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We have come to Craft Countdown #7, the only one for which I bought new materials. My half bath has an absurd amount of shelf space that I really do not have any need for. It is also painted a shade of periwinkle that I believe was engineered in the laboratory to coordinate with as few other colors as possible. I decided to go with green and yellow as accent colors, which work okay, and a mild frog theme. There are four cubbies on each side of the mirror, and one was empty; it had held a large bar of soap that is now in use. I wanted something a little livelier than the other cubbies’ contents.

I dropped by the dollar store while running errands in the afternoon, and found some nice looking yellow roses that I picked up. When I got home and cut them apart, I discovered I could move the leaves, so I pushed them all up right below the blossoms. I bent the stems around so the flowers would stand at varying heights, and wired them together.

Then I found some (accidentally perfectly) coordinating ribbon from my stash and wound a length around the bottom to hide the tangle of stems. Initially I had it pinned together, but the ribbon was actually iron-on, so later I went back and pressed it so it would stick to itself and stay wound.

It serves its intended purpose!

I recently went to a paint-your-own pottery shop with a friend who wanted to make a few gifts. I didn’t really have anything in mind, so I took a 6″ square tile, pulled some colors that appealed to me, and started painting. I completely forgot to take a picture of the unfired piece, but my friend very thoughtfully went back a day or two later and got one with his phone. You can see it is completely matte, with true yellow and a brownish light colonial red with the two brown shades. The design idea was “keep painting until you like the result.”

When I got the fired tile back, they had put a clear glaze over it and the colors had become richer, though not to the degree of the samples. I suspect I did not use as thick a layer.

The motivation behind picking a tile was a tile coaster I already had. I picked up the tile at a secondhand shop, and glued two layers of felt to the (unglazed) back of it. It serves as a coaster, the grooves acting as an acceptable substitute for being absorbant, as well as a trivet, for when I sit in my recliner eating oatmeal or something and want a place to set the hot bowl.

I thought it would not be a bad thing to have a second such coaster/trivet, but was not sure whether the fact that the back was glazed as well as the front would make it impossible to glue felt onto it. Fortunately, I had some furniture coaster type felt strips lying around, so I stuck two of those on the back.

It’s not my favorite thing I’ve ever made, but I like the “drop of water under a microscope” look of it. Currently it’s living in my sewing room, the other place I often want to set hot things and beverages but otherwise don’t have a good place for them.

Guess what I forgot to do yesterday?
Well, better late than never. To call this the final report is slightly misleading since the piece has yet to dry and will hopefully subsequently be glazed and fired, but the class is over.

Recall that in the first class we made a lot of little pieces – or at least I made a lot of little pieces. At least one of my classmates came in knowing exactly what she wanted to do, and so she made a small model, a maquette, just to figure out the particulars. I came into the second class still not sure what I wanted to do for my larger piece, but with roosters on the brain. I spent the beginning of that class making a new maquette.

The instructor helped me build an armature of PVC pipe in a T shape, which was excellent for support but did make the crouching position basically impossible – the body really had to be completely horizontal. Oh well, working within constraints is often more interesting than working without them. The first night’s work produced this:

The next week when I arrived I was not very pleased with my work in progress. Lengthening the beak made an enormous difference in my opinion, all by itself. After I did a little work on it, the instructor helped me take the armature out, but we found the clay inside was too sloppy still for hollowing the bird and expecting it not to collapse. Removing the armature required cutting the bird in half chin to tail and then stitching it back together again. Since the clay was still fairly soft, we had to support the bird’s head. Here’s the end of two nights’ work:

The fourth and final night of class, my third night of work on the bird, he had to be sliced in half again to make room to scoop out a lot of the interior clay. The thicker the clay, the longer it takes to dry and the more likely it is to dry unevenly. Again we violently slashed back and forth across the cut line to make sure the clay was thoroughly stitched together so it wouldn’t crack in the kiln later. I then did the final detailing, filled in low spots, and smoothed over rough patches with the newly available clay. I’ll go back with a piece of sandpaper and some other things probably a week from tomorrow and see if it’s dry enough yet to really smooth the surface.

Dry time is probably a good six weeks, but hopefully I will have a third post about glazing and firing this beastie!

Craft Countdown #5 was bookmarks. A few years ago I bought a pack of plain bookmark-sized cardstock to make bookmarks for friends as Christmas gifts. That was still bumming around my stash so I thought for variety in the Countdown I would make some bookmarks.

It helps in endeavors like this to have an obscenely large sticker collection.

To be fair, that file also holds greeting cards.

Unfortunately, the eyelets I bought in the scrapbooking section of a store were incompatible with the pliers I bought in the sewing section of the same store! I had to shimmy a few smashed eyelets off the pin of the pliers with another pair of pliers before I gave up. And now I should sort them out of my bin of eyelets so I don’t have this experience again.

But without further ado, the finished bookmarks:

And, a Happy Birthday to my Aunt Liz!

Onward to Craft Countdown #4. I’ve been enamored of this idea since I found the tutorial for it on Whimsy Love a long time ago. The idea is to make little matchbook-like notepads out of paint color cards. My paint cards were all boring colors I’d actually considered using for decor, so I used different heavy paper instead: two cards from the Pilates Body Kit (not ones with exercises on them) and one former notebook cover. You need some things:

The paper trimmer isn’t essential, but it would not have been possible for me to do this as one of my ten-by-midnight crafts without it. The sturdy stapler is definitely a must. I trimmed the notebook cover to remove a strip of black material that had formed the spine, and the opposite side to eliminate the rounded corners so it would be symmetric. To fold the covers, I scored the paper with a mechanical pencil – with the lead out on the bottom (3/4″) fold, and with the lead retracted to fold the top down. As recommended, I used 20 sheets of paper per notepad, cut 1/4″ smaller than the covers in each direction, and centered. That was about right – too much more and stapling would have been very difficult.

I didn’t worry much about getting my staples symmetric, but I definitely felt two would be necessary for notepads this size. Since the one notepad had a large stretch of plain blue, I applied some additional decoration.

I had my first sculpture class Monday night. The description said we would spend the first class making little idea sculptures, and the remaining three working on one larger sculpture. So far, that is accurate! I spent my time making five small pieces, and I still have no idea what I will start work on next week.

The first piece was a sort of mask, which I essentially made just as a doodle. The teacher had suggested, if we did not have an idea in mind, that we just lump clay together and mold it with no particular goal, and that similarly to how clouds will resolve themselves into shapes when one looks at them long enough, we might start to see little figures to draw out. Our “inner gargoyle,” he said. This is not my inner gargoyle, but I like it.

Second I started working on one of the few ideas I’d had prior to class: a winged toad with a satisfied grin. It did not turn out as planned. It turned out better than planned.

I was starting to run dry of ideas, and the next thing I made started out as a tall ghostly creature with arms. I briefly thought about making a Hattifattener, but ended up with a horse-like dragon.

The teacher was speaking to a woman next to me about her sculpture and mentioned something about owls. I was inspired to make an owl, odd as he might be.

Here is another view of the four pieces so far.

Finally, there was about an hour left in class, and I had a big lump of clay and no more ideas. I started pushing it around, and after going through a Mahna Mahna backup singer type piece, I produced this:

Incidentally, the only real gargoyle I made is the last piece – technically, a gargoyle is a waterspout, eliminating runoff damage to masonry by shooting water away from the building. If it’s not a waterspout, but it’s on the building, it’s a grotesque.

I’ve shown my Ulu knife on here before. It’s fun but it is hard to store. For Christmas I asked for an Ulu knife sheath, but my mother decided to spend her Christmas budget on other things, so I got this:

My father was still amusedly shaking his head at the whole thing, but he was conscripted to help. Mother included a tracing of an Ulu knife in the kit, so I cut that out, traced it onto the leather, and added a seam allowance to the curved edges. Dad cut the pieces out for me with a utility knife and lent me his leather punch. I used one of the purse straps to make a strap for holding the blade in.

The purse instructions said to use saddle stitch for most everything, which is just double running stitch (Holbein) simultaneously with both ends of the same thread. I followed those instructions and then sewed the strap on afterward. To make the open edge (necessary to get the knife in and out) look the same I did a double running stitch on each side individually.

At this point I had to pause until I got home to my actual knife. I wanted the strap to hold it in snugly, so I didn’t want to guess on positioning the closure. Retroactively (by an hour or two) it became Craft Countdown #1. I determined where to cut the strap and epoxied black velcro to each side.

It fits really well. Now I can stash it in a drawer!

I haven’t had a lot of time to cook, between being very busy with work and then traveling for the holidays, so I was concerned about this installment of Quarterly Noms. However, it occurred to me that I do a number of things because of not having time, to try to still eat well despite that. Here are some.

When I do have time, I try to stock the freezer with things I can take for lunch and have for dinner. I don’t just use them straight through (I wouldn’t want to have the same thing so many times in a row anyway), but they are an excellent supplement and last a couple of months. This time around I made some standby favorites: spinach chicken pie and stuffed bread, both with turkey frozen after Thanksgiving. The name “spinach chicken pie” is a bit misleading, since the recipe also heavily features tomato and potato, the former in the filling along with onion, tarragon, garlic, and cheese. I modified the original recipe, from a forgotten magazine many years ago, so the crust is now frozen spinach and sweet potatoes, instead of the original wilted fresh spinach and baking potatoes. I found the fresh spinach completely disintegrated, making the dough a sort of green Play-Doh-like substance which was hard to work with and not incredibly appetizing. The frozen spinach seems to hold together better, giving an appealing mottled look in which you can still tell the components. The crust also includes egg, salt, and flour. I use an extra-deep pie pan for this, and often still have overflow – sweet potatoes are bigger than regular potatoes, and I also throw in more spinach than is called for.

The recipe titled “stuffed whole wheat bread” gives no clue whatsoever to its contents, which are ground turkey, pesto, fennel, onion, chive and onion cream cheese, bread crumbs, and spinach. It is absolutely delicious hot or cold. I was going to buy whole wheat pizza dough to make calzone-sized versions, but decided to be ambitious and make my own bread. I used a combination of barley flour and King Arthur Flour’s white whole wheat, a finely milled whole wheat flour that is basically just as healthy as wheat flour without needing the special accommodations. The barley flour is because when I got some bad cholesterol numbers – despite being a pretty good weight, exercising regularly, and eating lots of vegetables and not much dairy fat or white flour – I did research on how one can lower cholesterol, hoping perhaps I could tweak my diet and see some improvement. Barley extract has apparently been shown to do very good things for cholesterol. It is not commercially available, or at least it wasn’t when I was checking, but since then I have tried to increase the regularity with which I eat barley. This was my first experiment with barley flour. I used my grad school officemate’s bread recipe, which relies on you knowing what bread dough should feel like when it has the right amount of flour in it, but is otherwise easy and good. The bread is stuffed between the first and second rises if there are two, and between the second and third if there are three.

Of course, I made an error. Barley has WAY LESS gluten than wheat, though it is not gluten-free, and so using half barley flour severely caps the amount the dough can rise and makes it fragile – it breaks apart like aerated cookie dough instead of stretching. I should have used all barley flour in the spinach chicken pie, where that wouldn’t have mattered, and significantly less in this. However, it worked okay; it was just a bit harder to manage and calzones were out of the question.

As a final note, one of my primary weapons for healthy eating when work is busy is making salads ahead. On Sundays I make salads for the week’s lunches, chopping and mixing and distributing into five containers. This allows me to have a decent variety of vegetables in my salads, save time by doing everything at once, and (most importantly) make sure they are there and easy to eat. To prevent Thursday and Friday’s salads from having that “off” smell, I put a single folded paper towel in the top of each container, which absorbs excess water and keeps the salad fresh for the needed length of time.

I also dress my salads with plain balsamic vinegar, which I keep in a travel toiletry bottle in my desk. You could use any dressing that doesn’t need refrigeration – a friend likes to dress her salads with soy sauce and olive oil, which would certainly work.

Happy healthy eating!

On New Year’s Eve, I was going to go to a First Night event, but the friend I would have been staying over with was kind of lukewarm on the idea (she was not completely healthy), and I had just gotten back the day before from my long holiday trip, so I wasn’t so up for going out anyway. I decided to stay home and craft in the New Year. At some point in the afternoon I had the idea to complete ten projects by midnight, like the last ten seconds’ countdown. I didn’t expect to do everything from scratch, though as it turned out I did all but #1 from scratch. Also, except for the flowers used in #7, I didn’t buy anything new for the projects. Here’s the Craft Countdown list:

1. Ulu knife sheath
2. Vermont soap
3. Business card holder
4. Trio of “paint card notepads”
5. Trio of bookmarks
6. Lowly Worm
7. Flower decoration
8. Memo pad case
9. Robot iron-ons
10. Denim coaster

Since work will be busy through March and I’d like to avoid a replay of the baby sloth episode (though baby sloths are well worth the bandwidth), I’ll post individual entries for each of these, spread out with other entries. Today, item #2!

I stopped in a La Quinta on my drive back from the Midwest to New England, and they had lovely orange-scented soap. The only problems with it were that it was small, as one would expect, and also kind of hard. No problem; I’ve solved that before. This time, in addition to water, I drizzled in some orange-scented bath gel (I like citrus scented bath products). And then I decided to get fancy with the shaping, and dug out a cookie cutter. I am ridiculously tickled by the result:

As before, I diced up the soap fairly fine but not perfectly (it was two La Quinta bars), threw it in a bowl with water and bath gel, and microwaved it to melt/dissolve it. I was a little subtler with the heating this time, doing shorter stints, and I think that helped. Then I put the cookie cutter on waxed paper and used a rubber spatula to scoop and press the soap into it. I left it for several hours to cool and solidify, and then was able to press it out by hand.

Anyone with really good Google-fu want to take up a challenge? The internet has gotten too big and I can’t find something I remember from years ago.

I am looking for instructions for an artificial fish tank/bowl where plastic plants and fish are suspended in a clear gel made from mineral or baby oil. I am pretty certain it was all household materials, nothing like the resin used in gel candles.

If you can find a link, I will make you something out of baby oil gel in return!