Playing with fimo some more

Warmed up my old black fimo in the microwave (really briefly, a couple of seconds at a time) then mixed up some translucent + white sparkly fimo to make faux cameos and ammonite/snail things. Used a twist drill and wiregauge drill bit to drill the holes after baking.




Having recently been to a talk on Art & Food Through The Ages at the V&A, these now remind me of oreo cameos... Hmm...

Longcat Scarves

A little over a year ago, I got a strange request from my sister to make a longcat scarf. How long should a longcat scarf be? I decided very long... but also I was on a budget so I bought 2m of fleece but made 4m of scarf.

It was a lot of scarf.


Decided after that epic scarf, I'd make one for myself but leave it at a more sensible 2m.

Been wearing it around for a while and then someone said to me... hey you could probably sell those. Hm. Interesting. I'll think about it.
A few weeks later, someone else asks if I made the longcat scarf and if they could commission one as a gift. Okay I'll think about it. This time I actually sat down, figured out material costs and time costs and came up with a reasonable number that didn't seem insane. I ask commissioner of scarf if the price was okay and they said it was reasonable so off I went making scarves.


Two of the above are now spoken for - the third is on ebay awaiting a good home. Third has been sold, made another one, put it on ebay, friend bought that one.

I've got a few plans for possible Tacgnol/Longcat combinations but I'll wait and see how these do first.

Laser cut rings and Plastic Weld

Apparently back in October I forgot to write about some laser cut rings I made.



A friend happened to be in the space after I made these and gave me some tips since they're a bit melted. Need to use less power and multiple passes next time.

More recently I learned of Plastic Weld which is a solvent that you use to "glue" (chemically melt & fuse) acrylic together. Just tried it out on a random 5mm mirrored perspex dot I've been keeping around since the prototype for the Infinity Box.



So awesome. So easy. Just hold the pieces in place with one hand, use a small brush to brush the Plastic Weld into the join and it wicks along by capillary action. Done in seconds. This basically means I can make boxes... or whole cases like those in galleries! This is exciting news, especially as I'm too lazy to design boxes with all those tabs or little slots for bolts & nuts (as in the design for the Ice Tube Clock).

Shrinky Plastic Fun :D

Kate is a bad influence on me. Or a good one, I'm not sure which anymore... She made me discover many My Little Pony merchandise, like colouring books. One of the things she used the colouring books for was to transfer pony designs to shrinky plastic (known as Shrinkles in the UK and Shrinky Dinks in the US).
Lately I've seen a lot of MLP jewellery designs using the shrink plastic so I wanted to give it a try. What can be better than infinite pony fan art?

First, I tried to trace a really big Fluttershy... The instructions said it shrinks 7 times smaller. So I measured before

(look at those impressive tracing, colouring and cutting skills!)
And after

And found it really only shrinks down by 2.5 times or so (thanks to Kimball for using MATHS to work this out for me because my brain was slow and addled by plastic fumes).

I realised after making the Fluttershy that ponies don't have black outlines, so I made this Pinkie Pie

I really love her expression in this one. From the original I traced, her head was more down and she was much more shy looking but this is still lovely and I'll probably make it into a necklace for myself soon.

Figured to try something a bit smaller... Gummy! Pinkie Pie's pet toothless alligator.

Would have been a little better if it was a little bigger so you can see he's hanging onto something by his mouth.

and even smaller...

Copied from a mini colouring book, it was a sort of illumination on a games page. Still the most pretty tiny thing ever.

I'm sure I could come up with more ideas for this stuff and I bought quite a bit of shrinkles too. One idea that has come to mind is possibly ... mouse-sized butterfly wings. Combining the mouse taxidermy with the Rarity's wings from Sonic Rainboom MLP... Might be interesting. Or just pretty and weird. Either way it's good.

Adventures in Fur - Paws (or Gloves)

Quite a while ago, after a bit of beer, the topic of fursuits came up. For those uninitated, this is what Furries wear... also Furries seem to pay quite a lot of money for these things. So a while back, a friend was threatening to buy some furfeet for 150euros (!) ... I drunkenly texted back NO! I WILL MAKE SOME FOR WAY CHEAPER FOR YOU!

Okay I've still not made the furfeet. I do, however, now have the materials! Then I got sidetracked by the fact that I have quite a lot of fur fabric... hey I could make furry gloves. Hmmm...

This website is the most amazing resource out there http://www.matrices.net/fursuiting.asp Seriously, if you ever needed to know how to put together a whole fursuit or just parts of one, you should look at that website. There is so much useful hints and tips. Stuff like using hair clippers to shave the fur to get more shape and detail seems like common sense to me now but I wouldn't have thought to try it (or thought it was so easy) if it were not for the videos on that website.

Gushing out of the way, I used the tutorial for the fur hands on the Matrices Fursuiting website. I was having one of those days where I really wanted to work on something but felt I couldn't due to lack of some sort of materials... My remit from my friend was black faux leather pads on the paws. I ordered some but was sitting and waiting for it. I looked around the flat and found some very thin, dark dusty blue suede leather. This might do... These may not be paws for my friend but if I made a pair of my own, I can make all the mistakes on these and then do better for friend who bought the fur fabric for me in the first place.

So the furglove making continued. I drew out a rough palm-sized pad and cut it out of leather.

I was surprised my sewing machine could handle the fur fabric and the leather but it seemed fine. I didn't follow through on the tutorial exactly - I went for more of a loose zigzag stitch rather than a satin-style stitching. It still seemed to work out pretty good

I learned that it's a lot easier to tack down the pads before hitting the sewing machine. Also it leads to slightly less huge bunches of fabric, as the leather sneaks around against the fur which moves around quite a bit.


All sewn up and ready for some shaving. I am so thankful I've trained myself to be ambidextrous. I had no problem shaving either glove using either hand. Wearing the glove while shaving with the other hand allowed me to move my fingers around and get more shaping in between the fingers.



And here's both paws


Hopefully I'll be moving onto the furfeet sometime soon... I've basically got the materials together, it's just finding the time to collaborate with friend to make sure shoes fit and final design/shaping.

Tool Roll

The husband has recently gotten into sport lockpicking and purchased his own set of picks. Unfortunately it came with a really small case and it was very difficult to get any of the tools out so I modelled this on a crochet hook case I got from ebay years ago. Just made of more sturdy fabric (denim, an offcut from my Tudor Rose purse I made years and years ago) and some random velvet ribbon from the velvet choker I made recently.

Oven Mitt and Machine Quilting

This was my first time machine quilting anything. It came out pretty well. It's for London Hackspace's kitchen since I managed to burn my finger trying to use a folded over teatowel as an oven mitt the last time I did any baking there.

A Just for Shiny

I remembered having a velvet choker as a teenager and i felt the need to have another... so this is a homage to that one. Pretty much the same construction but I made this one rather than bought it. Obviously needed to be done since all the other 90s fashions are coming back it seems... skater dresses and leggings... I even saw bodysuits (! those were painful...)

Warning! Taxidermy ahead

Disclaimer: Mice sourced were ethnically bred, raised & killed for snake/reptile food and were coming to the end of their frozen shelf life. This post contains dead mice. Not for the squeamish.

I follow a blog called Morbid Anatomy... mostly via twitter. I was very excited to find out that they decided to visit the UK for a month and host a series of events/lectures at The Last Tuesday Society. One of the things on offer was Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy. 4 hour class, not too expensive and rather unique... so why not?

First off, I highly recommend a visit to The Last Tuesday Society's shop. It is amazing. It's like wunderkammer heaven. So much weird and dark things. Actually, it is literally dark in the basement but that just adds to it... there's a few very small but brightly lit cabinets there that help to keep your eyes from ever properly adjusting to the light levels so there's always something luring in the shadows.

So... the tables were laid out like a macabre dinner party for cats. Dark paper table cloth, paper doilies, shiny little plates, cups of borax substitute and disposable scalpels.




There's no gory pictures because my hands were gloved and I was a bit busy! It's not really any different to taking the skin off a chicken. Here's what my mouse looked like before...


Then after

Like a little mouse slipper.

The tricky bit came after the skinning. It's very fiddly work wiring up the arms and trying to keep the tail/spine wire into the back of the head.

I actually struggled quite a bit with the body shaping. Using air drying clay used to bulk out the body made it a bit awkward. I spent so much time on everything else, I almost missed out the anthropomorphic bit (except for the fact the mouse is in a standing pose)... then I happened to spot some interesting lacy trim and knew it'd have to be a skirt for the mouse.


Thursday, I'm going to be trying to make another stuffed mouse... with quite an audience it sounds like! I'm a bit nervous, I'm still a newbie... but I guess that'll make me more interesting for everyone.

Embroidery

Two of my friends decided to share a flat together... We're kind of taking the piss out of them so made them His & His towels and then I decided they'd enjoy the rude tea towels too.





Happily, they seem to love them, especially the tea towels as they were needed.

Raspberry... P.I.

Another joke gone horribly wrong. Overheard someone describing a raspberry pi as a "raspberry pee eye" and then decided this needed to be celebrated with a raspberry sporting a Tom Selleck 'tache.

Giant T-Rex

Oh so funny... something that was vaguely a joke...

Somehow on the trip back from Derby Mini Maker Faire, we came up with the Amish T-Rex as a description for me. T-Rex because I have short arms and I have to ask other people to get things off of high shelves for me. Amish because ... well, I like to think I had a hippy upbringing but maybe it was more coddled/sheltered/not allowed to do fun & dangerous things. Also all the previous domestic skills tend towards being "amish".

Somehow I found a 6ft t-rex made out of plywood on Instructables. This idea escalated to Let's Build This For EMFCamp then ... it must glow. Yes it must. I originally thought I'd use UV paint but then decided glow in the dark pigments would be better... It'd react to light and also to the UV Lights.

I gathered a budget, I got granted a budget (materials only), bought plywood, begged for base-coat paint from friends, and somehow... it all came together. Under a bridge under the M1 in Milton Keynes.

Random Dremel Engraving and Nostalgia

So... many many weeks ago I felt the need to buy this shiny, green beetle encased in resin.

Tonight, I had a random urge to engrave all over it. In my mind it was going to turn out more victoria/goth lace-like design. Instead I came up with something that vaguely reminds me of one of my favourite movies from my childhood... Explorers.



If you've never seen this movie before, I highly recommend you watch it. It is fantasy but very wonderful.

This part is pretty far along in the movie but that crystal in young Ethan Hawk's hand is what I was reminded of when I finished my bug carving.

It's funny how memory isn't perfect - I thought the crystal was green with white carvings but actually it looks more clear with green carvings.

Fluttershy Everything

pink, yellow & turquoise book finished


Fluttershy cutie mark inspired nail art

Bookbinding - Leather Tooling, Finishing and Fluttershy Book Progress

Trying to get the Fluttershy* book finished for the end of term (next week! OMG I did a whole school year of something! :P)

I was almost going to finish it yesterday but I forgot my tube of Shocking Pink Book Cloth ... then remembered I didn't make any endbands either so I prepared to do that in class, then went... Noo I wanna make pretty marks on leather. Look, I prepared a leather covered board at home and everything!

So I went through all the finishing tools we have in class and found allll the swirlies. Happy happy swirlies. AND a tiling swirly so I can make a line of swirly!

Here's my practice board


I love working with leather. I could grow to love just tooling and finishing... Didn't even do any foil/gold work in this.

Went home and figured out that the purple silk thread I brought back from class would be the wrong colour scheme for Fluttershy - it'd just go a bit Easter colours if I used purple. So I looked through my embroidery floss and found I had a good turquoise like Fluttershy's eyes. And tada! I finished the tailband


Just have to finish the headband now. And re-do the mull over the stitches (doh. do things in order next time...)

*For those of you uninitiated into My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Fluttershy looks like this:

This book was totally going to be sane and reasonable(yellow end papers, red book cloth half-binding with cute dormouse & red berries paper) until I found neon pink acrylic paint to paint the head of the book with... then reason went out the door.

Minecraft in Cake and Ring form

Ginger cake with lemon water icing


Lava, Cobblestone, Dirt, Grass & Water block rings. The lava and water ones are my favourites. They both use "caning" for the patterns. Mixing the white glitter fimo into the blue fimo is beautiful - it already has AB sparkles which works really well with the blue.

Fimo is the most awesome stuff ever

Experimented with translucent white fimo and baking/forming over a foil form. This actually needs to be balanced a little better, it keeps wanting to face-floor.

It is beautiful, though, for something I just made because I was getting frustrated trying to make fimo ponies :P

Derpy (Derby) Mini Maker Faire and the Infinite Star Box

It's been ages since it happened but I figured I should write about it anyway.

In the run-up to DMMF, I was frantically trying to make my infinite star box. I bit off more than I could chew and by the end of Wednesday, I had... a mirrored perspex box and no lights. There was a bit of the magic blue smoke and I didn't have enough help or knowledge of my own of electronics to really do what i wanted to. I got horribly frustrated and sad and went home crying. It was a serious low point.

My friend Monty mentioned about just using a string of LED fairy lights instead, and my other friend Tom offered some of his lights (turned out to be broken so just stole some working ones that were hanging up around London Hackspace) so with about 8 hours of building the surrounding wooden box and putting it all together. It was exhausting, but at least it was done to some level of working. Just not quite to how I imagined and prototyped it.


The setup on Saturday was pretty frantic. It was suppose to be a day for Makers to wander around and look at the other exhibits, but some of the people exhibiting were only exhibiting on the Sunday anyway.

The person checking us in and giving us passes exclaimed "... How many of you guys are from London Hackspace?!" Strangely, by about halfway on Sunday, it felt like the correct response to that was "Not nearly enough".

Sunday was so busy! Over 500 people came to see the faire. We learned that little kids are much better at destroying golf courses than a few semi-drunken adults are (which was the last place the golf courses saw any action).

We had a table set up with some leaflets, my star box and some mini-stylophone kits. We also had Wacky Inflatable Wavy Arm Man! I may have accidentally emotionally scarred a child for life by making Wacky Inflatable Wavy Arm Man lean towards her after she poked it a few times...



We had a podcast recording with Hack All The Spaces too. I managed to hack their Derby Mini Maker Faire stickers to say Derpy. The look of joy/horror on Dominic's face was amazing ;D Both "that's amazingly well done!" also "STOP CALLING IT DERPY!!" hehe!


There's an insane amount of pictures on my flickr account:
Derpy Mini Maker Faire Photo Set

Next Mini-Maker Faire is up in Manchester. It's kind of far away so I'm still debating about going there. It's a bit costly train/hotel-wise. Derby was so exhausting too! Not sure if I can do that all again with the golf supervision.

Also I'd quite like to make another project but I'm not sure what yet. We'll see. It's at the end of July.

Bookbinding - Half Leather Book

I've been taking bookbinding classes part-time since September. I finally got to the "making leather bound books" level! Weirdly, I think leather is easier to work with than bookcloth and PVA glue. It's slower and more malleable to work with. Getting decent leather and a stone to work on and a paring knife seems like it'll be more difficult, though.

I'm working on a new notebook since I've nearly filled up my current one (the 2nd book I ever made in class). It should be a half-bookcloth (in red) binding with cute little dormouse & berries paper, with either pink or red head colouring and yellow endpapers. Something radically different to the usual blue/black books I've been making the whole year.

Knot Jewellery

The recent warm weather here forced me to wear shorts for the first time in years. Actually the shortest shorts I've ever owned which isn't very short but still slightly worrying to me.
For some reason this reminded me that I used to make and wear anklets made from embroidery floss. So on my way into London Hackspace for an evening I decided to grab a few skeins of embroidery floss and get to work.

I really didn't expect it to go so fast. I've not made these in probably 13+ years but I just remembered how to make all the right loops rapidly. I nearly finished the whole anklet just on my half an hour journey.

I've now started a full necklace too. Wondering if I should put the copper squid pendant on it since I made it a little too thick for a normal jumper ring. We'll see.