Deep sea lobster soft toy
I’m impressed with mediatinker‘s kiwa hirsuta lobster soft toy, made very soon after the discovery of the deep sea species. The detailed pattern and instructions are released on a creative commons license.
(via whip up)
Archive for the tag 'craft'
Moose on the Loose: Flip top thumbs and other goodies!
Of ‘full, woolly, activity-unfriendly thumbs’ in knitted mittens, Tanya Ewing at Moose on the Loose says ‘Quite frankly I won’t use them.’ Quite right! Tanya has the all-important recipe for how to put a flip top in your thumb on her page of knitting patterns, Homegrown recipes for woolly items, which also includes a simple earflap hat, a less pointy hat, and earflaps in stocking stitch. I love the little ears on this hat!
Tanya’s site also has a Kiwi-Aussie dictionary, some great scenic photos (she likes clouds) and a cool collection of sign photos, and, my favourite amalgam of both: Tim almost taken by a glacial surge wave at Fox Glacier. She is also the coolest ironing extremist I’ve ever seen.
Oona Tikkaoja’s sculptures
I love the look of the sculptures that the Finnish visual artist Oona Tikkaoja makes, in particular her wolf creature and lizard robot killer. They are soft sculpture.
I also think her wooden horses are spectacular. They are beautifully jointed, and immediately conjure up thoughts of the mythical Trojan Horse. Take a look at the photo showing the construction, with all the clamps!
(via Extreme Craft)
Month of Softies: Halloween Goblin
This scrawny but fierce little goblin is my submission for Loobylu’s October Month of Softies theme, “All Hallow’s Hysteria”. He’s only about 5 inches tall, and made on the run. There are two more photos in my Flickr Softies set.
Letting it rip!
Rebound Designs takes old books and turns them into bags. I’m not a handbag user, so in a practical sense they are lost on me, but they are really cool. I took a spin past a couple of the op shops the other day, and came home with a few books to experiment with. Maybe I can make a few Christmas presents this year?
Strange how it feels naughty to rip the pages out, even for books I don’t feel any relationship with. I found four Reader’s Digest condensed book volumes with pretty covers that I don’t feel too bad about remixing. I think they must be in the same series as this one.
I doubt I could have done it to this one. I did get a Dean & Son abridged Pride and Prejudice, with an amusing gaudy cover, but I escape any dilemma because its spine is too thin.
Did you ever do that thing of cutting a secret compartment in the pages of a book? I remember it taking a lot of grunt to cut through all the pages!
Quilts: Alison Horridge
Kath at red current has been blogging about the Craft & Quilt Fair held last weekend, and mentioned really liking a quilt made by Alison Horridge. Here are pictures of three more of Alison’s quilts.
This is beautiful.Thanks so much, July’s Month of Softies: Sock Monkey
This is my submission for Loobylu’s July’s Month of Softies, a sock monkey. I’ve been curious about sock monkeys since first reading about the tradition a year or two ago, so I’m glad to have tried it out. This one started out plain and ugly, and I nearly abandoned him altogether, but I kept going back and reshaping bits. Now he is more refined, and I have grown quite fond of him.
Here are pictures of him without his jacket, and back view, and there are a few others in my Month of Softies gallery.
Dave Riley’s Mask Studio tutorials
Dave Riley is a mask-maker, puppeteer and playwright based in Brisbane. His Mask Studio tutorials have been of great help to me a number of times – thanks Dave! There are two mask tutorials:
- Easy mask making using cheap plastic originals (creating a serviceable neutral mask from a cheap plastic model, and then making it into a character mask by adding styrofoam and compressing it to shape).
- Mask making methods using commercial felt.
The felt method is really interesting. It involves soaking the felt in white glue and then moulding it to shape rather like working leather. There are then different finishes to experiment with, including paint, and leather gloss and polish. The result is a very light strong mask.
A few years ago when I first tried it and made a series of animal masks, I built on a paper mache base because I wasn’t sure it would be strong enough otherwise, but recently in making some smaller masks for Hidden Corners’ ‘See Beneath’, I was more confident in using the felt by itself, with a muslin/white glue backing to make the inside comfortable and strong.
The seaweed fronds had a little extra strengthening, just because the shape was not intrinsically strong like the shell. The fishy mask was done a little differently, without felt because I wanted finer detail. It is carved quite thinly out of styrofoam, and has several layers of muslin and white glue to give it strength.
These have a water-based polymer gloss varnish added to the paint, which kind of plasticizes them.
Month of Softies: June bug
You know you are either going loopy, or your new creation has charm, or possibly both, when you find yourself taking it from room to room with you around the house, or with you in the car while driving errands. Especially when its a computer bug. And we won’t mention talking to it.
There are a few other images in my softies gallery. This bug was made for loobylu’s June Month of Softies. My thanks once again, Claire.
