I love the look of the sculptures that the Finnish visual artist Oona Tikkaoja makes, in particular her wolf creature (fourth pic along) 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)
Updated links 2015
Mimi Kirchner’s big men dolls are fun. It’s interesting how different the wool patterns and texture makes them, and I really like the spoof heroic shape! This one is my favourite. As someone remarks these guys are reminiscent of David Byrne in his Big White Suit in Stop Making Sense.
Mimi also makes the best bugs, too. (And you might know by now how I like a good insect!)
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.
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!
Manufacturing a Yellow Hound is a short online film showing the process of making this cool plaster dog sculpture. The armature is bundles of foil squished into shape and joined with masking tape. The shape is then covered with plaster bandage and painted. This elephant and bee are made the same way.
I found the yellow hound at Naive Knitting where the maker, Martha Wasacz, explains how the dog came about and fitted in with her thoughts about an open source policy towards crafting. I think that’s how it works, too.
Update 2015: broken links
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.
I’ve been making a few artist trading cards: an edition of just three. One of them is in exchange for Mimi‘s night baby.
Close-ups below.
I find the concept of artist trading cards quite seductive. It must be the idea of miniature art, like stamps and other mailart. But I am also wary of getting into it, on time grounds alone.
For a long time I wanted to make an installation – sometimes I still do! – with the little images I did for The Republic of Pemberley years ago. (Some of them were money and stamps invented for that imaginary world, featuring Colin Firth’s Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, but those particular ones are not online at the moment). The idea was to print and frame the pictures at the scale they were made – 200 x 150 pixels – and then exhibit them in a purpose-built miniature gallery. The way you would view them would be through peep holes, or being able to pop you head up into the individual gallery rooms from underneath. The idea connects into ideas I have long played around with, to do with how cyberspace impacts on our understandings of public and private space.
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 a few more pictures of him:
This is beautiful.Thanks so much, 