Ties and Hair Doodads.

So, I painted a lovely pepper mill to be a X-Mas present for my stepmum, but I forgot to take pictures of the final product. Ooops. It had a retro-hipster-tree forest in blue. I think I'm going to make orange marmelade.

So I made these a few weeks ago.
Materials: Ribbon, glue, molded resin+paint, bobby pins.





For the flower, I started with cutting petals out of 1 inch ribbon. I like using ribbon because it gives me a good width to start from. I use the full width as the largest petal and cut down from there. I cut the petals out by size, 5-8 of each, then put clear nail polish around the edge on the back side to keep it from fraying. Then I glue 'em all together with hot glue, starting with the center first. If I'm just going for a flower, I wrap a few around each other for the center, but in this case, I kept the middle open, not very clustered. At the end I glued the little skull in the middle.

The bow was super easy. I made a loop, creased it a bit in the middle, wrapped a peice of ribbon around it. The tails are just slant-cut ribbon glued to the back. The bone, again, is a painted peice of molded resin. I glued it down, wrapped a thin ribbon around that.

Resin is fun stuff. It comes in this metal bottle like paint thinner comes in. It hardens once the catalyst is added. It stinks like hell until it's completely dry. Oh. And it can probably kill you. You can pour it into any type of mold. Once it hardens, it can be sanded and shaped, which I've done to get nice round edges, which can be hard to make when carving molds. I've been carving them until I can get my hands on some nice mold-clay. It's a type of clay that, after hardening, is still flexible without cracking.

Also. I LOVE THESE!
I got a nice set of paint for X-Mas, something which I've been needing badly. So, of course, I had to use it immediately. I've been collecting old, ugly ties. I've had this idea for a while, but never actually...done it.

Materials: Ties + Paint. Posted in the order they were made.













Also, I've been asking all my friends to send me a list of their five or so favorite things. It's a nice source of ideas. That's where the space and cigarette painted ties came from. So please, send me your damn list people.

P.S. I need a better banner image for this thing. Any ideas?

Edit: By the way, the second one down is a peacock. Not a trippy eye thing. Wierdo.