Perler, The New Crack

Yep, I have a new addiction, not that I needed one as I don't have time for the ones I already have. Now for the details Perler beads are small, short, and multicolored tubes that you arrange into a design on a pegboard, and then melt with an iron.



They look so innocent and you think to yourself you know your cousin had had some of these and made some fun 8 bit characters from classic Nintendo games wouldn't those be just great for your friend who is a HUGE Mario fan? You know you could make a set of 3 or 4 iconic items from the game and he can turn them into magnets or hang them on his wall.

A few hours and many beads, and aching fingers later...



I have another friend who's pretty fond of Pacman so I made these for him.



It didn't stop there either, I was in full 8 bit mode and as I'd pretty much run out of black and white I picked up a second bucket at Ikea so I could make these...



It's a Moogle from FF7, I ended up having to glue the little pom pom on because the way it was designed I couldn't be the beads to melt together. I planned to also make the mages and possibly a couple of the main characters.

I also made some from one of my favorites Space Invaders, I'm not real sure about the proportions between the figures as I had to use multiple sites for images, but for the most part they look alright.



I have plans to make other characters including a Frankenstein for one of my friends but first I need to order some more of the individual colors for shading.

Makin' A Punkin

So every year my workplace has a pumpkin decorating contest, they buy a whole bunch of little pumpkins and put them out in the lobby for everyone to pick through. The deal is you get 10 days to decorate it, you can't carve it (I think that's because they don't want them to rot), the pumpkin must be visible, and you have to use one of the provided pumpkins. Then for the week before Halloween the submitted pumpkins sit on display in the lobby and people vote for their favorite.

I'm not much of a painter, though so I decided to try using Sculpty. I started with the nose, I was intentionally making it over sized for the pumpkin I had, and I have to admit I was thinking of Yubaba from Spirited Away when I started.



I made the center bit first and then cut open a sphere of clay, hollowed the halves out and attached them. I think it came out pretty good, it's a little uneven almost like one nostril is flared or the nose is twitching, and it's nice & pointy.

After I had the nose done I started working on the eyes. I started with another ball of clay that I cut in half and shaped, then I rolled out a piece of clay and pressed around the top of the eyes and then trimmed it down to look like a eye lid. It looked a little top heavy at that point so I rolled out another piece of clay for the under lid.



For the Iris I ended up using the top of a bottle of nail polish, because I couldn't figure out another way to make the iris really round. As it was the iris is too small and it looks kinda creepy.



I used the same trick for the pupil, only this time it was a bottle of Tacky Glue.

I wanted to do a really cool, half snarl for the mouth but I ran out of time, so I just made them big and pouty. I was pretty much ready to bake them but I occurred to me that I needed a good way to secure them to the pumpkin, so I used fatheaded jewelry pins and extra bits of clay to secure them.

Once they were baked it was time for paint!



I started with a base coat of white on everything, and started with the lips which I painted an out-of-the-tube red. I wanted a really brilliant blue for the iris so I used nail polish, and for the eyeshadow I mixed a slightly red violet, I really wish I'd had some fine glitter to use instead, but oh well. I also had this idea to use thin costume feathers for the eye lashes but they didn't workout so I painted kohl on instead.



The pumpkin itself, I painted half white & half black, and then I cut a big handful of worsted weight black yarn into approximately 8" lengths, smeared the black part of the pumpkin in tacky glue, folded the strands in half, and used tweezers to place the middle along the center seam of the pumpkin.



I also used some rug cotton I got for free from the BMFA barn sale a few years ago to make the core of the bun, painted it black, applied the tacky glue, and used more yarn to cover it.

The end result...



I like the concept for this piece, but some aspects of the execution need work. When I get some more free time I plan to try again with a styrofoam ball.

Custom Dolls

I have developed an interest in acquiring a Blythe doll or possibly buying Pullip parts to make a doll with. Why? Because I've been looking at what people have done with them on Flickr and there are totally kick ass custom dolls out there.

The thing is that they are also very expensive, so I would prefer to do it myself. Now the other thing is that even the stock doll parts are not that cheap, so as a kind of primer I picked up a couple of inexpensive Barbies and a basic model paint set. Just so I could start playing around with them and see if it was something I could really be interested in long term.

Since I'd just seen The Wicked musical twice (I really liked it) I thought I could try making an Elphaba doll.

First thing was to get the stinkers out of the packaging, why they need to be so thoroughly attached I don't know. Another thing is when the heck did they start putting those little plastic things through the head? They're like that ones used for clothing tags and I couldn't get them out of the head, so I had to just nip them off as close to the scalp as I could and shove nub in with a pin.



This first round I was just testing the paint, I wanted to see how well it would work on the doll. Knowing this probably wasn't going to be the final product and not wanting to waste time getting the color perfect just to find out it wouldn't bond to the doll's surface, I just used the stock green, so it's too blue but whatever.

I did the first coat the night before I left for Sakura Con. in Seattle, while there I found out about a new convention specifically for doll customizers called Innocente Seraphim in August, I considered going and braving possibly crazy doll people to attend the panels so I could be more educated in my approach. Unfortunately it is the 8th & 9th and that interferes with Sock Summit, so I'm not going.

I did however get to sneak some pictures of other people's dolls while I was at the con, so here they are...




































Getting back to my own doll, after painting the body I went to work on her hair, when I'd been at the store I hadn't been able to find a cheep one with long black hair, so I had to settle for dark brown. This meant I had to find a way of darkening the hair, a task made especially hard by it being synthetic.

Cosplay panel information came to save the day! One of the custom wig tips was to use a felt tip marker or sharpie, lay the hair out flat on some waste paper and run the marker along the strands. Well this worked great, though the hair is a little tacky, and it is fairly time consuming.







Another issue came up while I was coloring the hair and that was just in reposing the doll from when I hung it to dry, paint started chipping off at the joints. So once I was done with the hair I got to work on stripping the paint off. What's interesting is that the paint bonded really well with the torso & head, peeled right off the arms, and took some mild scraping to get it off the legs (mostly).

From there I just started testing a whole bunch of different things.

On the left arm I tried my old standby of nail polish, I didn't really think it would work but I wanted to just try it out. The coverage was ok, and it had a nice translucent quality, but as to be expected with an enamel, the first time I flexed the arm to see how it would hold up the stuff cracked and started flaking off.




On the right arm I tried Copic Marker, this was also fairly translucent, but it can be rubbed off so I'd need to apply a clear coat over it. The other issue with this method is the streaks, but I think that could be remedied by airbrushing the color on. I also used a black sharpie to see if it might stay on better and it did but the problem is the limited color variety and hard to work with tips.

Since there are so many different plastics used on the doll I also tested the markers on the legs and torso, because the torso is a hard plastic it seems to take everything pretty well. Oddly enough even though it's really flexible the head seems to do the same.

In an effort to find other materials to test, I watched some doll face painting videos on Youtube, and it's pretty common to use crushed pastels, and since I already have pastels I thought I'd give it a try. In the videos they were using brushes because they where going for a subtle look but since I wanted it as opaque as possible I just rubbed it directly on the leg. I think it looked pretty good, but I think I'd want to put on some workable fixative first, to give it something to grab ahold of and then clear coat it. Without that it just came right off.

Next I took the right leg I started out using a black Copic on the thigh but it wouldn't dry and was very easily smudged, I tried to fix it by dusting it with pastel and that helped but I'd still need a clear coat. On the lower leg I used the same green Copic from that I'd used on the right arm and it seemed to do better.




The lower left leg was for the sharpie test, and like I said before it covers well, and stays but it is a little streaky and I don't like dealing with the tips. On the upper part of the leg I wanted to give the acrylic model paint another try, but this time with a little more prep.

First I took a very fine grit pedi block and sanded the leg really well, taking care to not touch the surface with anything other than the block. Once that was finished I painted the leg, let it dry, and then applied the clear coat. It seems like it'll work so far, it's not peeling off at the joint like it did before.

Amigurumi Eyes

So I like safety eyes and I know you can get them in all different colors and sizes on the internet, and you can even get them in different color and/or sized sets. That is all good but they never come with the ones I want, or they're more expensive than I think they should be. I want to be able to have a large variety on hand so I can play with size and color for individual projects.

I know that I could just keep a pair in each size on hand for sizing, and then order a color I think will work, but if when I got them they didn't, I'd have to start over. I've tried locating a local supplier but so far I've only found them at two places Twisted & JoAnns but they pretty much have the same selection, and that's pretty limited. Both only have 1 size and color of cat eyes, and black & brown bear eyes in just about every size.



So I picked up a variety of sizes and decided to see if I couldn't change the color, I didn't have any paint thinner but I thought nail polish remover might work. I used some cotton facial pads doused with remover and started working on the paint on the back of the eye. It worked pretty well the brown was a little more stubborn and left a little bit of a red tinge on the eyes. To try and get rid of it I decided to try giving them a bath in the remover. I let them sit for about 15 minutes, and came back to check them and see if I couldn't get the rest of the paint off.

I'd say it was a partial success because while the rest of the paint came off it also ate at the finish which in retrospect makes sense because the stuff dissolves acrylic nails if you give it enough time. A fact the following results reminded me of, yes I'm a little slow at times but I do eventually catch on.





All of the eyes lost the gloss finish and the ones that had been in there the longest had turned so cloudy they were nearly opaque. I hoped they would gain back they're translucent quality as they dried, and I think they did a little but it was hard to tell because the finish was gone. In order to try and fix that, I used foam blocking mats covered in news paper and clear acrylic spray paint to restore the finish.




Again in retrospect I probably should have painted the backs before using the spray paint but in my defense I wasn't even sure if I was going to be able to see the pupils until the eyes had been spray painted. I also wouldn't use newspaper again, it started sicking to the eyes and I had to take them out of the foam core before they were dry. The result of that was some clear coat got on the backs of the eyes forcing me to sand them down before coloring them.

To repaint them I just used some nail polish since I didn't have any model paint and I know nail polish works well on acrylic. I think they came out pretty good but you can kind of still see where the clear coat was on the back.

I'm thinking leaving the eyes in the polish remover bath until they're cloudy is a good way to do eyes for zombie/dead amigurumi or if possibly the critter you're making is supposed to be blind, like oracles or cave fish.

The next time I do this definitely no bath, repaint before clear coat, and use a foam block wrapped in tinfoil so the eyes wont sick. Oh, and if I'm in the mood to take things easy on myself I could just order clear eyes in varied sizes so I can cut out most of this process, but it's good to know in case you're in a pinch.

Flamboyant Googlie Eyes

I have a friend who has a thing for googlie eyes, that may possibly be a little on the obsessive side. That being said she was telling me how frustrated she was that there really isn't much variety in googlie eye styles, so I decided to try and make her some customized ones.


Materials

• To start I purchased three different sizes of eyes to experiment on 10mm, 15mm, and 20mm.
• small angled blade
• tweezers
• model glue/tacky glue
  
• glitter
• confetti
• acrylic/enamel paint
• small brushes
  

Opening The Eye


Using a small angled blade I inserted it in the side of the eye as close as I could to the white backing as I could get, and slowly slid the blade down the side. I had quite a few mishaps at first with the blade working it's way up the side until I was closer to cutting along the upper edge of the clear plastic. Once I got a little better at it though I was able to get the blade to separate the clear and white plastics giving me a cleaner opening.

Once you have an opening large enough to get the pupil out, I recommend using a pair of tweezers to do so, it allows you to get away with a smaller opening.







Pupil Mods

The first set I did I coated the pupil with the model glue, covered the surface with glitter, and patted it down until I had an even coat. That worked out alright, I just had to clean up the pieces that hung over the edges. Once once I was satisfied with it, I again coated the the eye with the model glue to help hold the glitter on the pupil.

Next I tried painting it, the acrylic paint worked alright but it took several coats to become opaque. Nail polish though worked really well, you can usually get it cheaper than model paint, and when you're done you can paint your nails to match. I'm thinking of attempting to paint the pupils to look like animal eyes next, but I need to get some good closeups so I can try to make them at least a little bit accurate.

I also tried replacing the pupil with confetti and/or glitter. I think it worked out pretty well, the one thing being that the confetti is much lighter than the original pupil so it doesn't move around as much.








The Eye

I haven't tried too much with the casing yet, but there are eyes with an eyelid painted on them available so I picked some of those up and used it as a guide to apply the model glue and then dipped them in glitter, and added another coat of model glue for a blingy eye. I also used the model glue to secure confetti to the white backing, by applying it to the confetti and then using tweezers to pick it up, insert it, and center it.

I'm thinking of using felt as an alternate backing and then it would be easier to use the eyes on sewing projects. I'd also like to get some doll making eyelashes and do some more glittered eyelids.




Reassembling

Ok, so this part is pretty easy, just insert whatever it is you've descided to use in the eye and glue the opening shut. Originally I also used model gule for this but the type I have has a very low viscosity so while it was great for detail work, almost all of the first eyes I made ended up with nonmoving parts because the glue seeped right through the opening. I found that using tacky glue which has a much higher viscosity, worked much better. I pinched the sides of the eye on either side of the opening and used a small paintbrush to apply the glue along both sides of the gap then pressed it closed and brushed some more glue along the seam.

Tis' Craft Show Season!

I always like the holiday crafter's show season, it's a lot of fun to see all the interesting and creative things people come up with. This year I'm planning on going to Crafty Wonderland which thankfully is going to be at the Convention Center this year. Last year it was at Norse Hall which is a great place just not suited to large crowds trying to squeeze into aisles to look at vendor's goods. It was nice that they had a bar and it was open but getting run down by a lady in a fur coat and a Bloody Mary, at 10"30 in the morning really wasnt.

That was actually the deciding factor in vacating the premises and going to Rebel Rabbit a few blocks away. It was much more laidback and I found a great baby outfit that I gave to my cousin for her baby shower. Sadly they have now disbanded.


So instead I'm thinking of going to one of the Handmade NW shows this month, I've not been to one before and think it'd be fun to check out. I might also see about hitting the Museum of Contemporary Craft's Holiday Shop, it's probably too expensive for me but it should have some beautiful pieces.