Tag Archives: gift

Three Little Birds

Leave a reply

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.

My mom really liked her tiny birds.

A Collaborative Piece

1 Reply

50th

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!

Our family’s present to Mom and Dad for their 50th wedding anniversary (it was on Christmas, but I’m just getting around to posting it now because the last 2 weeks have been crazy).

For my parents’ 40th anniversary, my sister presented them with a quilt made up of a squares decorated by pretty much everyone they knew or were related to, interspersed with family photos. She just reminded me that the project actually took 5 years from start to finish. My sister-in-law had knitted a square that represented her being pregnant for the first time, but by the time my parents received the quilt, there were photos of my 2 nephews included.

So I had this idea that I wanted to do something like that—collaborative art, a group effort that would create something personally meaningful for my parents—but would not involve herding cats and would be completed in 6 months. I asked my sister for ideas, and this was the one she came up with. You just take a photograph, divide it into a grid, and assign each person 1 or more pieces. All the different art styles and media come together to create this cool gestalt art.

Amazingly, we managed get all the pieces completed and to the framers within the deadline (granted, The Man was still working on his an hour before I went to the framer) and nobody spoiled the surprise, even though a goodly portion of the people involved were small children.

This piece is based on a photograph I took of my parents in a local rose garden. The square I spend the most time on (the enlarged segment on the right side of the photo) is mostly fabric, but the hands are made of leather, and the zipper pull is a real one cut from a discarded pair of The Man’s jeans. I also did the blue sky piece that says “50.” That one is all tissue paper, using the same technique I do many of the little animal cards in: just torn paper and matte medium. I also did the flower bit, far left, second from the top, in crayon. My sister’s pieces are all gouache. Her husband did his part (third from the top, third from the left) all in wood and The Man did his (right side, second from top) in metal. Other materials include oil pastels, colored pencil, and acrylic. My brother-in-law facilitated the process by creating the individual black and white pieces for guidelines, and by cutting all the 6″x6″ squares so everything would fit together perfectly.