Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

Baby Yoda 1000 Piece Star Wars Lego

I bought myself this as a Christmas present. it's not exactly my usual craft project, but what the heck, it's an accomplishment and I'm mentioning it here.

Thoughts on this:

(a) It comes in 8 different sections of building: the core center, each side of his coat, the arms, the head, and the rest of the head/sign. It also comes with a 162 page manual to put this thing together. Each section has its own bag and then bags within bags for the really tiny bits. 

(b) It took me about 2 days, I did the first 6 sections one day and then the last two on another.

(c) The drawings were very clear and about 99% of the time, easy to follow, thank goodness.

(d) The worst part of it was making the coat, as after you construct each side you just kind of...press...it onto the center, and it doesn't attach very securely. This kind of shocked me for Lego and made it feel kinda rickety. Occasionally I had bits flying off. 

(e) Occasionally, pieces were missing, sigh. Not sure how sometimes you have extra and sometimes you...don't....?

(f) I did appreciate the movables/articulations for the hands, and that he has a little ball! His head is on a... slider thing, I guess, so you can slide it back and forth.

(g) Making the head (and the ball) were my favorite bits. The head is really cute. 

(h) The tiny Baby Yoda it comes with is SUPER TINY. Probably a good thing it sits on the sign or else it'd get lost. 

Anyway, good job, me! 

This is mostly done...Garden of Chaos!

Ugh, I haven't updated this in over a year? Good god. Uploading pictures is such a pain in the ass that I take them and never upload them.

Anyway, here's what I've been up to lately: my third gallery show is up. 

 
Remember the Summer of Flowers last year that was taking forever to upload? I did finish that and sewed them altogether into a shawl.

My mermaid costume from a few years ago. And I finally did a self-portrait in mosaic. 

Mosaics from the last few years. Big thanks to my friend Melinda who actually does woodworking for figuring out how to put backs on them.

And here's the last four years' worth of "ugly" holiday sweaters.

The last batch of ceramics I made that weren't stolen off my patio this year: 

Since this year's theme is "Garden of Chaos," one area's dedicated to flowers and the other's dedicated to undersea gardens:



This is called "Octopus's Garden" because there's sixteen octopuses in it. My friends Meg and Jamie contributed to it, and I am ah, still adding pieces onto it because I spent so much time making the first display piece (and then I found boogie boards at a thrift store in Santa Cruz) that I just don't feel quite done yet. Will keep adding more things later.  

 

 

 

Happy Halloween

I STILL CAN'T GET ANYTHING TO ROTATE RIGHT and if I keep trying, there goes the rest of the day.

But there you go: Princess Leia ceremonial outfit. Sideways. 

Playing with polymer clay

So my friend Jamie has finally made this blog! We made polymer clay things. She was attempting to teach me how to make butterflies, but I was somewhat clueless at it. She, however, is an expert at it (and we were working on a syllabus for a future class for her to teach tonight). I said she could use me as a guinea pig later.

Jamie would like you to guess which pieces she made and which ones I made. I'll put the answers beneath the spoiler cut...

Scenes from botanical sculpture.

Followup from here.

 

Things I learned:
(a) There's like....six or eight layers of petals that you do.

(b) A lot of techniques about making petals thin, thin, thin

(c) I am not super good at making petals thin, thin, thin without ripping them.

(d) In general, this clay isn't really up for being resculpted over and over again like I was doing. It dries out, it cracks....this flower looks a lot better in photos than up close where you can see the cracks. And the leaves I was working on keeled over and died. 

It is a complicated medium. I was clearly Worst One In Class and the teacher redid most of my petals (see photos: most of that's her). Ah well. Sometimes you ain't the star student. My flower (with bud) still looks pretty cool though...just don't look close up! 

So I am taking a botanical sculpture class

Here's the fancy clay they ordered from Hong Kong for the class, and two layers of flower petals. 
Btw, I canNOT get my new computer to put lengthwise pictures in the proper orientation for shit now, I give up.

For the record, THIS below is what we're supposed to learn to make in this class. Seriously could not tell these flowers were not real looking at them IRL. 

 

My mosaics

This one's a combination: it involves paper collage behind the glass (note flying birds and jewels in the black), plus ceramic cats and stars and moons. 

I found that mermaid tail cut as is in the scrap bin and guess what I had to do. The wave at the top and the gold fish were also pretty much cut as is.

I'll show you the rest of this one later...

Sculpted dollie/angel ladies

My friend Meg and I made these dollies--the individual/groups of four ones were the ones I did. Pre-glazed shots here.

Finally got some glazed pieces back

This is what comes from using clear-ish glaze on multcolored clay. Kinda...gray.

The finished fairy garden

Now it has a fuzzy, vine-and-leaf decorated fence around it, and a few other additions.