thinking, “O, wow, I can totally finish a project in this space!”
And I did. And it’s great. I picked up another project that I’d abandoned months ago and worked on that as well.
I actually had a few moments where the freedom of not-a-mess was so incredible that I almost cried
So my house is clean, my mind is clear, and every day is going to bring rainbows.
This is something I’ve been thinking about since I finished the feigned glass windows: feigned glass light box. Michael’s had some tiny shadow boxes that they were, of course, sold out of, but I got this bigger box and The Man cut a hole in the back and installed the LEDs.
I used clear plastic for a background and sealed the whole thing with the clear plastic as well, and the rest of the design is scrap pieces from the original project, except for the bats, which are heavy cardstock that I painted purple. I used hot glue to stick affix the panel to the box and then more hot glue to seal the edges with ribbon.
This particular box was created to be a birthday present.
Definitely want to do some more experimentation with this type of thing but I have to find a good (affordable) source for the boxes and the lights.
I was asked to create a cardboard “fireplace” for an event that will involve children drinking hot chocolate before school. While it usually isn’t cool enough for daytime fires in Arizona, lately it kind of has been, but I guess you can’t have a real fire at an elementary school, so they still will have to sit around the pretend fire.
This piece took a little extra time because it had to fold flat, meaning that I couldn’t just wrap the whole thing up, but had to keep each panel separate. There’s one piece of tape on the back and the whole thing collapses if it’s removed. The fire itself comes out: the grate isn’t attached to anything, and the flames and the wood are stuck into grooves cut into the grate and can also be removed.
Currently, the cozy pretend fire is sitting in the front office next to an artificial Christmas tree. Maybe I should make a pretend Hanukkiah to go along with it. There probably aren’t that many Jewish kids at this school—guessing we have more indigenous kids than Jewish kids—but not everyone is cool with Christmas stuff. I never do overtly religious designs, although I’ve done culturally relevant adjacent imagery, like luminarias.
Everyone loved the Monster Box (they call him the Candy Monster) so much they didn’t want to put him away for the season (honestly where would they put him? He’s enormous and he no longer folds flat) so now he’s dressed for Thanksgiving and collecting donations for the canned food drive.
I honestly cannot tell you what the Monster Box is all about. The front office staff just asked me to make this for the PTA. They wanted a large box that looked like a monster and you could put candy in the mouth. They did not explain anything beyond that. I gather someone saw a similar project on Pinterest or something. I will have to go to the Fall Festival to divine the true meaning of the Monster Box.
Getting the box was a bit of a chore, and then I had to rebuild it because it didn’t have a bottom, and the top was kind of weird. After I cut the mouth I realized that they wouldn’t have any good way to get the candy OUT of the box, so I cut another access panel in the back. Then I made it look like the monster was wearing novelty underpants.
If I had to do it again, I would do a lot of this differently. I’m not use to working in 3 dimensions or with cardboard.
This project took about 7 hours, and used 1 1/2 bottles of Elmer’s glue. There was also a lot of tape involved and a little of my special bookbinding plastic adhesive. I might go back and hit the horns with the hot glue gun just to be sure. They are the number one thing I would do differently if I did this again. I’m not sure they’re stable.
Last year I was out in the desert with the Fox and he suggested we take a bushwhacking off-trail detour to look at a hilarious piece of graffiti someone left. “Welcome to Chupacabra Country,” it said on the back of same random abandoned building. This is indeed the land of the fearsome goatsucker. And the inscription stuck with me so long that I went out and got some polymer clay and made this plaque for the Fox to enjoy.
This is my first time using polymer clay in this way. I made a lot of mistakes. I learned a lot.
The color is Unicorn Spit, which I had also never used before. Lots to learn.
I made the letters by pressing an old set of refrigerator magnets into the clay. The little dots in each letter were actually formed by the magnet.
Probably will make another plaque like this for myself, but I think I’ll flip the coloring so the background is read and the lettering is yellow.
I wanted pinking shears for a special request bulletin board I’ll be doing later in the week, but apparently that’s not a thing anymore, because I had to buy a set of 12 “decorative scissors” to get the one pair I needed. They’re not as high quality as the ones my mom used to own but the whole set was $13 so I’ll probably get my money’s worth. Testing them out tonight, I accidentally made this flower, which I then painted intentionally and glued down with matte medium. Cute. I’m on a mission to get paint on every time of this floor.
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