I made this for my niece Emily, who is seven years old.  I bought the wooden box at Michael’s and spent a few weeks decorating it.  The butterflies are cut out from art paper that I bought at the Paper Studio (one of my favorite stores!)  The lettering on the top is made of polymer clay, and considering how much work it took, it ought to look a lot more spectacular. 

I made the velvet base out of mat board and polyester quilt batting, then sewed on the jewelry so it doesn’t bounce around too much in transit.  I wanted to make the whole thing look a lot more extravagant, but I ran out of time and ideas. 

I made this for my niece Jessica, who is five years old.  Like her sister’s box, it is a wooden box from Michael’s that I spent a few weeks decorating.  I used violet interference paint, mixed with gel retarder, to stamp the leaf patterns on the lid and sides.  I tried to make a polymer clay embellishment for the lid, but it turned out poorly, so I used the gerbera daisy cut out instead.

Inside the box is a rhinestone tiara.  My focus group says this sort of thing is appealing to the 5-7 yr old girl demographic.

I thought I ought to post pictures of our tree angel while she was still in one piece.  She took a tumble while we were decorating this year, and the ceramic head broke at the neck.  We managed to repair her, but she’s looking her age. I made her ten years ago.

My favorite part of this angel are the wings, though they are what make the angel hard to store and delicate to handle. I found a package of white bird feathers on sale at the craft store. I trimmed them and glued them to the cardboard form. The base form of the body is made out of cardboard folded into a pentagonal cylinder.  Now they sell cone-shaped angel/doll forms, but in 1998 they didn’t have any.  The head and hands are purchased porcelain doll parts.  She was originally blonde, but I colored her hair brunette with permanant ink.  Like her maker, her hair is lightening at the roots, but that’s fixable.

The dress is made of colored velvet and trim, with beads and gold mesh and satin all glued on.  Her halo is a piece of thin brass, cut to shape.

When I was in Japan, I used to do cobalt underglaze on porcelain more than anything else. It was a style born out of the fact that I can’t read glaze colors in Japanese.  There are a lot of traditional designs and motifs, usually used on fabric, which lend themselves well to the concave surface of a bowl.  This is one of the easiest.

 

Fellow artist Jane Cheek gave me some fabric dyes, and I decided to try them out on a book cover.  I started out with a calico that had spiral patterns on it. After all, using just plain fabric wouldn’t be much of a change over using paper.  Some of the fabric dyes stain just like ink, except without bleeding. Others, especially the pearlescent ones, feel more like acrylic paint in that they leave a residue and don’t have that cloth feel.  I didn’t have anything like a neutral shade to outline in, so I used a fabric marker.  That was a mistake, as the fabric marker had a fat tip and didn’t leave a nice line. The mermaids’ faces were blank, as the marker couldn’t get anything like detail.

I left the mermaid faces blank while I did the beading.  The beading, as usual, takes a long time, but adds a nice layer of texture. Unlike glued embellishments, the beads can move slightly without coming undone, so you can play with them while you’re holding the book.  I used thread to add a webbing texture on the fins.  The sewing actually extends past what you can see on the cover, as I needed some for selvage.

I experimented, trying to get the faces to look right.  First I tried painting eyes and mouths with the fabric dye, but they just looked blank.  I tried using brown thread to create lines, but with the fat marker outline, it didn’t look right.  I thought about painting faces on with acrylic, but then the faces wouldn’t match the bodies. 

I reasoned that if the faces weren’t going to match the bodies anyway, I might as well just make three dimensional faces that matched their fish bodies.  I made these masks of translucent polymer clay then brushed tinted mica powder on them.  While I have some art-doll face sprig molds I made a few years ago, they are in plaster, and don’t do well with anything but real clay, so I had to use the purchased flexible polymer clay molds.  To make the dolls look like they were three-quarter views, I impressed the oval of clay off center in the mold.  I like how surreal it looks.

The endpapers were a gift from Mary Swallow, a very generous friend of mine, who bought the paper for a project and didn’t use it.  I have enough paper left for many more books.