December Musings and Holiday Decorating

I woke up yesterday morning and discovered it was December first.  It is time to start thinking about Christmas decorations.  Some of my neighbors already have the jump on us.  Their homes are decorated inside and out already.

When the children were small, we used to put up a real tree every year.  We picked the largest tree that we could fit into the room.  The decorations on the tree were very eclectic.  Each year we would also go on a shopping trip to find a special ornament to add to the display.  We also had ornaments that the children made at school or bought at a school bazaar to hang on the tree.  They are some of my most treasured ornaments.   Over the years the collection grew, and it took hours to put up the tree and add the lights and the decorations.

Then the children grew up, became adults, moved away and started families of their own.  Then it was just my husband and myself.  For a while we put up a real tree.  One year the tree we purchased was so dry that we did not dare turn on the lights.  On New Years Day, when we took the tree down, all the needles fell off and we were left to haul out a completely bare tree.  The floor was covered with needles:  a trash bag full of needles.  It was a mess to clean up because the needles clung to the rug.

The next year we decided on an artificial tree.  None of the children would be home for Christmas, so we were somewhat depressed and did not want to make a big deal out of Christmas.  We bought a small artificial tree that would fit on top of the table.  It was like a revelation.  The tree went up in minutes rather than the time it took to saw the end off of a real tree and then work with it to make sure it was standing upright in a tree stand.  What a concept!     

Since the tree was small we had to choose which ornaments were going on the tree that year.  Some of the ornaments were too big for this small tree.  We finally settled on which ornaments would be put on the tree and which would be saved for posterity for no apparent reason.  The Christmas collectable were labeled Christmas and Current Christmas to differentiate them when we were ready to pull things out of the attic.

The first artificial tree we purchased did not have lights attached.  When that tree became worn and shabby we upgraded to another table tree.  This one had LED lighting.  Now the tree was up and decorated in just a matter of minutes.  In some ways it seemed an improvement, but I found that it did not really share much Christmas spirit.   We lost something in not having those family hours spent decorating the tree. 

I still miss the smell of a real tree.  I tried adding some fake Christmas tree smell to add some realism. That did not work out all that well.  The smell was overpowering and it did not really smell like a Christmas tree.  At least not when it was first sprayed.  Several hours later there might be a slight odor that smelled something like a Christmas tree. 

There was still something missing.  Then I started making dolls.   I started making Santa dolls because at that time hand made dolls were in vogue.  At first they were not very good.  I was trying to make soft sculpture dolls.  I had a hard time with the faces.  Fortunately they improved over time.  

 At first, I just made dolls and they just sat or stood there.  Something was missing and it took me a long time to figure out what it was.  The dolls were just dolls until they told a story.  Once I began adding embellishments and details that helped fill in the story the dolls seemed to take on extra meaning.  They finally added something to the Christmas decorations that had not been there for some time.  Now, taking out the Christmas decorations once again seems like bringing out old friends.  I look forward to bringing them out every year. 

The last Santa doll I made was a Belsnickel.  A Belsnickel is sometimes called a Grumpy Santa.  One of the legends of Santa is that he leaves naughty children coal and switches.  So, my Belsnickel is carrying a bucket of coal and some switches. 

I put this doll in a state-wide contest a few years ago and it won third prize in the hand-made doll category.  I guess they thought it was a more original take on Santa than the traditional Santa and toys.  

Perhaps some people thought it odd that I would make a Santa like this.  Santa is supposed to be the jolly, loving character.  I think the problem is that modern day concepts have overshadowed the myth of the Belsnickel.  These days children expect toys, candy, and expensive electronics for Christmas.  Coal and switches would seem like a terrible gift.  But think for a moment about the time that the Santa/Belsnickel myth originated.  Coal and switches were the materials to build a fire to keep warm.  The message of the Belsnickel is that even in the years that you were not behaving at your best, (Let's face it we have all had them.)  there was someone that cared about you enough that he (or she) wanted to make sure that you were warm and knew that someone cared about you.   That is the message of the Belsnickel.  Someone cares about you even in the years that you felt unlovable or undeserving.

During this time of the Christmas season while we are so busy buying the latest electronics or heading out to the next holiday party, make sure that you take some time to tell those you love that you care about them.  That message is much more important than picking out the latest video game.  It will be remembered long after the must have toy or game of the year is forgotten.

Halloween Folk Art Cat - Part 2- Project Completed

I have completed my latest project, a paper mậché Halloween cat.  Regular readers know that one of my challenges for the year was to create a Halloween item once a month.  I am finding that I am already running a few weeks behind.  This is my second project.  Although, to be fair, I did not post the resolution until almost the middle of January, so I was late getting started. 

I am also still working on my long term project, a large doll.  Between the the two projects, I am putting in a lot of hours in the studio.  I will be blogging about the doll project in next weeks blog post.

Last blog post, I showed the armature for creating the doll.  After that it was pretty much a matter of adding layers of paper mậché.  This doll has a total of four layers.  Two of the layers were added, then additional pieces of material were added to create the cat's pants and the big smile. 

After the second layer, I had to add some additional support to the tail area.  The tail kept shifting as I moved the doll about while adding the paper strips.  The movement caused the tail area to crack.  I needed to strengthen the area by adding some additional support.  I soaked small pieces of a manila file folder in multi-purpose glue and applied them over the crack.  The glue soaked into the bits of folder, and that made them flexible enough to follow the curve of the area.  Once they dried, they were very firm and stiff.  With two additional layers of the paper mậché, the area is now strong enough to support the piece without cracking.

Other than that, it was just a matter of painting the piece and adding some embellishments.  I wanted this to be a black cat as that is a Halloween tradition.  However, I found that painting it black was a bit problematic.  The black was very black, and it seemed to soak up every bit of light.  I really had to use very bright colors for the rest of the paints just to keep the piece from fading into the background.  If I had not already painted on the face by the time I decided that the black was too dark, I might have painted it over and used a very dark gray.  However, done is done, so I decided to press forward with the project.

Besides using the traditional red-orange Halloween color I brightened the piece by adding metallic paints.  I made a small start stencil and traced stars all over the shirt.  I painted the stars with a bright gold metallic paint.   The stars seemed to fade away against the orange, so I outlined them with black paint to make them stand out.  I also painted the suspenders with a medium cadmium yellow and added orange dots. 

I originally painted the pants a navy blue, but once again the piece started fading into the background from lack of reflected light.  I over-painted the blue with an antique metallic gold.  The pants tend to read as an olive kacki .  Because the paint is metallic it adds enough reflected light that the piece moved forward again.  I echoed the color on the shoes. 

For me, the colors of Halloween will always be orange and black.  Although I used other colors in the piece, I wanted to give a nod to the traditional colors, so I just used orange and black in the bag.   I only used two black stars because I still needed to keep the black to a minimum to keep the piece bright.

When I make a doll, I don't want the doll to just be standing there.  I add embellishments that help tell a story about the piece.  I want the viewer to engage with the piece and figure out the story.  If I had just painted the doll and not added embellishments, the viewer might have guessed that this was a Halloween piece.  By adding the trick or treat bag and candy, it adds to the narrative because they bring back some memories to the viewer.

The giant lolly-pop is a great example of this.   Practically every kid that has seen one of these giant lolly-pops at a candy store, amusement park, circus or sea-side resort has longed for one.  If the viewer was ever the recipient of such a confection, perhaps he or she remembers that moment that the candy was received.  It seemed like the greatest treat in the world.  The cat's big grin can reflect the emotion of that moment.  If the viewer never received one, perhaps it brings up a memory of an opportunity missed.  Or perhaps the viewer will remember the moment as one which as a parent, they had to say no to a child because a parent knows it is over-priced, too much sugar, and doesn't taste all that great anyway.  (And perhaps the parent knows this because the parent has had one at some point.)  So the story can be interpreted in many ways depending on the point of view of the observer.

At one point, I considered making a noisemaker rather than a lolly-pop.  When I was growing up, Halloween was also a time to make a lot of noise.  I remember having an noise-maker that was on some type of ratchet.  As you spun it around it made a grinding sound.  Another noise-maker was some type of  tin (or more likely aluminum) paddle with a bead on a wire.  When you shook it, the bead banged against the paddle making a loud noise.   I guess I haven't seen too many of those recently.  Everyone is so busy and/or stressed these days that excess noise is even more of an irritation than usual.  Anyway, I decided that the lolly-pop was a better option not only for the candy connection but because the noisemaker would have taken longer to make.

Overall, what I want to convey about the piece is the hopeful attitude of a Halloween creature showing up at the door with expectations of candy.  When I was growing up, Halloween was such a special holiday.  I can still remember the excitement of running around in a costume and yelling trick or treat at each doorway.  I think today's kids are missing out on that part of the excitement.  Halloween today is not the same.   But then, I guess people can not miss something that they never had, so perhaps children today will still have fond memories of Halloween, even if they are not the same memories.

Next Sunday I will be blogging about my large doll project.  Check back on Sunday afternoon for the latest on that project.

  

Large Doll - Part 2

Paper mache' over foam head.

This has been a very successful crafting week.  It was aided by a winter storm.  It was snowing and cold and everyone was staying inside.  I actually got a fair amount of work done despite having a bad cold.

My new project is going to be a large doll.  It will be close to four feet tall.  This is my first attempt at making a doll in this size, so the whole project is one big experiment.  As with any experiment, you have a working hypothesis of what you think is going to happen.  Then you perform the experiment to see if what you expect is actually going to happen or if you end up with something else.  I am hoping that my doll making skills from working with smaller size dolls are going to translate well for this project.

In my last blog post I had just started the project.  I had put a layer of paper mache' over a Styrofoam doll head.  I was using a basic method of paper strips slathered with a paste made of all-purpose flour and water.   This post I would like to elaborate more on my method of working with paper mache'.  Many of my new readers have not seen the older projects and may not be familiar with my methods.  Long term readers may want to skip over the next three paragraphs and move on to the rest of the article.

Rubber  band used to mark center line.

There are many ways to work with paper mache'.  I use this method because it makes less of a mess during production.  I mix flour paste and water and stir until the mixture is really smooth and there are no lumps.  Newspaper is torn into strips appropriately sized for the project.  A large smooth area can use larger strips, but a curved surface will need smaller pieces to prevent the paper from forming folds and creases that will show on the surface of the project.   If you have folds and creases in the paper, it will require more sanding to achieve a smooth surface in your final stages.

I use a foam brush to smooth an even layer of paste on each side of the paper strip.  Then I use the foam brush to smooth the paper onto the surface I plan to cover.  If a piece of paper will not lay flat on the surface, I use scissors and cut the piece so that one side of the cut will overlap the other.  The foam brush helps smooth out air bubbles.  If you leave air bubbles under the paper, you may have a soft spot in the paper mache' after it dries.  The foam brush helps keep a smooth even layer of paper mache' on the suface.  The smoother the surface, the less sanding is needed.  Depending on the project you may or may not need to sand, but on a doll's face I would like for it to be as smooth as possible.

Horizontal registration marks added.

There is another method of working with strip paper mache' that is somewhat quicker, but as I said, it makes a mess.  Dip you strip of paper in a trough of the flour paste.  Use your finger and the side of the trough to remove excess flour paste from the strip.  It does work but... a good bit of the time the strip broke in half leaving me to fish a soggy mass of newsprint out of the paste.  It also sent drips of flour paste everywhere.  If you have a work area where how much mess you leave doesn't matter maybe this is okay.  But I found that flour paste was everywhere and once hardened it was difficult to clean up the work surface, floor and even at times on the wall.  Enough said.

Now, back to this project.  I put four layers of paper mache' on the foam head.  My plan is to remove the paper mache' from the Styrofoam mold.  Looking at the foam head I could see that the head was cast as a two part mold.  I was hoping I would be able to take the mask off as two pieces, but I suspected that it might have to come off in three pieces.  Four layers of paper mache is still fairly flexible, but I did not know if it would flex enough to be able to pull away from the overhang of the chin.  Again, this is an experimental doll.  I have to figure out how to make things work.

I placed a large rubber band on the head at roughly the center line.  I traced alongside the rubber band with a black marker to give myself a cutting line for removing the head.  Then I removed the rubber band.  If I had just used the rubber band, it might have rolled off as the head was moved.  It could come off and give me a sharp snap.  How do I know this?  Experience.   

After removing the rubber band, I added some horizontal registration lines so that I would be able to re-align the piece evenly.  In a previous project I had forgotten to add them and it was really difficult to make the piece line up.  Paper mache' is more flexible than you think and tends to curve inwards or outwards once it is cut.  It is not just a matter of taping the two halves back together.

I used a scalpel blade to cut along the marked line.  A scalpel blade is curved and does  not cut as deeply as a craft knife.  It is also very sharp.  I wanted to retain the foam head in as pristine a shape as possible.  I have plans for it in a future project.

Well, one can hope for a specific outcome, but you don't always get it.  As it turned out, it took cutting the mask into three pieces to get it off the face.  The overhang of the chin was too sharp to allow the chin to pull free.  I am guessing that the foam head was cast in a silicone mold that allowed the mold to peel back.  At any rate, it was not going to work with this mask.  It just means that there is a bit more work involved in putting it back together.

The second cut was marked just under the jaw line and the base of the chin.  If there were any ridges visible one the mask was put back together I wanted to be below the curve of the face.  The ridges can be sanded down, but still the less visible the better.

I won't keep you in suspense, the doll mask is off the doll and put back together.  This post is already getting long, so I will be blogging on how I put the mask back together in next Sunday's blog post.  It was not quite as simple as one would suspect.

Doll Experiment - Part 7

Doll torso

I did not post on Sunday.  With the holidays coming up I have been swamped.  Sometimes there is just too much going on to make time to blog.  I used to post twice a week every week, but that has been falling by the wayside for a while.  Sometimes I have to choose between blogging or crafting.  I generally choose crafting because if I don't craft something I have little to blog about. 

I am blogging today as I have managed to carve out some time in my studio (aka the spare bedroom).  Last blog post I showed that I was able to re-position the arms.  Today I will be blogging about the legs and weighting the doll in order to stand.  At least I have been working in that direction. 

I ended up making some extra work for myself.  If I had thought about it more I might have completed the task of the doll standing by now.  The doll that I used as a mold for the papier mache' did not stand on its own.  It used a doll stand.   Also, as I blogged in previous posts, I had changed the pose of the doll's arms, which shifted the weight on the front of the doll.  I wanted to weight the legs so the doll would be able to stand. 

Not thickness of the papier mache'.

The problem started when I made the cut on the torso.  I was thinking about weight in the legs and decided to cut the legs just where they met the torso in order to have the maximum amount of leg room for adding the weight.  If I had just decided to make the cut at the hip, I would have saved myself some work because the legs would have been one unit rather than two units. 

 Because I had to rejoin both legs it created extra work.  But that is not the only problem I created for myself.  I am getting ahead of myself here though so let me go on from weighting the legs and get back to what else went wrong. 

I weighted the legs using aquarium gravel.  Why aquarium gravel you might ask?  Well it is because I had some left over from another project in which the small bits of gravel made up part of a mosaic.  I had plenty left over.  Also, the gravel can be inexpensive compared to other items that can be used as weights.  A pound and a half of aquarium gravel  (0.68 kilograms) can from two dollars to twelve dollars a bag depending on features such as whether it is dyed or polished.  Two pounds of plastic pellets (0.91 kilograms) for stuffing toys can run sixteen dollars.  So gravel made sense in this case.

I filled the legs with gravel, covered the top of the area with tape and began the process of re-attaching the legs to the torso.  And that is when things started to go awry.  First off, the doll that was used as a mold for the papier mache' had a defect.  The porcelain legs were not attached evenly.  One leg was slightly longer than the other.  Since the original mold of the doll was cast as one piece, my doll had one leg slightly longer than the other.  That had to be addressed if I was ever going to be able to get the doll to stand on its own.  Furthermore, the tape that was added over top of the legs added to the unevenness in the legs.  The longer leg had to be shortened or the shorter leg had to be made longer.  To try to build up the short leg would mean that one foot was thicker than the other.  I decided to try to remove some of the length from the longer leg.

Maybe you can guess where this is going....  I took some length off the top of the longer leg.  I used a cutting blade with my rotary tool for this.  I did not remove enough.  I had to remove more.  I removed more and of course, it was too much.  So I ended up having to rebuild a section of the left leg.  It took a while.

After I filled the legs with gravel, their tops were taped with masking tape.  Then the legs were tapped to the torso.  Of course, there was a void in one leg where too much material had been removed.  The opening at the bottom of the torso was also taped with masking tape.  Between the two pieces of tape, a ball of aluminum foil was shaped to fit the area of the void and all that was covered with masking tape as well.   All of that was covered with multiple layers of papier mache'.  I allowed each layer to dry completely before adding a new layer.  

Each leg had to be added separately.  I tried to do both of them at once, but the legs kept shifting as I was trying to get them into position.  I finally gave up on that idea and added the legs one at a time.  As I said earlier in the post, if I had just removed the legs at the hip rather than at the base of the torso, it might have saved me some time, although I don't believe that I could have made the doll stand if I had not adjusted the length of the legs.  One foot would have looked much to thick.  Or conversely, I could have removed the shorter leg and added some length to it.  Well 20/20 hindsight is easy enough.  I wish I had considered it more before making those cuts.  However, I was in a very busy and did not think it through enough.  I will know better if I decide to try something like this again.

In the photo of the doll's leg filled with gravel, you can see the thickness of the papier mache'.  I only applied three layers to get it that thick.  Of course, when you are doing papier mache' each piece of paper  will overlap another piece so you are actually looking at double the original three layers.  

Anyway, the doll is back together at this point.  The balance is still a little off and I need to do a little work on that.  This is not the end of the papier mache' part of the process, but I will blog on what is coming next in my next post.

Ribbons at the State Fair

In my previous post I blogged that I had submitted three items to contests at the Virginia State Fair.  I entered competitions in Wearable Art - Mixed Techniques Single Garment, Handmade Stuffed Animal, and Handmade Doll - Dressed.  I am pleased to announce that I won ribbons in all three competitions.  I took the second place in Wearable Art, second place in Handmade Stuffed Animal, and Third place in the Handmade Doll competition.  So my three major pieces for this year won ribbons.  I am very excited.

I have been notable absent from blogging the last couple of weeks.  I had a case of bronchitis and just was not able to get everything done that needed to be done.  When that happens crafting tends to fall by the wayside until things get caught up. I will be back to blogging in another week or so.  There is so much going on right now.

At the moment, there is a major hurricane potentially headed our way.  Before I can get back to crafting, I have to make sure that we have everything we need in case the storm hits here.  I guess this is going to disrupt our plans for the holiday weekend coming up.  Right now we are in wait and see mode.  It is still far enough away that they cannot make an accurate prediction as to exactly where it will hit.  Right now the weather reports show that the whole state is in the potential path of the storm.  Will it hit?  Will it go out to sea?  Only time will tell.  If the storm should turn and go out to sea, I have a plans for the holiday weekend.  Everything is on hold until I know what is going to happen with the weather.

The last time a hurricane hit, the debris was a major problem.  We lost several trees.  The county was picking up debris for free, but we had to pile it out next to the street.  We had a pile of debris six feet high, six feet deep, and about thirty feet wide.   We were without electricity for days as well.   I hope we don't go through that again. 

Anyway it might be several days before I am back to blogging about crafts.  I will be posting regularly very soon.  I am at the start of a new project, but with everything going on, it will take a bit of time to have something to show on the blog.