iseecerulean

I bought some crayola air dry sculpting clay a while ago...thought it would be an easy way to make a ghost to be my harpist.

It was relatively fun and easy...but his arms won't stay up where I want them long enough for him to dry.

He's not exactly right either...he's too thick in the shoulders and doesn't have enough of a butt. 

I wadded him up and put the clay back in the tub to play with another day.  I think I'm going to have to make him around a wire armature to support his arms.

I'm also thinking I should probably make the harp first...it's got to be easier to form the ghost around the size and shape of the harp than to form a harp around the ghost.

p.s.  I was contemplating titling this post 'gone tomorrow', but that would have been lame...really, really lame.

There!  Done!  I can quit nagging myself.

I used a mix of black, gray, and white wool to give her hair more dimension than a solid color...it turned out okay.

I got Mr. Skeleton done too...he was easy...the most involved part was trimming down and smoothing out the seams left on his body from being made in a mold.

I'm too chicken to start Mz. Crow's hair (I'm afraid I'm going to screw it up)...so I used popsicle sticks to made a miniature box for the studio miniature instead. 

I was planning on drawing and coloring some small scale harlequin wallpaper in black and cream, like what I used in Susan's piece last year...but I bought a new brand of tea and it has these cool tea bag wrapper/envelope thingies.   There's no reason the wallpaper can't be purple...purple is Halloweenish too.

I bought some wallpaper for my artist's studio miniature this week...I'm torn between Sugarplum Stripe (on the left) and Grandpa's Attic (on the right).

I'm leaning toward Grandpa's Attic...I like the scale better and it's more subdued....Sugarplum Stripe may be too bright for a background.

It's hard to tell from the picture, but Grandpa's Attic has two blue and one red pinstripes between the black stripes...click on the picture to enlarge it.

What do you think?

Mz. Crow is seriously pissing me off.

She stood up on her own when she was just armature...she stood up on her own when her body was done...she stood up on her own after she was dressed the first time...but now she won't stand up.  I've fiddled with her and fiddled with her and grrrrr....

I want to put her hair on this weekend, then I'll set her aside and give the standing problem some time before I go back and start fiddling with her again.

My hand is healing...my blisters have scabbed over and look disgusting...but scabs feel a lot better than raw burned skin exposed to the elements.   Washing my hands all week was agony.  I'll spare you any pictures with this post!  Anyway...where I'm going with this (I have a point, really)....now that it doesn't hurt to type I went back and added text to the last couple of Mz. Crow posts.

Blurry pictures this morning...my right hand hurts like hell and I couldn't hold the camera steady.

I tore Mz. Crow's dress apart and painted a bodice directly onto her body.  Since her legs are visible through the toile I painted down almost to her knees, so it look like she's wearing a slip.

Then I glued and stitched some toile over the painted bodice, and onto her upper arms...you can see it if you click on the pictures to enlarge them.

When I reassembled her I snugged the wings up tighter to her body to cover more of her upper arms and shoulders...I didn't like the big gap there before.

I also painted some shoes on her feet and painted her head where I'm going to put the hair, so that white scalp doesn't show through any thin spots.

In the process of tearing her clothes off I broke her arm (that sounds odd in a kinky kind of way, doesn't it?).  The wire armature broke at the shoulder, but the floral tape is still holding the arm to the body.  I put a couple of sewing pins into her elbow going all the way through her torso so she's more stable. 

I'm glad the arm that broke is the arm I was going to have fully extended anyway, instead of the one I was going to have bent at the shoulder and elbow.  Whew!  Though with both arms made on same piece of armature I'm going to have to be very careful when bending the other arm...

I like the wings, tail and skirt...but the bodice is awful...her boobs are hanging out the sides.

The bias tape is as wide as one square on the graph paper I drew the design on...but after I got the wings assembled they were twice as wide as they should have been.  How did that happen?

I ripped half of each wing apart, which left me enough pieces to reconfigure into a tail and waistband...which was actually kind of nice, because I was dreading having to stitch any more silver accents.

After assembling the wings and tail I decided the bias tape was too stiff to make the rest of the dress out of, so I used toile instead.  The skirt is a little long yet, but I can trim it easily enough.

While I was working with a quilting iron I looked out the window and got distracted by the sight of my husband's cute butt walking across the back yard at the same time I was reaching for the quilting iron...I picked it up by the barrel instead of the handle.  Ouch!

I did some more stitching yesterday, then decided to take a break from wicked, mean metallic thread to make something for the studio miniature instead.  I made a mini wine crate for my mini artist to make a minier miniature in. 

But, because I'm a dork, I made my wine crate in comparison to the size of the artist, instead of in comparison to the mini furniture that needs to fit inside it. 

Sigh... 

I think I'll take the middle shelf out of it and use it to make a miniature of my muse assemblage to go on the studio wall.  There are a few things in my real studio that have to be recreated in my mini studio...my muse being the most important.

One sleeve done, one to go....then the rest of the dress...