Well, here is a larger version of the dog-face earrings I sculpted with the polymer clay and then painted with acrylics. This is actually the second pair that I have made, as the first one ended up getting half lost...

This picture isn't great, but they turned out perfect, and that Fimo Soft brand of polymer clay works really well, although I'm afraid to really try out the durability of the earrings (they're not that thick...).

Anyway, enjoy.

Projects Completed!

So I finished (in time!) a few of the projects that I had started for my roommates birthday (all the ones not completed ((or started...)) will just roll over until Christmas.). Above you can see the three picture frames that I painted (I did a fourth, which is back in her bedroom...). They turned out really well. The one on the left is intended to look like the Ikea pillow covers that my roommates got in San Fran (the Lusy Knoff, or something...), and the black one on the right is too, except that I switched the black and white areas for something different. The purple one in the middle is just a sort of spiritual successor to the others, as is the fourth, unpictured one. They look like they all match together, but I just pretty much made two of them up using influences from the others.

Smaller and in the foreground are three sets of earrings that I made, too (some are just beads and one is very successfully using the polymer clay!), but I'm not sure I can get better pics of them. I can't take pictures of small things because they get blurry...

Anyway, chalk that up to a couple of successes! A few more actually completed projects.

(PS: The pics in the frames are mine, too. I chose ones I liked the best from our memory card and played around with them in photoshop to make them look really great in black and white, which I think complements the colorful frames nicely.)

I'm an idiot...

Duh...

First off, no new pics, yet, but I've just had a rush of good ideas while searching around Ikea's website and then wandering off on a Charley Harper tangent.

Anyway, my roommates returned from San Fran last weekend with some cute living room pillow covers (Lusy Knoff, or some such nonsense...). They're white with buttons drawn all over them with black line grids drawn in around them. Anyway, I've got this sort-of coffee table sitting in the garage that needs some love and I've been wondering what to do with it, etc., thinking about doing some striped legs with a decoupage top, but now I'm thinking that doing it to match the pillows would be a GREAT idea, even if it doesn't really "go" in our living room (we already have a coffee table, which is old and nice-ish, but slightly ruined by magazine ink getting transferred onto its surface...). I also have these two small (8X10, perhaps...) canvasses that I've been wondering what to do with, and those to match the two pillows would be PERFECT! Although doing them in the same white background would get lost on our walls, which are the beige-ish hue of masking tape. They could go somewhere else, since our walls need something really BIG and standout-ish to "pop" in the room (we have giant, colorful original art EVERYWHERE, so things tend to get lost, a bit...). Perhaps above our blue brick fireplace, or maybe somewhere entirely different...

But the table is very do-able. And it would look REALLY cool in our living room.

As for the Penelope tree, following my Charley Harper Googling brought me to a similar (but smaller - a single branch) type of thing, and after Googling "decorative tree branches", I felt like an idiot because, DUH! Every craft store has these smaller real and fake branches for decorations. I'll bet that Walmart's miniscule craft section even has something that I want, because I know that they have two whole aisles dedicated to fake flowers...

So that is looking back on track for a real birthday gift opportunity.

As far as my polymer clay experience has gone, I bought a more difficult kind/brand to work with, and so I'm not sure if this particular brick is old and dried out or if they're all like that, but it is HARD to work with. It cracks every time I try to smooth it out and won't blend together easily at all, even after I've worked it quite a bit. I wasn't happy with any of the things that I tried as an experiment... I should have bought the Fimo Soft brand stuff, which will hopefully be easier to shape and smooth. Problematically, I don't want to spend a lot of what little cash I do have on something just to have it turn out not how I would like it to, so I will probably be putting that "Chihuly" project off for a month, or so.

Also, bought some fun beads for dangly earrings for the same birthday gift happenning at the beginning of next month (Nov.), and I just need to hook up with a friend to get some help/supplies for making them. I have stuff to make non-dangly earrings, but looking at all the supplies for dangly stuff was daunting. I had no idea what I should get or would need, so I'll just get a couple of pieces from the friend, if she ever gets back to me...

I feel like working on something (painting...), right now, so I may post again this evening.

Customized Halloween Skelton

So I just finished re-painting this skeleton decoration for our house. I forgot to take "before" pics, unfortunately, but it used to have a hot pink body with black eyes and mouth (basically all the orange used to be black, and all the black used to be pink...). It was really faded from being out in the sun all the time, as we usually just keep it up year round, so I thought I'd fix him up. Here's his full body: This project was sort of a pain in the ass, like a lot of stuff I do, but ended up looking pretty good. My original intention was to paint him all orange underneath and then do a top-coat of black that would leave the indented parts (eyes, fingers...) untouched and still orange, but the black kept getting in all the crevices (not to mention the fact that I started painting him with orange acrylic paint with a brush that wasn't covering the original black areas very well, so then I had to spray paint him orange on both sides, but I didn't have enough of the good orange color, so half of him is more of a tangerine...). So I then just painted him all black and went back in to do the details in orange over the top, which was tough because my paints aren't very thick/opaque, so it took a bunch of coats and you can still see black underneath... Then I lightly sanded down the black areas to give him a "scratched" effect, and you can see the orange underneath (this worked out great because the spray paint was really glossy and the black overcoat just sanded right off perfectly!). Finally, I gave him a coat of spray lacquer and hung him up.

He looks good, but I should note that I only painted orange details one side of him, partly because I was fed up with having to do so many coats to make it look good, and also because the nail in his head that he is hung up by won't come out, so I couldn't really hang him up the other way, anyway. The other side of his face is a scary face, instead of a goofy one, which is why any of that matters.

Hope you like it!

Also, in regards to the candy corn earrings, as I said before, they are finished and turned out great, but since they are so small, all my attempts to photograph the final product have just turned out blurry, so I guess we're done, on that front...

Enchilada bread, 2 projects finished!

So I enjoy baking as well as arting and crafting, and after we made a TON of enchilada sauce with the tomatoes from our garden, we still had lots of the sauce left over after making an enchilada casserole.

Enter: enchilada white bread.

First of all, I had forgotten that to activate the yeast, the water has to be just right, temperature-wise, which I always judge by hand from the faucet. You get a feel for it after doing it too hot or too cold once or twice. In this recipe, however, I was using the enchilada sauce in place of water, so I had to heat it on the stove, but then it was too hot, so I had to let it cool for a long time and even put it in the fridge for a few minutes, after which I still felt it was too hot, so I used the old "ice cube in the soup" trick, which very quickly made the sauce too cold... So I had to reheat it again in the microwave and just said "fuck it" at a certain point and tossed it in with the other ingredients...

It may have been too hot. The yeast rose, but not as much as I would have liked, ending up in a dense dough (and eventually bread...). It might have actually just been that enchilada sauce isn't as good for making white bread as water it, given its slight chunkiness, but I don't know.

In the end, it tasted good, if not overtly like enchiladas, but was good as the bread for a pepper jack, tomato, and roasted bell pepper grilled sandwich (which I made with weird "Mexi-tot" potatoes that didn't turn out as well...).

But I'm glad that baking season is back upon us.

Above is a picture of the tomatoes (and some chilis...) we picked in ONE DAY that we put into the enchilada sauce. We've been doing a lot of hot sauces, too...

As for the two completed projects, I made the candy corn earrings that I was talking about, as well as finished another halloween skeleton that I was working on. I'll post pictures later (the camera is out of the house...) and talk more about them. I also bought one small package of polymer clay at Ben Franklin's, today, but mostly as a practice brick. I will do a few smaller pieces before committing to a full-on "glass"-type piece.

The problem is that, while not terribly expensive, the bricks of the clay are so damn small! I'll either have to go really thin with what I want to do or end up buying a crapload of the packages. I knew that they were small, so it's not a terrible surprise, but I would like to find some larger bricks, especially since I had wanted to do some variations in the color (swirls or designs, etc.). I'll keep this page updated with my progress (and the smaller projects I do, first...).

Oh, and I did a tiny bit of online research and found out how to glaze the polymer; there are either special glazes made by the clay companies or some people use this Future brand wood floor sealant, which I assume is what James Lehman was referring to. I guess it's thin, but a certain site suggested dipping the whole piece in it for a thicker, shinier coat.

I didn't sleep well last night because I was having fitful dreams of how to make this polymer "glass" project... Oh well...

One step forward, two steps back...

So on the polymer clay-as-glass sculpture project: after searching around for a few mildly related things, I finally re-discovered this artist that put the idea in my head in the first place. James Lehman! His website, here, which doesn't seem to have been updated very recently (I don't know if he's still doing the art, is what I mean. I came across another polymer clay website that went on and on about how excited the artist was making all these clay lamps and how it was totally his thing, but in a text box at the top of the page was an update saying that he didn't make any clay lamps anymore and that the site was more of an odd curio marker in his life from when he used to work on those projects. I wonder what happened in his life to make him stop so abruptly, but I guess we all outgrow everything...).  

This is a picture of one of Lehman's pieces, which isn't as "glassy" as the one I saw at the library, but is pretty damn close to what I want to do, conceptually. I will say that upon seeing more of his work, I like the forms but not really the colors or patterns. I'm still going for more of a Dale Chihuly-look, but I had to look at a lot of different pieces to understand what that really meant. As it is now, I'm thinking that I might do a series of three round balls, one each in red, yellow, and blue, and they would run along a clay track that would undulate and wind around. Hopefully it would be big and look cool, but I'm still not sure where I'm intending it to go, so perhaps I'll change the piece to something more wall-friendly... 

I might try and do something illuminated (putting a light in or under it...), but I'm not sure about the clay's density and whether light will permeate it like glass. I sort of doubt that it will, actually.

The other thing was that on Lehman's website, he said that regular gloss finish (sprays, I'm assuming) don't dry on polymer clay properly and that he uses a special water-based hardwood floor finish to lacquer his work, which is fairly vague. I'll do more research, but I ended up biting the bullet and just emailing him at his 5 year-old address, just straight up asking what he uses and how he uses it. Hopefully I'll hear back with some info, but I would assume that I won't. Glad I didn't just go ahead and fuck up a whole project by going into it half-cocked, but that still doesn't really help if I never find out what I do need to use.

More ahead. 

Last one for tonight: Making polymer clay look like draped/blown glass!

Dale Chihuly is this Seattle-based artist that does this amazing blown glass work (pictured left); I've been stoked on it for a while, and my roommate, whose birthday is coming up next month, REALLY digs on it. Of course, it would be SO cool to do a neat chandelier or installation piece like that, except for the fact that I don't know anything about glass-blowing. Whoops!

Cut to me at the library earlier in the week, where I look up craft to find out how to better sculpt a dog-face charm for a different friend's birthday, and I find a book on polymer clay (like Sculpey...). I've worked with it before, but YEARS ago as a kid when I was much more limited in my abilities. You just sculpt stuff and put it in the oven to harden. If I had to guess, I would say that it's bonds become a firm plastic-like substance with the heat (Sculpey can be pretty fragile, but I guess other brands are less kid-friendly but more stable...). 

Anyway, this book that I looked at had TONS of great ideas and pictures, unlike the internet in this case. There were sections on how to make the clay look like wood, metal, and GLASS!!! So beyond being perfect for sculpting a little charm for a bracelet (I was going to sculpt from oil-based clay, cast a negative mold in plaster, then re-cast a positive in this harder "stone" plaster, after which I would have to chisel with a screwdriver out this little dog's face... I've done it before with other projects: NOT FUN!), apparently I could use it to replicate blown glass.

Technically, there was only one page on the subject, and it wasn't really a how-to. It just showed a picture of the result (I don't know how they mix all the colors together to look like tie-dye, but afterwards you sand the shit out of it and then hit it with numerous coats of lacquer, my new favorite thing!) and had a brief paragraph about the artist and how amazed everyone was that his work was plastic clay and not glass...

So I'm still flying blind, here. I have a mental picture of what the final product should look like (theoretically, since I still haven't drawn up any designs...), but only a vague sense of how to make it work. I'm guessing that I need to put the colors that I want together and roll them out to be flat and smooth and then drape or shape them somehow...

This is more what the picture in the book looked like:

Chihuly does orbs and all those crazy spires, though, which I think I would like to play around with more, although it does seem like it would be tougher to sand them or keep them from breaking. 

Expect some updates on this in the coming weeks. Until then...

 

Full disclosure, AND candy corn earrings...

I started this blog as a lame attempt to put up some "clever" vampire fiction, hence the "Eternally Pushing Thirty" title, meaning that the person writing it would remain in her late twenties for all time... Yeah, so that never really came together, but what I realized just a few minutes ago was that, as an artist and creator of various neat-o things, I actually had something valuable to contribute to the internet: I could document all the stuff that I do in regards to arts and crafts and fun projects! 

I should say, what I'm really itching to put up is all of the stuff that I can't find info for online, already. Like the red tree from Penelope, there is a blank spot on the Worldwide Web for a lot of this stuff that I want to make. My peeves right now are not enough sites/info dealing with making polymer clay look like draped glass (I'll get to that one eventually. I want to get it to look like blown glass chandeliers and stuff! Should be cool!!!), the red tree (obviously...), and making candy corn earrings...

Now, I tried to buy candy corn earrings. At Walmart they are ugly as fuck; too big, dangly, and with a weird bow on the bottom. Not cute and petite for my roommate's pixie ears, at all... I looked at Halloween sections of some other places and didn't really see anything useful either. I'm going to try looking at a bead store for candy corn beads, or even blank triangley shapes that I can paint to look like candy corns:

This is close to what I want them to look like... What I was searching for online was whether or not I could just lacquer some ACTUAL MADE-FROM-SUGAR candy corns and super-glue some earring backs onto them and have them serve as workable earrings, at least for the rest of October. I don't see why it would be a problem, except that if they were handled too abruptly, they might get bent or melt or get sugary all over her ears... but if the lacquer is sealing it? I don't know. I'll set off to answer this question over the next few days.

Until then...

Making craft-type things that exist in movies is difficult...

I want to make or find and customize this, the amazingly beautiful red tree from Penelope's room in the movie Penelope. It would be for my roommate's birthday or Christmas or whenever, but given the fact that there are only TWO photos of it that I could find online (after searching for it numerous times...), I guess I don't really know how to go about doing such a project.

Now, I'm a crafty fellow. I can paint and sculpt and draw and make furniture, but this thing just seems crazy. If I had to guess, I would say that the set decorator either found it as is and added some of the background stuff, found it looking slightly different and modified it to be red, or just plain made it out of something. I'm not sure that I'd be able to make it from scratch.

I think that I may begin searching antique stores for something similar and large, since I don't mind putting in the customization work, but I don't even know where to go to find something like a giant fake tree.

But can I use a REAL tree or branch and lacquer/seal it to stay pretty sturdy and then paint it? Or should I build a wire/wood/whatever armature and fill it out with paper mache/plaster strips?

I think I'm a bit out of my element, but I finally figured out what I can be good at blogging about: I'm going to make this all about my dumbass, unrealistic art and craft projects that are way over my head and I end up fucking up my way through... 

I will keep updating with project progress, and the progress of my many other crafty solutions to things that I want to do...

Until then.