Sanding and Painting the Carousel Animals Begins - Part 59

This is probably not the picture you were hoping to see, but it is the necessary first step.  Despite it being a busy week, I was able to do some work on the animals.  I started with the three animals that had fur on them because they needed the least sanding.  

Mainly, the ram's horns needed some work and the saddles and blankets needed sanding.  Since the bodies are supposed to be fur, I did not try to sand them.  I wanted the rough texture to be there.  I will say that the horns were the easiest to sand.  The toilet tissue clay I made for the saddles and blankets was as hard and as solid as rock and did not sand easily.  

After sanding, I painted the back, head, face, chest, underbelly, legs, and tail of each animal.  They were then laid on their unpainted side to dry.  I still have to paint the far side of the animals.  

If you have been following along for a while you will have read about my adding decorations to the animals.  The horses and the rabbit have roses, and the tiger has some stars.  The ram does not have any added decorations.  A ram just did not seem to go well with flowers.  I thought about adding a bell on a ribbon, but it just did not seem right for a wild animal.   I decided that I would just paint his saddle blanket.  Currently, I am thinking of painting some sort of stylized mountain scene on the blanket.  I have not totally committed to that yet.  The blanket is very small area.  I will try it, but if I cannot pull it off, it may be repainted and some type of scroll work might take its place.

At the moment, I am having a lot of anxiety over beginning the painting.  I have come so far, and what if I mess it up?  I have questions about the painting.  What color are a ram's horns?  How do I make sure that I have the eyes in the right spot?  How many stripes does a tiger have?  What color should the horses be painted?  Am I trying to paint it photoreal or am I okay with it being a bit stylized?

When I was newer to crafting, this sort of thinking used to just paralyze me for weeks.  Now I know that the antidote to the anxiety is to pick up a brush and get started.  I will be doing a little research on each animal as I start to paint it.  I have just had to learn to live with that no matter how I paint them, it will be the best I can do on that day.  Perfection is not required.  

I have learned that some of my dissatisfaction with painting (aside from a lack of skill and talent) is that I always feel that it is missing something.  I finally came to realize that no matter how much I worked with shadows and highlights the thing that was missing was that spark that says it is alive.  It is a painting or an object and will always be just that.  Much of my source of disappointment is that I cannot paint that.

Anyway, check back for the next post will be on next Monday or Tuesday.  I hope to have some of the color on the animals by then.

 

Decorating the Tiger - Part 58

 I missed making last week's blog post because the weather was once again very nice and the mountains were calling.  This past week has been peak color.  The season does not last long, and when the perfect opportunity presents itself, there is no other place I would rather be this time of year.

It was probably just as well that I took a break.  I tried for three days before I left to make a decoration work that is just not in the cards when working this small.  I was trying to make a fringe for the tiger's saddle blanket.  I wanted it to look soft enough to look like soft tassels but stiff enough that it would not get tangled and could be set to take some paint.  Not to mention that the fringe was only a quarter of an inch (6.35 mm) long.  Neither my eyes nor my fingers are up to working on something that small anymore.  When things like that come up, I get frustrated and need to take a break while I come up with a Plan B.

The tiger has so much texture that I did not want to detract from it with too many decorations.  I want the tiger to be the star of the piece.

My Plan B turned out to be stars.  I decided to add four stars to each side of the tiger's saddle blanket.  I did not want to just paint them on there.  I wanted them to be slightly raised so that they would stand out a little bit from the blanket.  

Making the stars turned out to be a bit more of a production than I expected.  They were not very much larger than the fringe I had spent days working on.  

The reverse of the tiger has the same stars on it.  

I chose the best stars to go on the Romance side.  (For newer readers, the Romance side is the side that faces outward to the public on a carousel.)  

Making the stars was not easy either.  I started by drawing small circles.  I used a circle template.  The circle size I needed was 7/16 of an inch (9.0125 mm).  Photos of the circles and stars are below.  I don't have a lot of leeway on where I place the pictures.

As I said above, I wanted to make the stars stand out a little form the saddle blanket.  To accomplish this, I cut out 24 circles form a piece of a file folder.  Three circles were glued together to make it thick enough to stand out, but thin enough to cut a star out of the circle.  So, I ended up with eight circles, four for each side of the tiger.

I drew in the stars by hand on each of the glued circles.  I did the best I could, to keep them equally sized, but I knew that there would be errors in cutting them out.  I was not worrying about them being perfect.  

Trying to cut them out was a challenge in itself.  It was too hard to hold them and cut with scissors.  The three tiers of the circle made it difficult for scissors to cut through, and it was hard to keep my fingers out of the way.  Next, I tried holding the circles with tweezers.  The pressure of trying to cut them kept pulling the circle out of the tweezers.  I finally put them down on a cutting board and cut them out with a craft knife.  I had to hold the edged of the circle down with a fingernail to keep it from moving around.  It took a morning to make these, but they are finished.

You can see the tiny stars up in the left corner.  The debris below them are the tiny pieces I had to cut out to make the star.

To put the stars on the tiger's saddle blanket I added a blob of thickened glue onto the blanket and also painted glue on the back of the star with an old very small detail brush.  

Note: Thickened glue was made by leaving some glue out to set up for a while.  

Once the stars were pressed into the glue on the blanket, I gave the stars a topcoat of glue.  This will help in preparing it for painting and also helped force glue into the sides of the stars. That also takes up a little bit of the space difference between the blanket and the raised stars, slightly reducing the about of the space that holds them off the saddle.  I am hoping that it makes them look like part of the blanket, but with a little texture when it is painted.

Anyway, that is all for this post.  I plan to be home next week so I should have a new post up on Monday or Tuesday.   Things may get a little spotty as we move into the holiday season, but I will try to make sure that I get up as many posts as I can.  

A Bit More Decorative Work finished on the Animals- Part 57

 

Autumn is bringing in some nice weather, and I think I have completed more outside projects and errands in the last week than I have in the last month or two.  The second horse has been decorated, but that is about it as new pictures go.  This photo does not show it, but I have also added the section of the halter that goes over the ears on this horse and the other horse.   

I spent much of the rest of my crafting time doing small tasks such as reinforcing the glue on the halters for both horses and making more roses.  I am considering adding more roses to the bottom edge of the saddle blanket for the horse I showed you last week.  I do not plan on putting roses on the blankets of both horses, but that could change if I like the look of additional roses on the first horse.  

The roses have not been added to the other horse yet.  I am holding off until I am ready to make some more paper clay.  The clay recipe I am using does not keep, so I am only making small batches at a time.  

I also started considering how I want to decorate the tiger and the ram.  Somehow, I do not see putting roses on them.  While the horses and even the rabbit can be a domestic animal and are sometimes dressed up for shows with flowers and ribbons, I do not think I have seen this done on wild carousel animals.  I need to come up with some other ideas.  I am thinking that there will only be decorations on their saddle blankets.  I will have more information about that in the next blog post.

Progress may be slow between now and the end of the year, but I hope to have a post up each week.  Suddenly, my calendar has gone from few appointments here and there to loaded to the max with the holidays coming.  I really want to finish this project, but I expect that the end of it may not come until after the first of the year.  A lot of sanding and painting has to come, and I want to get that right.  Or at least to a point that I can live with it.  Slow but steady wins the race as the saying goes.

While I don't expect to have all the decorating of the animals done by next week, I hope to at least have it well under way.  Check back next week on Monday or Tuesday for the next blog post.

Adding Decorative Elements to the Carousel Animals - Part 56

 

It was Sunday before I was even able to get into my studio this week.  It has been a busy week.  However, I was able to add decorative elements to some of the carousel animals this week.  

I started with the rabbit because it seemed to need the most help.  I hope it will look better once it is painted, but it looks so plain that I was not as happy with it as I was some of the animals.  Also, if I have to make mistakes, I would rather do it on this animal as it is my least favorite animal.  If I have to make a mistake, and cannot fix it, I would rather make a another of these than some of the more other animals.  Its shorter thicker legs make it easier to put together than ones with longer thinner legs.

Anyway, the large open spaces that will be white fur needed something to make this animal pop.  I used most of the miniature roses I made to make a wreath of flowers for her.  To set the roses in place, I made a small batch of the toilet tissue clay and made a ribbon of it to go around the rabbit's neck.  I used a small bead of white glue. (Yes, the Elmer's Multipurpose PVA glue was delivered). I found that pasting a small amount on the neck using a pallet knife was preferable to just adding a bead of glue from the bottle.  Although the glue is quite thick, it still wanted to drip down a bit.  Using the pallet knife allowed me to place a smaller amount of glue that did not drip.  

I cut a small ribbon of the paper clay and added it on top of the glue.  My first cut of the ribbon was a guestimate of what size it needed to be.  Once the paper clay ribbon was attached to the rabbit, I needed to use a clay tool to remove some of it because it was too large.  

Next step was adding the roses.  I ended up having to clip off some of the stem of the roses to make them fit into the paper clay.  I expected that was going to happen, but I needed to have larger stems on the roses in order to hold them while I was working on them.  Once I trimmed off some of the stem, I dipped each one in full strength white glue and pressed the rose into the ribbon of paper clay.  The paper clay has glue in it already, but I wanted to make sure the roses were securely glued to the ribbon.  These roses are so small that I had to hold them with tweezers while dipping and placing them.  I used most of the roses I made on this animal.  I only had a few left over.

 The first horse had a rose added to each side of its bridle.  I am thinking of it more as a halter than a bridle, but that is just artistic license.  I still need to add the piece that goes behind the ears.  I was having a bit of trouble getting the "rope" to stick into the glue.  Some things just have to be done a little at a time.  

The "rope" is actually kite string.  I tried yarn, and some smaller string, but the scale was not right.  The kite string wanted to unravel on the cut ends.  Before putting the bits of string on the animal, I tied the string taut between two lamps and ran a layer of white glue over it with my fingers and let it dry.   This kept the entire piece of string from unraveling when it was cut to length.  I still needed to dip the cut ends in glue and twist them after that.  The glue made the string a little bit stiffer, but still malleable enough to go over the curves.

I added a rose to each side of its head using the same method described above.

To add another decorative element, I added a chest strap.  I had made some small clay balls earlier from some leftover paper clay.  I had added some calcium carbonate to the paper clay mix so that they would dry very hard.  (The softer paper clay tended to want to flatten.)  I was just experimenting with the clay when I did that, but I saved them because I was unsure at the time whether I would be able to make the roses work.  At one point I considered making them jingle bells, but now they are going to be brass studs.  That is my story and I am sticking to it!

The other horse was done the same way.  

I still have the tiger and the goat to decorate.  I don't think the tiger will have any flowers, but I might want some for the goat.  I will have to make some more roses before I do that though.  

There are still some decorations to be added to the saddle blankets.  I may try to add some of the decorations as paper clay so they will stand out more, but most of them will be painted rather that glued on.  I have not decided yet.  It is difficult to work in this small a scale.  

Once I finish the last two animals it will be time for sanding and painting.  It has been a long time getting to this point.  Once painted, the animals will be ready to add to the carousel.  But wait, there's more.  I am forming a plan for adding some lights to the carousel.  I will be blogging more about that in an upcoming post.  

Check back next Monday or Tuesday for the next blog post.

More on Making the Roses for the Carousel Animals

 I was away last week and did not have a chance to make a post before I left.  After a year filled with ice in the winter, wildfire smoke in the spring, extreme heat and severe thunderstorms with flash floods during the summer, we finally had a stretch of nice autumn weather.  So, we decided on the spur of the moment, to drop everything and head for the mountains.  The leaves are already starting to turn up there.  It was nice to get away for a few days.  

When we returned, I started working on the miniature roses again.  All of the roses have been shaped and painted with glue to stiffen them.  They are quite hard now and hold their shape.  (If you want the information on how these miniature roses were made, scroll back to the last few posts.)  It is hard to see the rose detail in this picture because this picture shows them actual size rather as compared to last week's photos which were taken with the roses held under a magnifying glass.

Not all of the roses ended up looking like roses, some looked like daffodils and a few like camellias.  For this project, that is okay as I am not married to the idea that the flowers all have to be roses.  If you absolutely need roses, consider making extras, and choosing the best ones.    

When making the first few roses, I was dipping the roses in white glue.  Ultimately, I decided that the glue was too thick and as the excess did not shake off easily, they needed to be wiped off.  I ended up using an old tiny detail brush to paint the glue on instead.  It seemed to work much better.  

You might notice that the stems seem a little elongated.  I needed that extra stem space to hold the rose with tweezers while I was working on them.  The stem will also be used in this case to help attach the roses to the carousel animals.  I will be making some more paper clay to make ribbons for the animals' decorations, and the roses will be embedded into the clay with a little more glue to keep them in place. In other applications, the stems could either be trimmed or used to mount the flowers to stems. My paper clay recipe is only a few posts back if anyone is interested in learning more on how I made my homemade paper clay.

I have not been able to accomplish much this week other than giving the roses their coats of glue.  I ran out of glue.  I have been using Elmer's Multipurpose Glue-All for years.  I use so much of it that I generally purchase it by the gallon.  I went to my local hardware store to pick up some more.  The store was no longer carrying it.  I looked at the other big box hardware store, and they did not have it either.  I ended up having to order it online.  It should be here Wednesday.  The hardware stores had other types of comparably priced white glue, but rather than saying safe and non-toxic as Elmer's does, they only said ASTM (some number I don't remember) compliant and low VOCs.  Not what I wanted.  

I wondered what was going on with this.  I had never had any trouble finding it before, so I asked ChatGPT what was going on.  The good news is that it is still available, it has not been discontinued.  The problem is that this product is being increasing treated as a specialty product.  It is too strong for school projects and not strong enough to be put with the epoxies and construction adhesives.  It is considered a mid-tier product and is not often stocked in stores anymore, especially not in larger sizes due to shelf space issues.  Even if craft stores carry it, they may only be carrying smaller sizes.  They used to carry larger sizes, because a kid's craft project called Slime needed larger sizes of the glue to make it.  Apparently that craft project has fallen out of favor.  

 So, there you have it, the information on why this product is so hard to find. Your best bet to find it is online.  If you do look for it online, shop for prices.  They varied widely with some sellers charging almost double what other sellers were charging.  This may be because large sellers have more purchasing power than smaller businesses.  I don't know the true answer to that, but be forewarned that the price varies widely.

Check back next Monday or Tuesday for the next post.  I hope to have at least some of the animals decorated with ribbons and flowers.

Starting the Animal's Decorations - Mini Roses - Part 54- Edit Added Photos and Text

If a normal size rose looks right on a real horse, how small does a rose have to be to look right on a horse only five inches tall?  The answer is: really small.  I did not actually measure other than to say this size flower looks right.   

This photo was taken with the flower under a magnifying glass so you could see the detail.  

I made this flower from paper.  The rest of this article is about my process for figuring out how to make a flower that small.  

This is one time that the internet was not a lot of help.  I viewed multiple how-to videos before beginning.  There are plenty of ways to make flowers out there, but they are all about making normal sized flowers.  Cutting down the size of the pieces did not help.  The smallest I could come up with was twice the size of this flower.   Working this small is very difficult.

I also looked online for miniature flowers, but the ones I found were still too large for this project.  So, before I threw in the towel on having flowers on the animals, I decided to develop my own method for making miniature roses.  I did not see anything like this online, but I did not spend more than a few hours searching.  I hope you will find this method helpful.  I tried four different methods and multiple materials before I settled on how to make the roses.

The paper:  I did not try this with newsprint because it was not sturdy enough.  I used some heavy paper from a notepad that I had hanging around the house since about 1994.  The paper is about the weight of printer paper or lightweight card stock.  

The glue:  Elmer's white glue.

Other materials:  two pair of tweezers, sharp paper scissors, pen or ultra-fine marker, ruler, large sewing needle

Step 1

This photo shows the paper from the notepad.  The measurements are 3.5 x 4.5 inches (8.89 x 11.43 cm). Horizontally, I marked off every 1/4 inch (0.635 cm), then used the ruler to draw in the lines.  Vertically I marked points at 2 inches (5.08 cm) and a second 2-inch segment at the 4-inch mark (10.16 cm.).  The last little bit is crossed out as it was not going to be used.

I made two sheets like this.  

Step 2

Once I had the sheets drawn, I cut the pieces apart.  

Each sheet was cut into 1/2-inch x 2-inch (1.27 x 5.08 cm) strips.  Then I cut along the marks at 2 (5.08 cm) and 4 inches (10.16 cm) It made 12 strips with one 1/4-inch (0.635 cm.) piece left over.  The small strip is just a discard.  

Two sheets would yield 24 roses.  I hope that will be enough if I add other decorations to the animals as well.  If not, then I will be making more roses later.  The red background is just the notebook I used so that there would be some contrast.  They were not very visible on the white background of the plastic I use to cover my work surface.

The line down the middle of each piece is a guideline for the next steps of the rose.  You will not see the line in the finished piece.

Step 3

Roll the paper into little cylinders.  I started by drawing the edge of the scissors along the long side of the paper as if I were making ribbon curls.  This makes the paper want to curl and makes the next step easier.  

I wrapped the strips of paper around a large sewing needle; it was about the size of a darning needle.  Once I had it as tightly wrapped as possible, I slid it off the needle, held it between my left-hand thumb and forefinger, grabbed the loose end and pulled tightly to make it as tight as possible.  Then I rolled it between my fingers to make the cylinder want to stay in that shape.

Step 5

I made small cuts on one side of the paper.  The first and last cuts are cut just below the line.  The cuts in between are cut just to but not through the line.  

Once the small cuts have been made, I cut the right angles off each of the small cut pieces.  It should look something like a picket fence.  The points do not have to look exactly the same on each piece.  (See next photo)

Photo for part 2 of Step 5

Step 6

Spread glue along the uncut edge.  Then roll the paper back up into a cylinder, keeping the uncut edge even as it is rolled, and set it aside until the glue is dry.  I found that it was easier to identify which side was the cut edge after it had been rolled back into a cylinder if I folded one of the tiny cut strips out so that I could see it later. 

Photo for Step 6.  Picture was taken under a magnifying glass in order to see it better.

Step 7

Photos taken under a magnifying glass.  My husband took the picture as I needed two hands to hold the tweezers.

Once the glue has dried, hold the base of the uncut edge of the cylinder with a pair of tweezers.  Use the second set of tweezers to fold back each of the cut edges around the cylinder.  Curl the outer edge under.  It will give you two or three layers of petals.  Squeeze the center and twist slightly to give that bud shape in the center.

When the flower is shaped to your liking, dip the flower in white glue and set aside on wax paper until it dries.  

The glue will help the flower to hold its shape.  It eventually will be covered with a slurry of flour paste to harden it a little more before being added to the animals.

Check back next week on Monday or Tuesday for the next blog post.

The Last Two Animals Have Their Saddles - Musings on Next Steps - Part 53

This will not be as long a post this time because I have to be on the road early.  I have managed to make some more clay and put saddles on the other two animals.  

I saved the tiger for the last ones so that I could learn from my mistakes on the first ones.  Fortunately, this clay is very forgiving while it is moist.  Then it dries as hard as stone.  I do not yet know how well it will sand.  The edges are fairly rough, but overall, the flat surfaces are mostly smooth and will not need a lot of sanding.

If you are a new reader and want more information on how I made the clay, scroll back two posts.  If you cannot scroll back, you can look at it by going to the blog directly and then scroll back:  folkartbycaroljones.blogspot .com.  All of my projects for the last decade or so are there.

The other animal that received a saddle was the second horse. I just have not figured out how to move the pictures around.  I used to be able to click and drag the photo where I wanted it to be, but that option does not work any longer.  

I left a little more saddle blanket showing on this animal.  I wanted to add some decorative elements and have some areas to paint.  I may add some clay elements to this to make them stand out.  I had started on this the other day, but it was one of those drop everything days where I had to deal with problems and was not able to get back to the project before the clay started to harden.  I will have to make a new batch of clay, but it will be a smaller batch than the previous ones.

I wish that I could say that it was time to start to sand and paint the figures, but I am not there yet.  The bridles or more accurately halters still need to be added.  That will be a different technique entirely.  While this clay is strong, I am not sure it this clay would be strong enough since these pieces are so small and narrow.  I do have a plan for making the reins, which I will be showing in the next blog post.

Beyond that, I need to talk about the other decorations for the animals.  The intricately carved carousel horses I saw in my youth were bedecked with carved flowers and scrolling ribbons.  I was planning on having some of those features on these animals but have run into a problem.  The flowers would be so small that they are very hard to sculpt.  My hands just are no longer up to working that small.  To give you an idea, since it is hard to judge the scale from these photos, a flower that is 1.3 centimeters in diameter would be too large for these animals.

I actually looked online for small craft flowers thinking that perhaps I could cover them in paper clay.  The 1.3-centimeter ones were the smallest I found.  So, I am on to Plan B and Plan C.  I might be out of my mind to try Plan B.  I went online to learn how to make paper roses.  I will give it a try, even though the bits of paper (or other materials) will be so small that I will be holding the pieces with tweezers.  Even if I could only make a few, it would help.  Before I give up on my idea, I will give it a try.

My Plan C is probably more workable.  Instead of flowers, make little balls and paint them like jingle bells or other flat decorative objects.  It might change the flavor of the piece a bit, but sometimes you just have to say that something else has to be done due to circumstances beyond my control.  

Check back next week for the next blog post.