Revamped Ceramic Skull

A few months ago I went to an estate sale for the very first time.  I've had more than one friend just happen on an estate sale and find the most awesome "potion" bottles.  I did not have such luck. I only found one interesting bottle, but I did get a skull for $0.50. I almost didn't buy it, it was rather cheesy looking and I had absolutely zero inspiration for what to do with it.  But it's really hard to pass up a skull for fifty cents. I mean you can always find a use for another skull, right?

It also made me wonder about my future estate sale.  I know the kids will keep a few of my prized possessions for sentimental value, maybe a severed body part or a zombie creation, but I'm sure most of it will have to go.  I can even hear possible future spouses, "No. I know you loved your mother, but that thing is not coming in the house."

At my estate sale there won't be one lonely skull on a table amidst other holiday stuff.  There will be a whole table of skulls, next to the table of skeletons, between the body parts and potion bottles, right across from the table full of spiders.

This is the before and after of my skull.  It's a ceramic skull.  There's a big open area in the back so you can put a tealight in it and a smoke hole on top.

If you've been following along, you know I started obsessing over altered bottles last year.  It's like collaging in 3D.  There are so many different ways to go about it and I've only touched on a few so far.  Any method can be used to cover much more than just bottles.

One method I've been bouncing around in my head is using molded components.  HomeTalk has a nice video using this technique on ornaments (Creepmas anyone?)  Except I didn't have any molds and there's so many to choose from.  Investing in yet more crafting stuff requires a commitment I wasn't ready to make.

The Fates decided to intervene and I happened upon some Mod Podge molds on clearance at Michael's. I picked up the Ornaments and Royal mold.  The mold's are small, a 9.5cm square and less than $3, so not too much of a commitment in money or storage.  They are meant to be used with glue sticks, but they're silicone molds, so you can use just about anything.

For my first go-round I used a spackle glue mixture I had leftover from an ornament project.  It had lost quite a bit of moisture and was a really thick putty.  I used it for the three pieces on left which have some imperfections, but I believe that's called character.  Then I added a little water to thin out the rest, which was a huge mistake. It got all clumpy and no amount of kneading would smooth it out.  I used it anyway pressing it very firmly into the mold, but after it dried it broke into pieces when I removed it.

I also had leftover paint and joint compound mixture from my pirate ship. These pieces were lighter and more detailed, albeit a little pockmarked.  Maybe because of the sand texture?  They were also a little flexible.

A few things about these molds in particular.  Most of the impressions are pretty shallow, so whichever medium I used they were dry in a few hours.  The two domed areas on the "Ornaments" (left) mold needed to dry overnight.  You can see I got impatient and lifted them too soon.  Many of the objects on the "Royal" (right) mold were difficult to remove without breaking. Namely the top left scroll, the bee's little legs, the key and the boarder at the bottom.  For my purposes this didn't matter. Any defects just add a worn, aged appearance as far as I'm concerned.

I ended up making another batch of 50/50 white glue and spackle to make additional pieces.  Leaving a thin layer across the back of the mold made it easier to remove pieces without breaking them. It was easy to crumble off if I didn't want it, but I found I liked it.  The glue/spackle mixture isn't waterproof, so it does soften when you lay it on wet glue.  Using a small brush, wetting it if needed you can blend that thin layer onto your working surface.  

Here's the skull covered with a layer of the paint mixture to give me a good surface to work on.  The teeth and other cavities had a hard straight edge from whatever was used to cut those areas out.  I used additional layers of the paint stuff to build up and round out those places.  The "eyes" are just me playing around with pieces.



Then I started gluing stuff on, using white craft glue. The laurel wreath cut in half made a nice mustache.  I cut apart the boarders from both molds into individual pieces.  I took apart some old flowers.  I love that it doesn't matter what color they are because everything gets a coat paint.   The glass eye is just a cheap plastic gem.

   

I even used up most of the crumbly broken pieces on the back.  

Then I put some spackle glue in a disposable icing bag and piped it on to build up areas and fill cracks so the molded pieces didn't look like they were just sitting on the surface.  I used a wet paint brush to further move it around. There was some shrinkage after it dried so I went back and touched it up with more spackle glue.

After that dried it was onto paint.  I started with a solid layer of dark brown.  It took three coats to get every little nook and cranny coated, turning it every which way to make sure I didn't miss a spot.  The paint has to protect the spackle glue so you have to have good coverage. I liberally sponged on a tan coat, then a slightly lighter tan on and finally finished off with a few white highlights.  

This angle reminds me of Shakespeare, which is fitting since we did share an "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio..." moment while I was painting him.  

It just happened that after I finished, one of my air plants bloomed! 

Deluxe Dirt 'N Worms

Last week we had Dirt 'n Worms for Mother's Day, again. It's one of those things I started innocently enough and now I'm contractually obligated to make every year. I changed it up a little this year to keep things interesting and it was declared to be the best dirt 'n worms ever.  Which probably means my contract has been amended to say "Deluxe Dirt 'n Worms".

I added a layer of brownie at the bottom and some sour gummy worms (not pictured). 

This is the basic Dirt 'n Worms recipe and this is the Best Fudgy Cocoa Brownie recipe, from CafeDelites.com that I used. My brownies were baked to perfection in 20 minutes. These are not cake brownies, these are ooey gooey with a nice crust brownies. For the tablespoon of oil I used coconut oil and it gave the brownies I nice mild coconut flavor, if you're into that kind of thing.  I kept the brownies, pudding mixture, worms and cookie crumbs separate, and assembled single portions right before serving.  

I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of gummy anything, so my opinion is completely biased, but I think there should be laws against combining gummy worms with chocolate.  And sour gummy worms with chocolate?  I don't even want to think about it.  But my spawn likes the gummy stuff and loves the sour gummies even more. For actual consumption I  recommend dirt 'n worms without the worms.

But the visual aspect of the worms is undeniable. I think I like the way they look laying across on the brownie,sticking out from under the pudding goop, better than the traditional route of sticking them on top.

Of course if all the worms were under the goop, you would need something to decorate the top.  A tombstone perhaps? I've seen where people use Milano cookies with iced epitaphs as gravestones .  Wouldn't it be fun to honor horror Moms?  Bates, Voorhees, White...

So brownie, worms, pudding and whipped cream mixed together with crush cookies, topped with more crushed cookies, topped with yet another cookie decorated with icing.  Nope, that doesn't sound excessive at all.

Speaking of Creeptastic Moms...Watching mother themed movies for Mother's Day isn't something I had considered before, but some channel was promoting their marathon of mom related movies of the overly contrived lame comedy variety, which I felt was decidedly lacking.  Especially when you can catch the aforementioned moms in Psycho, Friday the 13th and Carrie.   Not to mention kickass Sci-Fi moms, like Sarah Connor.  And what would the whole Alien's franchise be without a mother's love? [I love this Aliens Mother's Day card by the way.]  For those that truly just want a light hearted comedy, they could always binge on Santa Clarita Diet.

We went middle of the road with the creepy, but not gory, ever fabulous Coraline. It's a great movie to watch with the kids, because no matter what your failings are, as long as you are not a soul sucking monster who likes sewing buttons on children's eyes, they'll be grateful that you're their Mom.

From The Depths of the Deep Blue Sea

It's about time I finished this bottle, which I started back at the last craft party.  The contents were done, but I didn't like the lid.  I could've just painted it black and called it a day, but I had a vision and sometimes those bastards are persnickety.


I found a nice simple template for the boat at MollyMooCrafts.   I made mine on a much smaller scale of course. Actually I made two, slightly different sizes, because I wasn't sure what I wanted. When cutting out the pieces, instead of cutting all the way around, I left tabs sticking out here and there to aid in the assembly process.  After all the pieces where glued in place and dried, I set the boats on top of the lid and there they sat.  For a really long time.  A really, really long time, in a slightly mocking manner.

See, being made out of printer paper they were too thin and flimsy to just paint. And the thought of reinforcing their teeny tiny little hulls with paper mache seemed torturous. So they sat.  That is until The Great Nerf War of 2018. 

An epic battle some say, even though the only casualty was a living room wall.  Since I had to get everything out to patch a hole, I decided to also tackle the Father Vs Son WWF Match dent and the Ninja Sneak Attack dings.  The thing is, I live with animals, but as a result I've become a bit of a drywall repair goddess.  So there's that.

When it comes to drywall stuff and paint, I never work out of the original containers, I always just take out a little more than I think I'll.  So after everything had been repaired, I had a little bit of this and a little bit of that leftover.  I felt bad about just tossing it, so I mixed it all together.  It was maybe (didn't measure) 3 parts all-in-one primer paint, which is really thick and creamy, to which I had added some sand texture, 1 part joint compound and just a smidge of fiber reinforced compound.  Well it was all consolidated in one container now, but what to do with it? And there were those two little boats staring at me.

Well it turns out this stuff was perfect for little boats. 6 thin coats, inside and out and my little boats are nice and sturdy, with a uniform thickness I wouldn't have been able to achieve with papier mache.  On a few passes I scraped the side of the brush against the top edge of the boats to make a thick ridge.


The fabric draped over the lid and used for the sail came from my daughter's old mermaid costume.  Sometimes it pays to know someone who's been through a princess phase.  I've been using pieces of her worn to death costumes for years.  They have layers of different textured fabrics that have come in handy more than once.  This piece is some kind of synthetic satiny material. For the sail I distressed it by setting a toothpick on fire, blowing it out and using the glowing embers to burn tiny holes in it.  I started out using an open flame on the pieces hanging over the lid but that was too hard to control, stuff burns like crazy. Which leads me to realize how lucky we were that her "Princess, Sponge Bob, Jellyfish, Snake & Worm Party"*, full of princess garbed little girls, didn't play out like a scene from The Towering Inferno.

*That's the kind of stuff you end up with when you ask five year olds what they want to do for their birthday.

Continuing on, the mast is a toothpick with a few small beads on top, and is set into a small grommet.  The "water" is glue, fabric and tissue paper.  There's a little bit of cheesecloth down the sides.

If I were to do this again I would start with the lid and then add the contents.  As it was I had to cover the jar in painters tape, and keep it upright so as not to jostle the stuff inside.  I was too scared to take the lid of and work on it separately.  Things have grown in there since last year.  I can only imagine the aroma that would ensue from opening that jar. I do love the murky effect.  Yes for once that's not just crappy photography on my part, that haziness has been organically grown.  There's even an interesting line of rusty colored growth.

I rather like the idea of my pirate, decomposing next to his treasure, looking up from the murky depths of the ocean floor, contemplating whether or not it was worth it.

Altered Ornament

After the holiday season I bought a big package of shatterproof ornaments on clearance.  This is the first of them to succumb to my devious whims.  During my journey down the rabbit hole of altered bottles, I also saw quite a few ornaments using similar techniques.

Lace and fake flowers seem to be popular along with a mix of found objects. I decided to not get too crazy and limited myself to some small flowers I partially dismantled, buttons, PVA glue mixed with spackle and tatting. I started with a layer of watered down glue and tissue paper and let that dry to get a nice base surface to work on.  Throughout this project I used a banana holder to hang the ornament while drying.  

What's tatting you might ask, well it's lace made by knotting thread. I don't remember how it came to be on my radar. But once I saw it, I decided I was going to learn to do it and then create the most awesome skull design ever. No skulls yet, but I finally have the basics down.

I highly recommend TattedTreasures.com to get started if you have any interest. Also the Tatted Treasures channel on youtube. Very easy instruction to follow and I love the fact that she did a video for Lefties.  It really hurt my brain trying to learn how to flip stitches left-handed while watching right-handed videos.

I've been trying out snowflake patterns. All the ones pictured are variations of the same pattern. White is a good beginning color because it's easy to see the knots and snowflakes are generally easy patterns to follow. I had given one of my better ones to my mother-in-law and when she found out I bought a bunch of cheap ornaments to play with, she inquired if I was going to glue my snowflakes to them. The ones I've made are too big for the ornaments, but it did get the wheels turning.

I attempted to modify a pattern into a design that would wrap around an ornament. Besides my alterations, which didn't really work, I was very distracted that day and made numerous mistakes. I was a little peeved with myself for dorking it up. But then I thought maybe it doesn't have to be perfect. So I glued it on an ornament anyway, covered up the mistakes with flowers and buttons and built up some areas with spackle-glue. I think it turned out alright and now I know what to do with my other tatted practice pieces.

I added some swirly texture with my fingers in the spackle-glue. I think I'll have to play with this technique more in the future.

It was hard to tell how it was going to turn out until I did a base coat. Before that it just looked like a big mess and I thought maybe I was wasting even more time on a doomed project. I painted half of it at a time because I was holding the other half, so I could really push the paint into all the nooks and crannies. There were a lot of little nooks and crannies. It took four tries before I couldn't see a speck of white no matter which I turned it.

Here's a few more shots of the finished project.  My daughter said it would have looked pretty if I hadn't used such dark gloomy colors.  I used a matte black for the base, sponged on gunmetal gray, then dry brushed on silver and added a touch of pearl white for accent.  It is rather dark and gloomy, but dark and gloomy makes me happy.  

I think the bottom looks like a cabbage.

Polymer Skull Cane Version 2.3

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away I was messing about with skull polymer canes even though I didn't know the first thing about polymer canes.  If you truly are interested in making a skull cane, I'd advise you to read through my first post.  First, so you don't make any of those mistakes, but also that post covers a lot more information that I won't be repeating here. This time around I righted some of those previous wrongs, unfortunately I found new ways to muck things up.  So here is more advice on what not to do.

It started out simple enough with a disk of white clay. 

That's about 15mm thick, 6cm in diameter.  

Laying the design on the clay I used a pin to poke an outline.

I cut out the design.  The reason behind cutting it across the middle was to make it easy to remove the white and add the black, like I saw done in this Hello Kitty cane video. Also it worked well for me last time. Since than I've come across this skull video, which is pretty nice by the way and doesn't end up wonky like mine.  I like the way she uses a round cutter to remove the eye area.  Now I would need to create a custom cutter to remove the eyes in one piece, but I think making multiple cuts using a small circular cutter along the inside of the dotted line would produce a similar result.

I used my template again to size the black clay for the eyes.

If this was a movie, this would be the freeze frame with the voice-over explaining why it is from this pivotal moment that everything from this point forward goes wrong. 

Somehow the white area between the eyes became very small.  You can see where I added a strip of white to compensate.  That might have been all right had I taken the time to really blend it in.  I should have also taken the time to shape the teeth better.  See how the bottoms curve up? That's only going to get worse. And while I commend myself for remembering to use a matching clay between the teeth, I should have made the wedges thinner.

Here I've added slices of a different cane to create a boarder around the skull.  The biggest problem here is those individual segments are going to move differently against the skull while reducing.  

Here with past and present mistakes side by side you can really see what I'm talking about. [For reference the starting canes on the left are approximately 6cm wide, while the finished beads on the right are about 2cm.]  The cane below I wrapped a mostly continuous band of clay around the skull before adding slices of decorative boarder and the outer edge of the skull stayed fairly smooth.  Whereas above I didn't and the skull is all jagged.  When you reduce a cane the clay is going to push into any available space.  I knew that, and I still didn't comprehend how the end product would be affected. Hopefully I've learned my lesson this time.  

The cane I used for the purple and blue outer layer was based on this "Static" cane on Craftster.org.  I learned a few things the hard way with that too.

My first mistake was buying hard clay. The Blue Bottle Tree has an excellent article on buying clay.  I gave it a little test squeeze in the store and convinced myself that it wasn't "that" hard, mostly because I just wanted to get my clay, get home and get started on this project.  I would've been time ahead if I had just tried another store for softer clay. 

No matter how hard I worked it, it wasn't getting the consistency I wanted.  I didn't have any clay softener, so I thought if I used translucent clay instead of white to make my skinner blend that would help which is sort of, but not exactly, following advice again from The Blue Bottle Tree.  That did make the clay more workable and I was able to make the cane, but it didn't move as well as the softer colors when I reduced the cane.  Beads and Beading mentions using clays that are the same consistency and temperature, along with other useful tips for making canes. Many of which I have demonstrated what happens if you don't follow them. You're welcome.

Also after baking there are little pits and cracks in the static cane area. I've never had that happen before, so I suspect the dry purple clay. They are really teeny tiny and not all that noticeable.  The problem is they are scattered all the way through so no amount of sanding with get rid of all of them and that interfered with buffing the beads to a high gloss sheen.

On the subject of skinner blends, they are often done with the help of a pasta machine.  If you're like me and not invested enough to get a pasta machine you can use a simple roller, it just takes more effort. This is a helpful video about making a skinner blend by hand.

Even though my static cane didn't turn out exactly like the original, I think it looked quite lovely around my skull before I reduce the skull cane.  After reducing you can see in the very first picture of this post the beads look really dark, almost black or midnight blue.  Below you can see how sanding and buffing brings out the colors.  That is in the right light, close up. From a distance they still look pretty dark. In fact in that first picture one bead has been sanded and buffed, can you tell which one?Also see how my skull got all twisty.  I keep seeing people roll their canes and think that I can do that.  Well I can't and the minute I roll it, it gets things all twisty and I need to just stop doing that and only squeeze it.  [See my first cane post if this doesn't make any sense.]

If I had a soft purple and used a plain white clay instead of translucent, I think they would have been a bit lighter, but still not like the original post I saw.  I have since learned that not all skinner blends are equal.  This is a very helpful video showing skinner blend comparisons. I made mine similar to the first example in the video, when I believe the last example would have given me more of the result I wanted.

There is one thing that I did this time around that I am very happy with. I made some complimentary beads using the same colors.  Some of them I covered with thin slices of the cane ends.  I also layered thick slices of my purple static cane and the butt ends of the skull cane and tried some Mokume Gane techniques.  I think it's a good way to use up the distorted ends of the canes. 

The only ones that are sanded and buffed are the top three large beads in the very last picture.  It doesn't show well in the pictures, but the colors of the buffed beads are very vibrant and crisp, while the rest are dull and cloudy looking.

Well that's it for mistakes this go around.  I hope you learned as much as I did without all the pain and agony.  Just the pain and agony of trudging through this long post, but hey you made it to the end you should give yourself a cookie!

Creepy Crawly Adorned Bottles

This is another experimentation into altered bottles.  For these the common component is plastic creepy crawlies.

Both started out with a layer of  mod podged tissue paper.  The paper makes for a nice surface for everything else to cling to.  Then it was just a matter of gluing stuff on and painting them.

Last year while I was putting away Halloween stuff I thought the spiders made a nice design laying side by side. A normal human being would probably just have glued the spiders on by eyeballing it.  I'm am sure that would work just fine. I can be a little particular.  That's why I measured the circumference of the bottle and used graph paper to evenly lay out the spiders.  I pinned cheesecloth over the graph paper and glued the spiders to their proper places.  I let it set for a minute or two. Long enough for the spiders to stay in place, but short enough that I could pull the graph paper off.  Ignore the concentric circles they're for another project.

Gluing the spiders on the cheesecloth worked pretty well.  Once the glue had dried I applied Mod Podge on the bottle and wrapped the spider cheesecloth around it.  I still had to touch up a few legs with glue, but it was much easier with the spiders already in place.  Because the spider bodies were flat they pulled up a little in the rear, so I added a little layer of tissue paper to cover up the gap.  This also gave a little texture to the smooth plastic.  I probably could have used a heat gun to curve the bodies to the jar, but I didn't trust myself not to melt the legs.  After painting I added the rhinestones.

Next up is this centipede jar.  I really fail at photographing metallics, so you'll just have to imagine rich copper tones, champagne gold, antique bronze and just a hint of metallic green.  Beside plastic centipedes, I used cord, rhinestone mesh and lentils as embellishments.