Contrariwise ramblings

I got home from work today and guess what was waiting for me?!

A box of new toys for making jewelry.

All of this is stuff I've never used before but I've been dying to try.  I just put in an order on Monday with Contenti, and I wasn't expecting to see my shipment for a week.  But here it is!

It's just like Christmas at my house.  It took me about 5 minutes to rip open the package. 

Whoo hoo!  What did I get!!!???

• A DRILL PRESS.  Although this is their economy model, it should make it easier for me to make holes in metal and cut-outs in metal (for example, the settings behind my cabs).   

I've wanted it ever since Contenti started carrying it, but it's been out of stock for months.  Until this week.

I especially appreciate this description in their listing:  "The instruction booklet provided with the unit is written in incomprehensible English. For the sake of clarity, we have re-written them."  (So true to life that it's almost funny.)

Yup, no more using my dremel, which is pretty inaccurate for drilling and has made me ruin more than a couple pieces.

• A NYLON HAMMER.  No, not for me to whack my husband.  But for me to whack silver without marring it.  I'm hoping it works even better than my rawhide mallet.

• BINDING WIRE.  To place little bits of silver into bondage for me to solder them more accurately.  Never tried it before.  This might prove to be very interesting, fun and, probably, oh so frustrating.  

Or, as those of us in the corporate world are taught to say, "This will be an opportunity."  (ARGH!!!!)

• A CHARCOAL BLOCK.  Yes, I'm going place my leftover scraps of sterling on this and melt them into little balls of solid silver goodness.

And, best of all, something I should have gotten long ago:

• AN OPTIVISOR.   5 x, with a loupe.

And yes, my daughter literally just threatened to disown me.




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This past weekend Indianapolis featured  annual Mutt Strut  which  benefits the Humane Society.   You get to walk your dogs on the Indianapolis 500 Speedway.


These photos are from our local paper.  And even though it was raining, it looks like the participants, both 2 legged and 4 legged, had a great time.


I missed out this year.  But  next year, MooShu and Indy will definitely need to participate.


And yes, there is nothing "so ugly I'm cute"  than a Chinese Crested Hairless.  Except maybe one decked out in rain gear.  







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Just thought I'd share this adorable photo. These poor little meerkats lost their mommy at 2 days of age. But with some human love, a hot water bottle, and the help of a stuffed animal, they're doing great and are now over a month old.

link

I just took my first jewelry class the other week. It was a silversmithing course to make a silver pendant with a stone.

It was SO MUCH FUN! Lookie at what I made!

I bezel-set the stone, using a propane torch to solder it to the sterling back, which I cut freehand, using a pair of scissors.

The teacher is a former silversmithing teacher at a local university who knows a great deal about how to use inexpensive techniques. He told us stories of using an coffee can, some foil and an old skillet to do some fancy work. He's quite a character, let me tell you.

I had brought a stone that I wanted to set as a pendant, but the instructor didn't think it would be the best for the project - the back of it wasn't flat. But he had brought a bunch of stones that he cut and polished himself for us to pick from. So I went through his pile and finally settled this red one that you see above.

I asked him what kind of stone it was.

He looked at the stone. Then he looked at me. The he gave out a long drawn out sigh and coughed a few time.

After he got everyone's attention it was time for a story.

It seems that he had been out in Arizona a while ago, looking for fossils to bring back as specimans for his classroom.

Well, not fossils, exactly. Coprolites.

One of his old friends had a dinosaur on his property that he had been digging out for quite a while. As the story goes, it was a raptor, and whatever had killed it, must have scared it sh%tless because there was a big pile of dinosaur poo at the base of his tale.

Well he dug up this prize speciman and displayed it in his classroom for a number of years. He also cut and polished chunks of it.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my pendant is fosilized dinosaur crap.

Nice color, isn't it.

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Wilhelm Staehle created Victorian scenes by superimposing silhouettes over paintings, and gave them somewhat subversive captions.


Simply brilliant. (I wish I could buy them as cards!)










The enigmatic Wilhelm Staehle is a clever gentleman indeed whose nomenclature appears on two lovely sites: Silhouette Masterpiece Theater and The Dollar Dreadful Family Library.

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Elizabeth, who has some wonderful jewelry in her Etsy shop, Keys and Memories, has "Freebie Wednesdays" on her blog. All you have to do is leave a comment, then she draws a name to pick the winner. Well, a couple of weeks ago, she picked my name!

Whoo hoo! I couldn't believe I won!

Keys and Memories has tons of earrings, keychains, necklaces and rings made from lovely vintage typewriter keys. But she also has some variations on the keys. For example, isn't this Dr Suess bracelet funky:

But some of my favorite things in her shop are her steampunk jewelry made out of watch parts and vintage items. (I'm just a sucker for steam punk. I wrote about some fabulous steampunk computers and journals in an earlier post.) This brooch in her shop is just amazing:

To see more neat stuff in her Etsy shop, Keys and Memories, click here.

BTW, the typewriter key necklace I got seems to be on permanent loan to my 17 yr-old daughter. She "borrowed" it the day it came, so I will probably never see it again.

Children...

...can't live with them; can't kill them.

OK, so I have a thing for sock animals. But I can't help it. They're so CUTE!

You might remember that in a earlier post I blogged about Sock Zombies, these delightfully weird creatures made by the Etsy seller Underroos. I thought that they were so unique that I submitted them to BoingBoing.net. (BoingBoing is a great site. Check it out if you haven't already.) And http://www.boingboing.net/BoingBoing featured them late last month!

Well, Underroos ended up selling more than 50 Sock Zombies in just a few days. And, in appreciation, she sent me a Sock Zombie for my very own!


It's a large toe-horned throwing zombie, as you can tell from the 3 small nubbins on the top of her left horn and the 2 slightly larger nubbins on the right. She has slightly glazed and maniacal, yet not unkind, look in her eyes.

She is pictured lying on my couch in my work room where she guards my beads from the undead.

My daughter, Emma, has taken quite a liking to her and gave her her cherished Hannah Montana wig.

I think the wig is definitely a nice touch, don't you?

Hey, I submitted Underroos Sock Zombies to BoingBoing a couple of weeks ago. And guess what! They've been featured!

Link to boingboing.

A zombie made out of socks is better than an ACTUAL zombie in so many ways! I mean, can you put an actual zombie in your backpack?

Sure, but just that one time.

JANUARY 30 UPDATE: Yesterday, underoos sold 31 Sock Zombies because of being featured in BoingBoing! She even made top sellers in Etsy Tools . Yeah!!!

First thank you to Tizzalicious for mentioning me in her blog!

This is NOT your mother's crochet. If you want to see doilies, go elsewhere.

I've always enjoyed folk sculpture. It's just someting about the naivete and whimsy in the pieces that makes me smile. Yesterday I stumbled upon a new seller in Etsy whose amazing folk sculptures brought a smile to my face.

His shop is called Crescent Hill Designs and this is what he says about himself in his profile:

I am a self-taught artist from Nacogdoches, TX, drawing inspiration from such great artistic minds as Tim Burton, the great animators of Aardmon Animations (Wallace and Grommit), and anything ranging from childhood naustalgia to the mystery of the unknown. Anyway, I feel that I have always been an artist at heart, but my passion for it really began to bloom shortly after my highschool graduation. Before I graduated I preferred acrylic painting to anything else, but now I have settled into the joys of sculpting from polymer clay and paper mache. I can't imagine a life with its absence.

Hmm, folk sculpture influenced by Tim Burton. Maybe that's why his sculptures struck me as being so interesting.

This one on the left is called Cat and the Fiddle. I think this one is my favorite.

I love the almost maniacal grin ( I think I can see the Tim Burton influence coming through here), the way his whiskers have become a moustache, and all the wonderful details. This kitty is made from polymer clay, wire, metal, and wood, and is painted with acrylic paint, varnished, and coated with sealer.


The "Sunday Pendler is a long-legged chick enjoying a peacefull sunday ride on his unicycle. The detail, once again, is remarkable. I haven't worked in polymer clay, but I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to make the unicycle in this medium. The chick reminds me of those made with antique chocolate molds. (Have you ever seen them? Most of the molds were made in the late 1800s and, because they are so unique and detailed, have been recently used as molds for chalkware figuringes. )



The little green fellow on the left is called "Frog Hair Tea". There's got to be a story behind that name. (I don't know where the name came from. But maybe it's because frog's hair is so fine you can't "see" it. In other words it's so fine as to be non-existent. Uh oh. I'm rambling again.) But look at his face! What a whimsical almost bemused expression he has!


Anyway, I thought I would share these sculptures and wish Crescent Hill Designs and Lance Perry, the artist behind these work, the best of luck with his shop.

Go visit them if you have a chance and take a look at some of the other sculptures. I'll bet you'll be amused with them as much as I was.

So maybe I'm behind in the times, but it's only been lately that I've discovered amazing tiny little artworks call ACEOs.

This awesome knitted and dissected frog. was just featured in Neatorama and BoingBoing .

Having grown up just a few miles from the ocean (Long Island Sound, actually, but that's close enough), I have many fond memories of playing on the beach, making sandcastles, chasing and catching minnows, and drawing in the sand.

If you sell things on the internet, you know that good photos are essential. To improve your digital photos there are programs that you can buy like Photoshop (which I have but really don't know how to use) and programs that you can download for free. For example, I use Photofiltre which is relatively easy to use. (Read: 'idiot proof'". ) But even with these programs, pretty much all I can do is lighten up an image that's too dark, crop it, or make it sharper.

While manipulating photos has become relatively easy, to do it well is not easy and not that many people have that talent. Therefore, I am pretty much in awe of people who are great at it.

If you want to see some really great photoshop work, go to Worth1000 . People display their photoshopping skills in contests with different themes. Examples of contests are on Woorth1000:

Supersize it! <---Really huge food portions You Are What You Eat 3 <---turning people into food Surreal stories <---Putting a Salvador Dali slant on the world Here's one more great link on photoshopped animals .

The people who participate in these contests are really good. I mean really good. Either they're professionals or they have an awful lot of free time on their hands. I mean, most of us can barely take a reasonable photo let alone touch it up.

There are a number of people on the internet that can create photo montages for you. One person that creates custom collage portraits is 6timemomma. (That name comes from the fact that she has SIX KIDS all under the age of 11!)

She can take an already cute picture of your child

And create it into a fantasy image a la Anne Geddes:

<--I guess this is where babies come from.



And what little girl wouldn't love to have a photo of her as a fairy!?

I can just see this hanging my my daughter's room and her getting ooohs and ahhhs from all her friends.










Here's another one of her works; I love the composition with the mushrooms.

6timemomma also does serious photography. She's exhibited her photos, they've been published, and one of them was even selected as a Betterphoto First Place winner out of more than 23,000 images!




You can find 6timemomma's online shop at http://www.6timemomma.etsy.com/

First, if you're not familiar with steampunk, it's like an alternate history: what would our world be like if we still used steampower to drive our inventions and if everything was still handcrafted instead of being mass-produced? Sort of like a combination of sci-fi, goth, and geekery.

Still unsure of what it is? Think of the final scene of Back to the Future Part III : Remember Dr Emmett Brown and his family flying away in a steam-powered time-machine locamotive? That was early steampunk. Have you seen the movie The Golden Compass or it's trailers? They have some wonderful scenes of steampunkery. (Especially the airship.)

A perfect example of steampunk is the work of Jake von Slatt (not his real name) who is quickly becoming something of an icon on the scene. He's probably best known for his computer mods, namely his steampunk keyboard, and most recently, his steampunk monitor:

Pretty cool, huh.

Till next time!