I made this for a contest posted on one of Jeff Vandermeer’s blogs.  The contest instructions included a youtube video about how to make this.  I had to fold it five or six times before I got the hang of it.

Each page has a sketch of a crow on it, and the cover says “Crow” in gold ink.  The sheet of paper I used was six inches square, and the finished book is just over 1 1/4″ tall.

This shrine was inspired by the Mexican folk art shrines that honor Maria de Guadalupe and other Catholic saints.  They’re usually bedecked with candles and marigolds and photos. I love the look, but I wanted something different.

I started with an old deck of Morgan Greer tarot cards.  It took me a while to decide to use one of them, because as a rule I generally don’t like to use anyone’s art except my own. (Kind of limiting for a collage artist, I know.)  I chose this card because it was pretty, and colorful, and female, without being too serious or religious.  I painted the back of the box red, figuring that if I chose a color I liked, everything else would follow along.  I painted the inside of the box red too.

At this point, I hadn’t yet decided if I was goign to use the door on this shrine or on the owl shrine.  I assembled the main box part, and painted it with a copper acrylic paint.  I painted the roof piece copper as well.  Still no ideas, so I mixed some violet acrylic paint and rolled it out so I could use a rubber stamp and give the box some texture.  Better, but still a little bland. 

By now I’d gotten far enough on the owl shrine to know that the door wouldn’t work on that one, so I started thinking about how to make the door suit this one.  I just got some sheets of copper, and I was dying to try them out, so I embossed the backside of a copper sheet and then folded it over the front of the door.  It didn’t cover the edges very well, but I had a roll of adhesive copper foil tape that I bought for use with stained glass work. I used more of this tape to cover the linen strips that serve as door hinges.

To finish the door, I went through my beads to find something that looked good as a door handle, and I painted the inside violet to complement the texture.  I’d found the magenta silk flower, and decided that looked good in the peak of the attic part, so I glued the roof on and stuffed the flower in there.

Flowers were a good theme, so I rummaged around until I found the poppy seed heads.  I’d grown these poppies last year from a package of poppy seeds I bought for making cakes and then never used.  They have very large heads.  I painted them different shades of red and purple, and two of them I leafed with red-gold leaf.  To prop them up, I used the plastic casing from a box of 22 ammo. The plastic wasn’t very pretty, so I wrapped it in magenta joss paper.  A little hot glue to put everything in place, and voila!

This is nine inches tall, six inches wide, and two inches deep.

I got a book called ‘Creating Personal Shrines’ by Carol Owen after Jane Cheek showed it to me.  (Jane and I tend to inspire each other.)  The focus of Carol Owen’s book was creating memory boxes based around family ancestors.  Like most contemporary collage, her work is heavy on vintage photos and “ephemera”.  Not my thing, but she includes patterns and instructions for creating the boxes.  It’s quite time consuming, in that you have to paint foam core board on both sides with acrylic medium, and after it’s dried, you have to wrap it in rice paper.  I tried newsprint, as it’s about the same weight, but unfortunately you can’t use cheaper paper in this and expect the same results.  You can’t see it in the photo, but the blue paint made the newsprint wrinkle.

Unlike most pieces, this was inspired by the novel I’m writing right now (Mulberry Wands).  In this novel, owls feature predominantly, so I’ve been thinking about them.   I started by painting the back of the main box blue, and I printed stars on it with a commercially purchased foam stamp set.  I also painted the inside of the roof of the box (though as you can see in the photo, I ended up not attaching it.)

For the main box, I painted two pictures of owls in watercolor on 140lb cold pressed paper.  The branches are from our tangerine tree, which has been having a few rough years and has plenty of dead wood to spare.  Once I put the branches in, I chose the owl picture which worked better.  Lucky for me, the original size of the painting was suitable, so I didn’t have to print out a copy, I was able to use the original.

Next, I covered the lower box with the aubergine metallic paper, and I painted the inside flat black.  Soon after that, I decided I wanted to put a glass sheet in front of the box, like a specimen display.  (For anyone trying this at home, use a real glass cutter, not an oblong piece of tungsten carbide, especially if you’re going to wrap it in copper foil afterward.)  I knew that if I painted it with black or silver, it would have a nice mirrored effect, so I kept with the night theme and painted the waxing and waning moon. I made the moons small so that they wouldn’t obscure whatever was in the box.

I knew I wanted to incorporate the feather somehow.  I found this feather in my chicken coop, and it seemed to suit.  I was going to drape it across the top, but then there was space below that needed something.  At this point I decided to put it along the bottom, and find something else later to put on the roof.

So what to put in the box?  I was working with a deliberately limited color scheme, so I wanted something white or blue.  Something dark wouldn’t show up.  Owls are killers, and they’re silent, so there’s a sense of coldness.  Bones are also cold and silent, and I liked the creepy-yet-scientific idea of a bone.  This is a real cat bone. I’m pretty sure it’s the pelvis.  My daughter found the cat skeleton in our bushes, and she said I could have one of the bones.  I put it in the box and wedged the glass in front to keep it in.

She also said I could have the bones from her owl pellet at school, but hers were kind of gross, and I didn’t feel like cleaning mice ribs because they break so easily.  Jane helped me out here too, in that she gave me the contents of an owl pellet that had been sanitized.  I used one of the mouse skulls for another project (The Trickster, an art doll that’s still on www.cagedfaeries.com), so I had one left.  I rubbed it with silver and blue mica pigments, and set it experimentally on the roof.  It was too small.

Last night I started a stained glass class, and the instructor had us practice cutting circles in plain and bubbled glass.  When I cut this circle out, I realized I had a good use for it.  I ground the edges to make them smoother (or at least not sharp enough to slice).  The bubbled glass works as a halo to draw attention to the mouse skull.

This piece is just under twelve inches tall, and six inches wide.  At its widest, it’s three and a half inches.

This is one of my old faeries, one of the first I made with paperclay faces. She’s also one of my favorites.

Everything is made by hand.  I painted the wings, made the hair, made the dress from my own pattern, sculpted the face and hands and feet, painted them, wired them together, etc.  Pretty much the only thing I didn’t do was make my own beads.  It takes hours and hours of work, and I have to dip extensively into my paper and art supplies.  When I sold them at art fairs, I grossed in the very low two figures for them.   This is what made me decide to not make art to sell anymore.  I don’t think people appreciate art, especially if they don’t spend very much for it.  I’d rather give my art away to someone who will love it than sell it for too low a price.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

It’s time for the Renaissance Festival again, and of course the costumes the children wore last year are unsuitable for this year.  My husband sweet-talked me into making bodices for the children.  I’ve made dozens of these, but the necessity of making them, often at the last minute, has sucked the joy out of it for me.

Here’s how I did it:

Step one, find a t-shirt you’re willing to sacrifice. I wasn’t able to find the ones I set aside specifically for this purpose, so I ended up using tank tops, which didn’t work as well.

Step two, put the t-shirt on the girl and wrap with duct tape.  Draw lines where the vest should go with a sharpie, then draw along the curves.  This takes some knowledge of how patterns are put together. Cut the shirt off the girl.

Step three, place the cut pieces on paper and trace around them.  Make the pattern out of the average of these two pieces.  You have to remember seam allowance (naturally) but you also have to leave extra space at the top of the shoulders, as these never align properly. You also need to leave extra where the grommets are going to go.

Step four, cut out pieces. I used an old velvet dress for the black (I had to tear out eight darts, which made me grumpy.) I used the lower half of cheap Ikea curtains for the lining.

Step five, sew pieces together and make sleeve for boning.  For boning, we always use 1/2 inch cable ties, trimmed into curves at the end.  The standard boning you get at the cloth stores doesn’t hold up very well, and it doesn’t have the support you need for a hefty woman.  For a generously bosomed woman, you can use up to four pairs of boning.  For my tiny children, I used only one pair.

Step six, sew backs to fronts, leaving shoulders and front of bodice open.  When this is done, you have to turn it inside out (difficult if you haven’t left enough room) and press the seams.

Step seven, hand sew the open seams, including the front.  This takes a special fitting, to see where the shoulders match up and to decide how tight you want it.  If the fabric isn’t suitable, it will stretch out of shape (again, it’s worse on more zaftig women) and you’ll need to make it extra tight.  My kids are beanpoles, so I just made it fit like a vest, not like a bodice

Step eight, insert the grommets. We have the grommets and the tool for inserting them, but the awl for punching holes has died from overuse.  I had an awl of the right size that I bought for bookbinding, and I donated it to the cause. (My husband had to make many of these bodice/vests, for the dancers of his troupe).

Step nine, sew the seams.  I used decorative stitching and colored thread so I could tell the kids’ vests apart.

Step ten, sew on jewelry.  I bought this Kuchi jewelry at the Tucson Gem show.  It’s surprisingly expensive, considering how cheap the metal is.