Pondering colors and seasons

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Ignoring all the wires that have some sort of enamel coating to give them color (and also ignoring fancy metals like niobium and titanium, which can be turned pretty colors through exciting electrical processes), metal wire doesn’t come in very many different colors. Really only 3 dramatically different colors (reddish yellow being awfully close to either yellow – brass – or copper – rose gold).

There’s silver: silver, steel (stainless or galvanized), aluminum

There’s yellow: brass, gold, bronze

There’s reddish yellow: brass (sometimes), gold

There’s reddish brown: copper

I’ve been thinking about colors evocative of the seasons, and winter is easy: silver, accented with blue, grey, white, silver, mauve. Maybe some other very pale pinks and blues and purples: I see those in the cloudy winter sky.

Fall is also super easy: copper or yellow metal, accented with red, yellow, orange, brown. Maybe a little purple. (Why purple? I don’t know. It just seems right.) Maybe some dark green.

Spring is a little tricky, actually. Should it be silver accented with green? (And/or some early spring blossom colors, which tend to yellows and purples and blues, though of course tulips are any color you want.) Or yellow accented with green? Then what happens with summer? Because summer is where I get really stuck. Maybe summer should be yellow with green. But there are lots of different colors of flowers in the summer. So I don’t know. Light green for spring, dark green for summer?

Weekend summary: pigeon bead necklace done and other things in progress

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Helpful hint: Misplacing your prototypes is not a good idea. Forgetting which opaque container they’ve been stored in counts as “misplacing.” (And of course the container was literally right in front of me.)

This among other things has emphasized the importance of getting some better storage going for the beads and jewelry stuff and small tools and etc. etc. I think the old metal tool chest is going to be my jewelry/small tool storage, so now that I know what it will be good for, I have even more reason to get back to that project.

And now I see I haven’t uploaded any photos of the tool chest. After some extensive searching, it appears that is because I hadn’t taken any pictures. I could have sworn I did!  Well, I do now:

Old tool chest

Needs some work.

(Things needing doing to the chest: finishing cleaning out drawers. Reline with felt? felt over cardboard? velveteen? Possibly repaint the exterior. Would delay getting it into useful state, because it would be better to paint before putting in nice new lining. Unless the lining was easy to remove; see: gluing the fabric to thin cardstock so the liners could be lifted out intact. I’d have to sand it all down before painting, and working around the drawer pulls and the decorative bits would be a real pain; ditto painting around them. But it would be really pretty; I’m imagining a rich metallic green.)

Speaking of photos languishing, I have finally finished uploading all my abused/abandoned bicycle pics, including a few brand spankin’ new ones (but mostly they are old ones, the pictures I first took when I started collecting them). This is the first photo of the latest uploads; go forward from there.

Bicycle without wheels, seat, or handlebars, sinking into the ground.

One of my favorite ruins: Bicycle without wheels, seat, or handlebars, sinking into the ground.

Finished remaking the pigeon bead necklace – after comparing different looks, I went with the metal link style:

Comparing beads on a string to beads on wire

Comparing two different arrangements of beads on a string to beads on wire

Completed pigeon bead necklace

The finished pigeon bead necklace.

I also made some good attempts at some new styles of ear cuffs, and made a couple of jigs to try and make some of the shaping easier. It turns out that, in at least one case, the jig is actually not that helpful. What was really useful was to carefully wrap some string along the curves of the ear cuff, and mark the string at each place the wire bends. Then lay the string out straight, transfer the marks to paper, and note what each mark means.

When it came to trying to duplicate the shapes, it was much easier to hold a length of wire against that straight template, and grab the wire with my pliers at the given places. Since I ended up doing a couple of variations on this particular pattern, the template came in even handier than the jig, since the template made it easier to place some of the shapes at different places along the curve of the ear cuff. This would all make more sense with pictures, I know, but I’m not done yet, and it really deserves an entire post of documentation on its own.

A few of my fingers are rather sore from bending wire. They can do things my pliers can’t, and sometimes I have pliers in one hand, holding the wire firmly, and I need to shape it. I suppose if I spend enough time doing this, I’ll build up calluses. Or figure out how to do things with other tools, not my fingers!

Also: I was thinking about how to document some of my other techniques, and thinking about how much time it takes to take photos of every step, and write out text to explain every step, I realized I do actually have the technology to record video. And that might be better than still images and text. Setting up the camera to get a good look at what I am doing may be a bit tricky, though; I would like to set it so that the point of view is the same as MY point of view, which means the camera would probably have to be between me and my hands. Could be awkward. We shall see; now that I’ve thought about it, I want to do it. If nothing else, I need to know how it will work!

Another to-do, needing doing since I moved from blogspot to this site: figuring out which tags need to be converted into categories, and properly categorizing the old posts.

Pretty beads

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I saw these lovely glass beads in one of the local craft stores (Playtime in Arlington).

Silver beads with oil rainbow colors

Pretty pretty beads, with colors like an oil rainbow.

I kept thinking about them as “peacock beads,” because of the sort of eye shape of the color splotches, and the rainbow look of the colors, even though they aren’t peacock colors at all. Depending on the angle of the light, some of the colors are either pink OR green. Iridescence! Awesome.

Then I was waiting for a bus yesterday, watching what was going on around me, and realized what bird they really resemble:

Pigeon

Pigeon (aka rock dove) picture from flickr user TexasEagle

Browsing Flickr to find pigeon pictures, because I have none, I found an even more accurate color comparison:

Nicobar pigeon

Nicobar pigeon picture from Flickr user ucumari

Originally, I made a really simple necklace by just string the beads together on some black cord, but I’m not completely fond of it. The beads kind of swivel around when I wear it, and I think they will look better with some sort of spacer. I found something appropriate, but haven’t rebuilt the necklace yet (also I am torn between a simple beads-on-cord approach, or threading the beads on wire, and linking wired beads together).

Simple necklace of grey "pigeon" beads

Simple necklace is kind of boring, even if the beads are really pretty.

How to make a Borg faerie

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At long last, I took some pictures of the costume components. I haven’t been able to track down my stunt double to get photos of someone wearing it all (and haven’t gotten the photos taken at Arisia yet, either), but this is more or less how it all looked when put together:

Green dress + black Borg parts + Borg parrot

The various pieces:

Feather ears and false eyelashes

The eyelashes were purchased at Boston Costume, which also had false eyelashes made from real feathers, but they were brown, and not quite as immensely long and swoopy. Moving on:

Borg torso piece

I reused parts of last year’s Borg pirate. Here you can see that the structure of this piece is cardboard from a cereal box (or maybe that’s an oatmeal box; I used a variety). You can also see that it won’t hang straight down, on account of having hardly any material on the right side. Oh, gravity, why must you ruin my pictures?? Next:

Shiny green prom dress

This came from the Garment District during one of their wonderful “50% off everything” sales. I would totally have paid the full $16 for it! I don’t have many excuses to wear it, but fortunately I came up with the idea to combine it with the Borg pieces. Now I need more ideas. But that’s not all:

Green half-shirt over black turtleneck

I had to wear a black turtleneck for the Borg part, but I didn’t want my right arm all black, and I like that turtleneck a lot so I didn’t want to cut it up. I went hunting for a cheap source of appropriate green material, and found a nice little green skirt in a thrift store which got turned it into just enough shirt to cover my right arm and chest. I left the rip there intentionally; being partially assimilated can leave a mark, you know!

Shirt layered under dress, with Borg part over everything

The main parts of the costume layered properly. I then added a Borg piece to my upper arm, plus Frankie, plus a black glove. I didn’t worry about my shoes, because the dress is so long (I did wear my favorite black boots, which are more Borgish than Faerieish). Maybe some day I will get some real photos, showing all the pieces together. I haven’t actually seen them myself.

The story I gave people about my costume was that the Borg tried to assimilate Faery, but their technology had a difficult time coping with a magic-based world, and so they weren’t very successful. (This gave me cover for not wearing a Borg eyepiece or other head covering; I tested out the look of wearing last year’s eye piece with the costume, and didn’t like it. Also rejected: wearing the feather headpiece from many years ago. The faerie effect was best with my hair all down, with just the feather ears and eyelashes, and some gold lipstick.)

Arisia costume 2010: False eyelashes are stabby, and other lessons learned

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So the costume ended up being “the Borg tried to assimilate Faery” and was made up of green prom dress + Borg torso and arm pieces + green shirt (for the non-Borg arm/shoulder + feather ears + long green false eyelashes. And some sparkly things in my hair. Also: gold lipstick on Saturday (silver on Sunday, which I liked much less).

Lessons:

1) If you do not get the inner ends of the false eyelashes stuck down really, really well, they will curl up and stab your upper eyelids every. time. you. blink. And sometimes when you aren’t blinking. Two days after, I found I had flaky skin on my upper eyelids – scabs, apparently, from the repeated stabbings, which happened because I put the eyelash glue in the bag that I put in the coat check and thus didn’t want to try to retrieve.

2) Carry the damn eyelash glue WITH YOU.

3) Strands of beads hanging in your hair are heavy and will pull the hairclips to which they are attached down towards the floor. This hurts. Also hurting? When hair gets wrapped around the beads in stupid ways.

4) The wire hooks on the ears were a little too tight on the first day. And needed adjusting to a more comfortable position much sooner than the end of the day.

5) Wearing a turtleneck + dress + cardboard and leather thing over your chest makes for some overheating. That Borg element needs some sort of ventilation. Pushing up my sleeves did help a lot; also, I could have not worn pants, because hello, wearing a dress. Which completely covered the pants AND the really long socks. (could have worn short socks, too, instead of the really long, almost tights, socks that I went with)

6) The flashy eyelashes were really quite popular. I think I got about as many compliments on them as on the feather ears or the overall look. (I thought they looked really weird.) And other than the STAB STAB STABBING, they were pretty comfortable.

I was complimented by one woman on how “subtle” the look was.

“Subtle?!” They were BRIGHT GREEN! And enormously long! YOU COULD NOT MISS THEM!!!

“Well, yes,” she said, “Compared to putting on a whole bunch of make up.”

Hmm, well, okay.

And some awesome things:

The layers kept me warm in rooms that I would have normally been freezing in.

Got to show off the construction of the ears to several people, including a couple of people who I sent the Flickr link to because they seemed particularly interested in it.

Noticed by the hall costume awards people. Twice, even! I was found late on Sunday by one of the people doing hall awards, who wanted to make sure I got one (which I already had earlier that day).

Person at a party who blurted out, “I’m sorry, I can’t stop staring at you, but you’re just so pretty!” (She was one of the people I sent a link to later.) I know that dress looks good on me, but the eyelashes were just so weird.

It must be nearly Arisia

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How do I know? Because suddenly I feel like I must spend every available minute working on a costume, because I put off working on it until um about a week ago (granted, I didn’t have a good idea until about TWO weeks ago).

Anyway.

(I am feeling lazy and will therefore not be putting images right in the post. Maybe later.)

It involves feathered ear things, because it’s been way too long since I made anything with feathers, and at this point I have enough feathers to build an entire flock of over-energetic birds, so I need to do something useful with them. (More birds == bad idea. Two is quite enough, especially when they decide to get a look at what I am doing. A really, really close look. And then get cranky and territorial and possessive about the thing in your hand that they want to chew on and carry away.)

One of the things on my mental to do list was to work out interesting wire ear cuffs, and finally, last month, I did just that! And the results are pretty neat, though I need to make myself another of the spiffy moonstone ones, because the first one went to someone as a gift.

The basic structure works out very well to support much more elaborate structures than mere beads. Not that feathers are such a weighty structure; the feather ear things are very light (SHOCKING I KNOW) and pretty comfortable.

Prototype nautilus

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Prototype nautilus, originally uploaded by jfeathersmith.

About 3 hours of work to get to this point. I sewed my finger to it once, and then almost did a second time (hand sewing, and the needle/thread only passed through the uppermost layer of skin, but it felt rather weird).

First time posting using Flickr’s “blog this” option; let’s see how it works.

ETA: Hmm, well that’s rather convenient for posts containing just one picture. Except I still have to add tags via Blogger’s editor.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

It’s interesting, but what is it good for?

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This project was actually completed a few years ago, as the final project in my Experimental Drawing class. I combined techniques from our puzzle project and our juxaposition project, primarily because I wanted to see how easy it would be to make a tessellating pattern that could also interlock in 3D. (The image above is actually of some of the test pieces, not the final set, but you get the idea.)

I was also interested in exploring what would happen when I scrambled an image (traced onto the acrylic pieces), overlaid some bits of it with other bits, and then linked sets of pieces together to form partial cubes. Since all the pieces are the same shape, the partial cubes can be stacked, made into rows, etc., so you get some depth to the recombined image.

It wasn’t as successful as I had hoped (not that I really had any clear idea what it would be like), and I’ve often wished I still had access to a laser cutter, so that I could do more experimenting. I think it would be much more interesting if I had used much thicker lines on the acrylic, and chosen a pattern that would align better, so that the lines from the original image could link up with other lines that came from a different part of the image, creating an interesting new, fragmented/reassembled picture. It would certainly be easier with a pattern, rather than a picture.

If the pieces were larger – 12 inches on a side, or 2 feet – I could see them being used for shelving or end tables, although I’d want to make them from wood (probably), and work out a good way to keep the pieces together, because they slide apart /really/ easily, and that’s a Bad Thing for furniture. (I could just cut the slots slightly smaller, but then they might bind, especially if they were wood.)

Because Easter has the best candy

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I figured I could justify buying some for myself if I also bought some for other people. And then I thought it would be more fun to actually make up little Easter baskets to put it in. But of course I didn’t want to buy some small, cheap basket that wouldn’t be worth the dollar-fifty, so I had to come up with another solution.

I could fold basket shapes out of newspaper.

Or . . . I could make use of the empty kleenex boxes that are almost always around (the household goes through a LOT of kleenex. Sorry – Kleenex).

Oh! And I could cut the edges down into grass shapes! And trim around the flowers printed on the sides!

So I did, and apparently they were a hit. One of the recipients encouraged me – repeatedly; one could say he egged me on, if one were inclined to make that sort of pun, which I am not, you’re welcome – to write it up as an Instructable, no really, he thought it was quite clever, and it could be just one photo and a couple lines of text, how quick and easy would that be!

Well. See for yourself.


Make an Easter basket from materials found in the recycle bin – More DIY How To Projects

I am actually quite pleased with them myself, but it -is- more than one step! My only regret? That I didn’t buy more chocolate eggs. But by some strange coincidence, tomorrow is the day after Easter, so there should be some good sales. And since I’ve been planning to hit post-Easter sales for cheap moving toys (glee! I can make Porkchop a friend!), well, I might as well take a minor side trip to the candy aisle.