This shrine was inspired by a trip to Texas I did last year with my family. It’s a long, brutal drive from Phoenix to Dallas, so I bought a lot of snacks for my kids, the kind of snacks they don’t usually get. I bought candy and chips and cheetoes and juice boxes and basically filled the car with  processed HFCS-filled junk food in brightly colored packages. Good times, good times.

As I raided the grocery store for all this horrid, un-nutritious, delicious food, I was reminded of trips we took as children, driving across the west to various national parks my father wanted to visit. I don’t remember Yosemite, but I do remember a package  of plain M&Ms that we fought over like starving dogs. (We never got as much candy as we wanted.) I was also reminded of Egyptian tombs, which included jars full of oil and grain and other foodstuffs. When going on a long, difficult journey, it’s best to have snacks.

I did this whimsical combination of the two. I made the gilded trim and the food out of polymer clay. It took me two years to finish it, since I prefer to work on polymer clay in the summer months (84 degrees room temperature makes polymer clay easier to work with.) I made the head and hands out of paperclay, and I made the body out of foamcore board and tea-stained gauze. The hair is embossing floss.

These shrines I make are some of the best-received pieces of 3-D art I make, second only to the smiley balls and the altered books. I would say they take the least in terms of traditional art skill, that is, craftsmanship and technique, but they take more creativity than almost anything else I do.

I had a bunch of clay and wanted to make something easy, so I decided to make fake rocks. I started by thumping the lump of clay against a tree in a random pattern. After that, I put it on the wheel and carved out a little hole. I thought if I let it dry really, really slowly, I could fire it solid, but Bridget disagreed, so I ended up hollowing it out by cutting a flap and bending it back. You can sort of see the lines where I cut it, but only if you know where to look. Underneath, it looks like there ought to be a flap to hide a key, except that there isn’t.

I’ve had this terra cotta pot under my studio table for just about a year, waiting for the project I wanted to do with it.  Finally, I decided that I needed a pot for some succulents, so now was the time.

I started by coming up with a short phrase to put around the lip. This is really hard for me, despite being a writer, because nothing seems good enough to immortalize in ceramic.  The phrase reads “Let the sun shine, the Earth bursts forth with life!”  I got the letter spacing better this time, because I drew out the length of the circumference of the pot lid on scrap newsprint, and therefore had a rough estimate of the space requirements for each word. I used the french liner raised slip to outline each letter and then began to apply the low fire glaze.

Why do I always forget how *($^%# time consuming those %^$#$%! low fired glazes are?  It probably took me four hours just to glaze the rim, and it’s not even as even as I wanted it.  At least listening to “This American Life” while I paint makes the time pass swiftly.

After I fired the pot, I started to design the tile mosiac.  I used a stencil of art deco  flower designs from a book I’ve had forever and enlarged it for the flower design.  I cut the petals out of clear glass and used acrylic medium to paste some really cool art paper onto the back. After the acrylic dried, I applied more on the back. Then I cut out around the glass with a razor blade.

I laid the flowers down on my sketch of the surface area, and went through the stained glass I had to decide on colors. I have a nice collection of stained glass, but becuase I got them in a bulk purchase from a non-standard location, they’re all opaque hand-made art glass. Ridiculously expensive when you buy it most of the time, but I got an incredible discount. Ironically, I don’t like it much. I prefer cathedral glass.  Still, the blue was nice, and I had several different colors of it that resembled one another, so I cut out chunks. The chunks are about half an inch square.  I cut the stems out of a light green glass.  When I was done, I realized that I needed more to fill the middle area, so I cut out the leaves from dark green glass.

For the bottom, I went through the tiles I’d made earlier. You can see some of them on this site.  I wanted to use the leaf tiles on the flower stems, but they didn’t look right. I have a lot of the circle tiles, not because they work well in the design (I think they’re hard to use) but because they’re easy to make.  I think that looked okay.

I probably spent about eight to ten hours on this project, including mastic and grouting. (It took at least an hour just to clean the grout off the tiles.)  Am I happy with it? No.  It doesn’t look as colorful as I wanted it to.  I think that black grout would have helped. I should have used an opaque glaze on the rim.  The blue squares are too big, and I couldn’t fit them as tightly as I wanted to.  Also, the succulents I bought are in tiny containers, so I put a different plant (a piece of columnular cactus) in there instead.

Still, it holds a plant, so it’s not a complete loss.

This looks a lot like a smiley ball without a face, doesn’t it?  I wanted to do something as close to a sphere as I could manage, just because it’s pretty easy and it’s sometimes nice to have a heavy ball to roll around in your hands. I coated it with red iron oxide (as I did for the freaky rabbit sculpture) too.

In the pottery studio, there used to be a postcard with a photo of this really cool freaky hare sculpture.  Naturally, when I went looking for it to use as a reference, it had mysteriously vanished.  I did this anyway, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I wanted that weird blobby texture (and I think I got it) and I wanted it to look a little like the rabbit would happily devour your brains if it could. As a bonus, it even stands up, and it didn’t crack. I call this a win.

One of the nice things about this project is that it rewards hoarders. I kept the little fimo orange slices from a (still unfinished) project I was working on last year.

Every time I make these magnets, I make them in a batch of 28, because that’s how much resin my measuring cups will hold.  It took a lot of sticky trial and error to get that down.

The one with the zipper is everyone’s favorite.  It swings freely.

I used to use scraps from my little books for the background paper in these, but the scrapbook papers commonly available are just as nice. You can’t see them perfectly well anyway.

The one at the top with the orange flowers is one of my favorites.

I experimented with different things to set in the resin, and some were more successful than others.  The gold leaf didn’t have that lovely suspended quality I had hoped for.  The small metal button in the bottom one is nice, though the glare of the light (which was even filtered!) makes it hard to see. I don’t like the clear glass bead as much, but the pearls and filigreed heart are great.

We got a new refrigerator, so to make it feel welcome, I made a set of magnets.  Here are some of them, photographed in their natural habitat. To do a project like this, you have to have lots and lots of little pieces and different types of paper, otherwise they aren’t terribly creative.

I made a new silkscreen of a nearly identical crow this week.  Today I silkscreened them on to my remaining tee shirts. I think I have a lot of tee shirts.  After this, I was supposed to iron them for 3-5 minutes on each side to set the ink.  This ended up kind of scorching the fabric.  Instead, I put them in the craft oven at about 275 for ten minutes. Still smelled a little scorched (like a high-heat dryer) but I hope it set the ink.