January 2012 - Page 2 of 3

Century post!

Today is my 100th post on this blog. That includes the little nothing posts, of course, but I’m still going to count it.

Today I’ll share with you Craft Countdown item #6. It occurs to me this one was also not completely from scratch, as I had made the tracing and transferred it to wash-away embroidery paper prior to New Year’s Eve.

If you don’t know who that is, get thee to a library or book store and look up Richard Scarry, who owns the copyright. I couldn’t relocate the specific source of this particular Lowly Worm image, unfortunately, and the colors I’d written down didn’t really make sense to me, so I used a mishmash of the colors from the books I did have accessible. This was easily the most time-consuming of the ten projects, but well worth it.

Paint card notepads

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.

Sculpture report

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.