Coca Cola

At a garage sale I picked up a Christmas ornament that was already in a bad way.  My plan was to just keep it whole, take off the bottom, and have a few cartons of Coke bottles in the corner.

To put it in perspective, originally the top portion was full of tiny bottles.  Then, after some wiggling, I realized that the Coke bottles could be removed!!!  (Two snapped in half, but that's the peril of yanking glued-in plastic out of more plastic.)

In-scale soda for everyone!  Here's a pill bottle full of Cokes.

I wear a sombrero now. Sombreros are cool.

Over spring break I went to Mexico and I got a few magnets... basically just cloth sombreros with miniatures hotglued on! 

Check it out, yo. 

The most amazing thing is the little green basket... it's truly one of the smallest, most intricate things I've ever seen.  The picture is pretty terrible, but imagine a basket woven with plastic strands no bigger than a thread.

Pretty soon I'm going to try to decorate the hat... make it truly groovy, but I figured I'd put this post in there to show you that I'm still kicking.

Speaking of kicking-- my book is out on Amazon now!
http://www.amazon.com/Five-Items-Adeline-Stein-ebook/dp/B00BF6CBAK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1361199001&sr=1-1&keywords=one+out+of+five
If you like what you see, even if it's just the sample on the Amazon page, send the link to everyone you know!  Word of mouth is so, so important.  And you don't need a Kindle to get it... just an electronic device that you can download a Kindle app onto.

Anyway, it's had some great reviews, and since you guys are so important to my art life, I want you to be a part of my writing life, too!

Blue Dog Blues

I went ahead and made an imitation George Rodrigue.  For those of you who don't know his work... he's super famous for painting this blue dog, based on his own deceased dog and the myth of the loup-garou. 

I went ahead and used one of those scrapbooking frames to frame it, and a fancy invitation to paint on.  Happy arting!

Monkeying Around

Today I made a tiny sock monkey!  I went for t-shirt materials that look like the same colors in a sock monkey, and just went to town!  I tried to keep similar construction, too, to add to the look!  T-shirt materials, if you don't sew them too tightly, remain loose and can fray a little to give the appearance of a knit. I used seed beads for the eyes and less than one cotton ball to fill it.

I think this little fellow is a tad too large for the house, but they make oversized sock monkeys too, so it can work.

Something pretty awesome I've found is that the scrapbooking section of most craft stores have tiny picture frames!  And, if people send you fancy letters they're usually in fancy envelopes, which work pretty well as watercolor paper!

Check it out, yo!  My first tiny picture for the tiny house.

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!

Under my Umbrella-Ella-Ella

If I atoned for the rest of my life, I'd still never be forgiven for the title of this post.

This project is something I've been itching to do for a while, and I thought it'd be much harder than it was.  I took a cocktail umbrella (which I've always been kind of fascinated with, honestly.  They're tiny, functional umbrellas with moving parts, and people just throw them out willy-nilly!  They're cool) and peeled off the tissue paper, leaving me with a skeleton of the umbrella.  Then I used the tissue paper, which was all surprisingly in one piece, as a template to cut out the fabric I wanted to use.  It actually worked out brilliantly, because I chose spotted fabric, and there's one spot right in the middle where I cut out the center piece.

I glued it on and coated the whole thing with white glue, in part to stop it from fraying.

Cutesicles, right?  Happy arting!

Today I planned to make a little box to put the cards in, but as you can see, it didn't quite go as planned.  The box is too small width-wise, so now I just have a tiny box!

I used posterboard cut into strips and tape to hold them together.  Then I tried to paint it, but the paint kind of... decided to not stick to the tape.  So I decoupaged it with tissue paper, used three small yellow beads, an orange glass tile, and a strip of gold string, and it looks so much better when the picture isn't done with my crummy phone.   Happy arting!

Today I finally felt a little spark of motivation, and I moved to make a tiny deck of cards.

It wasn't as easy as just snipping them out, though.  I painted the back with this cool metallic blue paint that I got when I was painting set pieces for a community production of Alice and Wonderland.  I fell in love with the shade, but I haven't had cause to use it since. 

The tiny cards were printed on cardstock (or photo paper) and I coated the front with white Elmer's glue.  That gave it more of a playing card feeling between my fingers, if that makes sense.

I'm not the best cutter in the world, so I tried to cut it with a boxcutter and a ruler.  Big mistake.  It ended up tearing up the paint on the back (I'll do touchups eventually).  I switched to scissors and I didn't do half badly!  This is Van Gogh playing Solitaire (okay, so my hands are too shaky today for setting up tiny things, but I made them, and that's the important bit!)  Happy arting!

Early Easter

I don't want to be the one to tell Hagrid that Easter is tomorrow.  At any rate, he seems to have found an egg.  I'm slightly worried about what's hatching from it.

You might notice that his basket is rather cauldrony.  I got the cauldron at a garage sale, at which point it was dry brushed silver, which gave it a really nice aged look, but it had a very obvious plastic seam down the middle, and MADE IN TAIWAN stamped on the inside.  I used a nail file to file down the seam and the inside, and I used some liquid copper leaf to color the cauldron.  It took a few coats.  Partially due to my own stupidity.  I thought because it didn't say to shake well on the back of the package that I didn't need to.  It's also a kicker to clean off of brushes and hands.

Don't let the bad quality picture fool you... it's gorgeous.  And it was really exciting to work with actual soluble copper, as opposed to copper paint.  I got it on sale, which is also pretty exciting. 

Happy arting!

Hello Dobby

Finally finished!  Here's a picture of Dobby next to Hagrid, for scale.  The very tall to the very small.

And here's a slightly better picture.  The picture isn't awesome, because I'm still using my phone camera.   The reason he's bandaged: he has a habit of hurting himself when he misbehaves, in the books.  The real reason he's bandaged: his arm fell off, and I had to crack his legs to get him to stand up.  His ear fell off and I replaced it with paper, and you can't tell the difference! 

I did a quick touch-up and replaced the picture, sorry!

Happy arting!

Slots of Fun

Garage Sale Saturdays was a huge success!  I got material, watches to dismantle, and... a working slot machine.

I didn't have a table handy so I used a clay container.  Pretty neat, huh?  Though, I must say, the last thing that anyone in the dollhouse needs is a gambling problem.  The house is 80% full of depressives (see: Poe, Van Gogh, the Crow, Batman, etc).

Okay, this picture isn't very good, but there's something I want to talk to you about, buddy to buddy.  Have you ever found something fully stellar but it's made of plastic and it looks like it's made of plastic?

Have I got news for you!  I found silver nailpolish  at the dollar store, and it works like a dream to make plastic look more metallic.  Now, this picture is definitely twenty-two shades of awful, but I haven't painted the knives yet, and you can sort of tell the difference.  The light reflects differently.  Better.  The knives look flat, and the other stuff has dimension.

Okay, you folks, I know that I've been quiet lately, but I'm working on flooring and I want to post it when it's finished.  So I'll give you something from Garage Sale Saturday.

I got a tiny rubber ducky!  Among other things.

Look how interested in the duckie Van Gogh is!  He must be in a mood.

Today I made a chair out of some scrap fabric and some scrap wood from the back of a canvas.  The wood was weak enough to cut with scissors, and I used a nail file to round a few of the edges.  I used light batting for the back and the seat, and a funky floral fabric that I just had a scrap of.

Here's a pic of all the pieces before I put them together, on my leg.

 Here's the finished chair!  It looks lopsided because I'm taking the picture at an angle, but it's really not.

Again, it looks lopsided, now because it's sitting on my friend's bed.  It's low to the ground, but some chairs are kind of like that!

Happy arting!  One day I will get a better picture, but right now I am sleepy.

I'm a basket case!

So, basically, this was super duper easy.  I modified a tutorial from over here, and basically just watercolored the paper, cut it with scissors (with much fit-throwing on the way when I accidentally cut entirely through the mold), and drank too much coffee as I wove.  All I really needed was very thick paper, watercolors, and scissors.  I look forward to playing with this!

They look cooler in person.  Happy arting!

Here we go!  Art at last, art at last.

I made a container of Bertie Bott's Every Flavored Beans!  I just shrunk and printed out a printable of the container (easily googled).  I used tape to make the plastic 'windows' by facing the sticky sides together.  The tape I used was kind of cloudy, but I would love to try this with really shiny tape, and little oblong balls of tissue paper to look like the candy!

 I'm sorry for the massive amount of radio silence.  I've been brainblocked so hard, because I want to finish the floors and the walls before I bury myself behind an avalanche of tiny thingies, but... doing walls and floors is tough.  I'm maybe the worst at it, possibly.

Here's a mirror that my sister was getting rid of that is going to turn into a table.

 I added lace with white glue, and then added a bead of hot glue along the bottom to keep it in place.  After that, I did two coats of white acrylic paint, and once the siding is all the same color it kind of imitates the look of intricately carved wood.  It even kind of hardens. 

I glued it onto a cork, put my skull vase on top for decoration, and the end!  Happy arting!

This is an idea that I've been (pardon the pun) sitting on for quite some time. 

To make toilet paper, take the cheapest, thinnest napkin you can find (or tissue) and cut it into strips that are wider than you want your roll to be, and wrap them around a thin straw.  Then trim the ends with a pair of sharp scissors.  I made this with the napkin and straw inside the cutlery packet for school lunches!

Happy arting!