Owl be Back

Recently minis have gone on the backburner so that I could plan for something secret!

It'll be in a month so expect frequent arty updates. 

Yesterday I sewed three owls for the owlery. I made them all with little pockets so that they can have notes in them!

Here's one!  I'm not crazy about them, so I'll probably make more (eventually!)

No Bones About It

Today I made a skeleton!  Rather, I took a dollar store skeleton garland that looks like this:

And fixed it up a bit.  I gave it actual joints beyond the shoulder joints and the hip joints.  This next part is a little technical... I noticed that the shoulder joints were connected to the upper ribcage, which is entirely incorrect, so I connected it instead to the clavicle (the collarbone, which, on these little plastic guys extends right to where the shoulder joint would be).

How did I do this miraculous thing, you might ask?  All you need is a piece of cardboard, a pushpin, and wire, and scissors.

Using the cardboard as a buffer, I pushed the pin through the skeleton to make new holes, one a little above the knee joint, one a little below.  I did that for the knees, shoulders, wrists, elbows, and cut the joints apart with a scissor.  At this point, I filed the edges down a little with a nail file.  Finally, I strung the joints together with wire, and painted the whole thing.  In the pictures, the eyes look darker than they are; I mixed a middle gray so it wouldn't overwhelm the rest of it.

Here he is, chilling with Poe.  Poor Poe.

Because I Need More Sugar Rushes

Today I made something so tiny that I can't get a picture of it.  I've been wearing a rubber band around my wrist for weeks thinking about this, but I hadn't gotten around to it until today.

So, you know those really thin, square-edged rubber bands?  Not the flat ones, the other kind.  I figured, if you can cut it right, you could make tiny sugar cubes, and you can!  It totally works!  I had to discard about 70% of the ones I made for being misshapen, but it's not like it's a lot of effort.

Painting them white is the challenge.  I tried coating my finger with white acrylic and rolling them around, but it didn't work as well as I wanted it to.  I had coverage, it just wasn't awesome coverage, even when I did it twice.  Then I painted the top of a Rubbermaid container (that's my workspace) with a little smear of white and rolled the little cubes through that! Much better.  I just wish I could get a picture!

Happy arting!

The Nest Big Thing

Taking the picture with my camera phone kind of wiped out all the details, but I made a tiny bird's nest!

I took twine and unraveled it and roughed it up around my finger.  After that, I picked apart the fibers in a piece of felt and rolled it up to make little eggs!   Happy arting!

Poe Gets Pwned

Today Poe watched the Notebook, and I found him later, next to the tissue box.

Poor Poe.

This is how I made the tissue box:
I took a small wooden cube, an interesting pattern from a magazine, and a tiny square of tissue.  Basically I wrapped it up the way I wrap a present (or, rather, how other people wrap presents, because I kind of... put stuff in bags or just hand it over or hide things under other things), took an oval of plastic and some tissue to make the 'opening,' and glued the scrap of tissue on top of that.