Biohazard Tentacles

It appears I had one more biohazard egg mashup in me.  Hopefully this is last because quite frankly aside from being cathartic, I don't see the point.  I'm not actually going to send out Corona Easter cards or frame these on my wall. Also there are just too many possibilities, and I'm awful about making decisions.  Photoshop is like being at the eye doctor. "Which is better one or two?  One or two?" Which is why there is also the following version.  

The octopus is from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.   They have many lovely tentacally pictures.  

And there's this one, that's not even eggy or Eastery at all.  

Frame and corner scrolls are from the Graphics Fairy.

Coronavirus Flavored Easter Eggs

I'm still playing around with photoshop, inspired by the cloud of impending doom hanging overhead. If I seem flippant, I truly don't mean any disrespect.  Sarcasm and art are my coping mechanisms.  I also been watching "So bad, they're good" horror movies.  

Garden Party Massacre - It's utterly ridiculous, but in a fun way.

Killer Sofa - I admit this one isn't great, ok it's really hokey, but I love how sinister the recliner is. It's expressions are priceless, this deadpan menace that's kind of adorable, achieved with a couple of mere upholstery buttons.  Actually you can save a lot of time and just watch the trailer.  I really love the song during the end credits, that's worth a listen, You're Cold by Bernardo Rao.

Wacko - This is my favorite bad movie during the lockdown so far.  I can't believe I didn't see this on a rental VHS, like I saw most of my horror back in the day.  And I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I think I appreciated it more now than I would have then.  It came out in '82 and it's a spoof on the horror movies that came out prior.  So for an old fart like me it was a nostalgic laugh down memory lane.  Julia Duffy is wonderful.  I would watch it again just to see the delivery of her lines.  She carries that perfect level of seriousness that's needed to balance the absurd context around her. The running pervy dad joke is wrong, but it comes up so often you find yourself reciting along like an audience participation film.  

Back to our regularly scheduled program, I can't decide which version I like better Corona Egg in Angry Red or Puke Pastel and either with or without a framed border.  Here they all are for your viewing pleasure.

My interpretation of the coronavirus is actually a picture of a Sundew leaf, again from the wonderful pictures made available by the British Library. 

Easter Pestilence

This is what my brain spits out when Easter coincides with a pandemic.  I think this would make a nice commemorative 2020 Creepster Easter card.   This year I imagine the Easter Bunny will be wearing a biohazard suit and giving out hand sanitizer.  Just kidding, he'll be practicing social distancing like a good rabbit and not even the Easter Bunny can get his paws on hand sanitizer.  

Flowers found on flickr courtesy of the British Library.

Framed Butterfly Curio

This is one of those projects that I've been sitting on for years. It's not that I'm a procrastinator, or a hoarder, I am merely extremely patient when it comes to waiting for the powers that be, to converge upon my little brain with divine inspiration.

This time inspiration came via Oddity Asylum. Do check out their etsy shop, they have beautifully framed specimens, all ethically sourced.

I obtained my specimen the way I usually seem to procure dead things, from a friend cleaning house and deciding it's probably something I could use. But here is the origin story for my specimen:

I'm a little surprise there's no mention of the species, but it would appear it belongs to the Morpho family. Not to be confuse with Morpheus who belongs to the Endless family. 

As I mentioned, I've had this for quite awhile and I've also been making a conscious effort to not buy any new art supplies. To make this project happen I had to cave and buy the metal filigree corners and I couldn't even find what I wanted local.

I bought this mix from Amazon, actually Smile.Amazon.com, so at least my favorite charity could benefit. Every little bit counts.

This is what my random selection ended up being. The metal is very thin, easily bent by hand. An attribute that I think will come in handy if I use them to adorn a round bottle or ornament. I wouldn't use them to embellish anything that didn't have a solid surface to give support.

And if I didn't plan on painting over them anyway I would be disappointed in the color selection. The gold was the only finish I didn't like, which is just my personal taste. But there's no way to predict if you are going to get enough pieces of the same shape and finish for a project.

I forgot to take a before picture, but this is close. Here I've just laid the embellishments on to see if I like them.

Here's everything but the embellishments painted black. I actually had enough of the same finish that I could have left them as is, but I like everything all black, letting the butterfly take center stage. I toned down the gold on the original mat, both by painting it champagne gold, and by adding and wiping away black paint.

I don't know anything about, nor did I research, mounting butterflies. I don't know if painting the mat with acrylics will have any long term affect on the butterfly. I did let the mat and frame cure for a week before reassembling.

The butterfly was actually mounted onto a thick glob of rubbery white stuff, so the butterfly doesn't actually touch the mat. I used a box cutter blade to shimmy underneath it and separate it from the mat, which thankfully it did easily. And I was careful to move the butterfly by handling the white glob only. After painting and curing, I used craft glue to re-adhere the white glob to the mat. And this is what it looks like in proper lighting without the glare of the glass frame.

One more project down to add to my collection of oddities.

Repurposed Coffin Case

My husband recently bought a secondhand guitar and had no interest in using the coffin case that came with it.  He was thinking about selling it until he saw the gleam in my eye, and I'm not going to lie probably a little drool, when I saw the black coffin with red velvet interior.

Before I eviscerated it, I got my skeleton out and tried a few poses to make sure it would be truly useful as a prop.

Gutting it was easy, the storage area was just a lid with a screw on each side and a couple of staples. There was also a little velvet covered bump for the other end of the lid to rest on.  For the moment I left the bump where it was at.

The middle hump was easy to remove it was just a velvet covered piece of styrofoam glued to the bare wood.  When I say velvet I actually mean velvet material quilted to a thin layer of foam batting.

Removing this left me with a bare spot in the middle and two slits in the velvet trim on either side.

There was no way I could have done a perfect patch job, the top and bottom were two separate pieces that where not quite lined up. But if I had wanted to spend the time to make this as seamless as possible I would have pulled up about a half inch of the velvet along both sides of the bare spot.  Then I would have trimmed the foam backing about a quarter inch so that it was a straight line and tucked the velvet material underneath the edge of the foam.  Then I would have continued on with the following, except my patch piece would have had to be precisely sized with all the foam removed from the velvet tucked underneath.

But I figured I could still make it look pretty darn good in half the time. First I removed any remaining glue with a razor blade.  Then I cut a cereal box to the shape I wanted.  I made it a little longer to cover the jagged edges of the velvet already in place and little narrower in width to accommodate the width of the velvet and foam batting.

I covered the cardboard with materiel I peeled off the styrofoam.  Hot glue is my least favorite bonding material to work with, but for this project it was perfect.

I still had the two side slits to contend with.   Trying to fix them with more velvet seemed foolhardy, so I decided to cover them with ribbon trim.  I used a wide faux leather ribbon, trimmed with sparkly fringe (Clearance purchase for the win!).   Since I thought it would look weird to just have it in two spots,  I evenly spaced strips of ribbon around the whole coffin.  

That meant I could remove the little bump at the top and cover the glue stain without it looking out of place.

The outside vinyl was torn in a couple places.  I colored the wood underneath with black sharpie, glued the vinyl back down with E6000 and used strapping taping to hold it flat while it dried. The final step was to replace the screws that had held the storage lid with much shorter screws so I didn't have to fix the holes.

I'm happy with how it turned out and it didn't take all day.  And now I have a cute coffin prop.  No, it's not big enough to actually fit a skeleton, but visually it does the trick and it's not as unwieldly as a full size prop.  It stores easily and has it's own carrying handle, which makes it pretty perfect for me.

Last year for Halloween on a whim I made my skelly dog a headbanger.  I already have a punk vulture and I've been meaning to do the same for my skelly frogs.  I have needle felted green liberty spikes for the big one and I'm working on some crazy red Johnny Rotten hair for the smaller one.  I just have to rock out my regular skeleton and I think I've got a band.

Needle Felted Monster Cactus

A long, long, long time ago Lady M asked me how long it takes to make one of these felty things and I had no idea.  This is the one project where I actually paid attention to the time.   In total, it took three hours, that included snacks, drinks, chatting and moving the eyeballs three or four times.

All you see here took an hour and a half and most of that was spent on the details.  Making the flower took the rest of the time because I felted each petal individually and it's harder to needle felt thin flat objects.  Sometimes wet felting is a better option for thin pieces but you do have to wait for them to dry.

Size wise you can see what three hours got me.  There's a trade off with size, obviously the larger an object the more stabbing that's involved.  But it's easier to do the detail work, which gets fussier the smaller you go.

This is what he would look like with flaming red curly locks.

I should say for safety purposes you should never needle felt distracted, angry or under the influence.  The needles are very sharp.   That being said, we generally have cocktails on Stabby Nights and on this particular night we had Raspberry Mimosas which were quite yummy and as a bonus I now have this awesome bottle to use for potions.  

The inspiration for this cactus came from Woolbuddies.  I don't have any experience with the kits, but the book is awesome and I think the style is easy for beginners to pick up.  Many of my stabby friends started out making the simpler Woolbuddy creatures.  There are a few how-to videos that are worth checking out.  The frog and the penguin are favorite among my friends.   

Mini Creepmas Frames

This Creepmas I saw a few different references to the lovely ornaments at Me and Annabel Lee.

While mine are nothing like those, I rather like theirs better, they were the inspiration for me to finally use these mini frames I picked up at a garage sale years ago.  My frames are approximately 5x7cm, outside dimensions, so perfectly suited for my tiny Creepmas tree.

The frames where already dark in color, highlighted in bronze but they were too shiny and perfect.  It made the metal frames look like plastic.  I covered them with a flat black and randomly highlighted the raised areas.  I also added some rhinestones, clearance purchase of course. Even the black ribbon was bought on clearance, thrifty down to the last.

I went with what I consider to be Creepmas images.  The image of the vintage creepy Santa is all over the internet.  As is the dapper owl, who in my mind looks perfectly attired for Victorian holiday festivities.  The skeleton child with her goat seems very Yuletide to me and this altered image is by Kelloween.

And on the subject of Yule goats, I really love the goats in this video.  

Creepmas Cookies

I said I was going to try making Yeti cookies and I did, but it wasn't quite the effort I put into the Krampus ones. The kids had their cookies to decorate and I had to make some "normal" ones, so there wasn't a lot left for me to play with. To be a honest my Yeti's are kind of a bust, but I have high hopes of doing better next year. I do like the one in the middle, he turned out pretty cute. For him I used an upside-down snowman cookie cutter.

I tried some mouth/tongues similar to the Krampus with rolled out gumdrops and black sugar. The horns are peppermint candy corns. The center Yeti's nose is a piece of Buncha Crunch, which is a nugget of Nestle's Crunch. If you have low expectations for peppermint candy corns, these will meet those expectations. They also infuse the Buncha Crunch with their lackluster peppermint flavor. But boy do they make cute little festive horns.

Here are some of the kid's cookies, upper right is a gingerbread man bleeding from multiple stab wounds, below that is a Death Snowflake, the candy corn being it's death ray and the skulls and tombstone representing the number of planets it has destroyed. At the very bottom with a candy corn tie is a mobster snowman, and above him is a vampire snowbat with candy corn fangs. They might taste like minty crap, but those candy corns sure are versatile.

Next year I plan on making more ghosts, I like how he turned out with the black skulls for facial features. The coffin on the left is my second one, definitely an improvement compared to the one on the right. Word of advice don't try to edge a coffin in one continuous band of frosting, it almost looks like a flipflop.

Second word of advice, less is more when it comes to color. 

I like the Creepmas garland, but I should have made it with fewer colors.

This was going to be a Yeti and somehow it ended up as an angry Yule goat. 

I think I need more of these next year too.

And more unicorn snowbat creatures, with bone arms.

I thought these bats were cute too.

And just to play fair I made holly with a bat cookie.
It would probably look more like holly if I had bothered to make green frosting. 

I used my usual recipe for the cookies and frosting. I don't believe I've ever made buttercream frosting in advance, but time constraints necessitated it this year. I just let it come to room temp and whipped it again before using. It was kind of nice not having the mess of making frosting on top of the mess of decorating cookies, I don't know why I've never done this before.

Another thing I liked this year, and maybe this has been around for a while and I'm just finally noticing, was the little $1 packets of holiday sprinkles at Michaels. It was nice buying a variety of holiday cheer in reasonable amounts that will get used up in the next two years. 

Rare Siberian Long Necked Yeti

Welcome to Creepmas Day 12 5/8, because no I'm not done yet.  Let me introduce you to my little friend.

Although sightings are rare, the Siberian Long Necked Yeti is most notable of course, for it's long neck.  It is also easily distinguished from other species of Yeti by the silky tresses that cover it's large round feet. Another interesting trait of this Yeti is the absence of arms, but that is generally considered an advantage for these cave dwelling creatures.

As I've said before it's too hard to do tutorials about needle felting.  For one I don't generally know where I'm going until after I've done it and for another the urge to repeatedly stab is too strong to stop and take pictures. I love this cross stitch pattern, the sentiment is the same for needle felting.

Jager & Yarn

I did however happen to take two pictures during the felting process so I could consult experts to ensure I was being anatomically correct.  The first being whether or not my proportions were accurate for the average Siberian Long Neck Yeti and the second on whether or not I was making the feet excessively hairy or the correct amount. Apparently all that fur is necessary to protect their rather tender, delicate feet.

The first picture was taken at the Crucible.  Have I mentioned how awesome it is that we have a local bar that hosts Dark Arts & Crafts every Sunday afternoon?

This video by Sarafina Fiber Art on how to needle felt a gnome gives some excellent advice on using curly locks starting at the 24:00 minute mark.  It also gives some excellent advice on making a gnome.

For my Yeti's very hairy ahem, feet, I cut my locks in half.  And then I folded those in half before felting them onto his feet.  I used the coarser locks underneath and saved what she calls the pretty locks for the top rows.

Because of climate change and loss of habitat over the last decade there has been an influx in sightings, especially in urban settings.  

The inspiration was this Yeti I found on pinterest.

Creepmas Millipede Ornament

I feel like this project should rate me some sort of title. It's not quite up to par to earn say, Queen of Crafty Recycling, but maybe Lady of Reused Refuse or Dame of Gluing Things Together That Anyone In Their Right Minds Would Toss.

I feel the back could be so much better, but I had no idea where I 

was going with this at the time and it is the back, so nobody look at it. 

Today is Creepmas Day 12 1/2, because I say it is.  And I got a little distracted with this project yesterday, so Yeti cookies are still not made, therefore Creepmas is still not over.  But when the old gods provide a perfectly shaped dead bug, you must act accordingly.

The following are a couple of pictures before I added a couple of nice glossy topcoats, because it's easier to photograph when it's not all shiny.  Layers from bottom to top:

The base is cut from a Yogi tea box.  The inside of the boxes have henna inspired designs.  I colored the design with a Sharpie and covered the other side with eggshells and paint.  See more about using eggshells here.  I got a little sloppy painting the eggshell side and had to get creative with the henna side to cover the areas I smudged paint.

Next layer is a clothing tag wrapped in fake spider webbing and painted.  See more about using spider webbing for texture here.

In the main the letters are painted alphabet pasta.  The large "C" is a dead millipede I found in my basement.  I liked the coloring, so left it au naturel.  

The little grommets, I bought on clearance years ago and they have come in handy quite often.  The black stars and ribbon that will magically appear in later pictures were also bought on clearance.

The grommets were originally inspired because of the hole in the clothing tag.  I then chose to make a corresponding hole on the other side.  I shouldn't have put them through both layers because they looked out of place on the back.  The grommets with the ribbon through them made sense, but the two middle ones I decided to cover up and that's where the star gems come in.