Someday, I'm going to buy a house again, and when I do, I'm going to get a big pretty china hutch that I can display all these wineglasses in, because they are so cool, and I am so proud of them, I really want to be able to show them off better. A closed off little cupboard just isn't what they deserve.
So. First of all. I was by no means done making Mario creatures.
The Bob-Omb! God, he turned out so cute. I bought another one of the little globe vases I had used for my Boo glasses, and covered him in black clay. His feet were little chicken nugget shaped and sized pieces of foil that I covered in gold clay, his wind up handle was just sorta free handed cut out of gold clay and his fuse is just twisted snakes of clay with some wire in the middle to hold it up. Once he was baked his feet ended up being too rounded in the back so he wasn't very steady on his feet, so I actually added more clay to his heels to give him more stability. I didn't want to worry about him tipping over when he's full of wine, since he's not very centered on the feet. I've already had his wind up handle fall off once, but it was easy to super glue back on. The silver lip makes it a little interesting to drink out of, but nothing too complicated. Nothing like my darling moogle who bops me on the nose with his bobble if I don't hold it out of the way.
Next up!
Wine barrel wine glass! This was the last one from the set of colored ones I bought, and for some reason it took me a while to come up with a good one for the purple one. But I saw a picture online of a wine glass that looked like a barrel and knew it was perfect. I didn't have any brown clay on hand at the time, but I had a ton of black left from the Bob-Omb, so I just covered it in black and painted it. It took a while to carve all the wood grain, but it ended up looking so cool. I also did a watered down black paint wash to highlight all the details. And then.... While taking these pictures, I set the glass on the table a little too hard apparently and snapped the base right off. I was so mad. Just clean off. I tried gluing it back on, but it didn't hold, so I took it out back, and very delicately smashed the rest of the stem off with a hammer. I used some spare clay to make a short base between the glass and the base and now the glass looks like this:
I just flatly refused to let it be broken, and now it's just a lil shorty! Still holds wine just fine.
Next up, after going to Emerald City con, I really wanted more Mario glasses. So...
Shy Guy!
I decided I didn't want to do a full body Shy Guy, because the shape of his mask was just perfect for a stemless wine glass. And I had a lot of red Sculpey Souffle left over because I'd bought it for my chain chomp earrings, but only needed a tiny scrap for the mouths. So I covered him all over with red, except for a big black oval in front, made a fairly thick white oval that I cut the eyes and mouth out of, and then laid that over top the black, so the mask is very three dimensional and everything. He was super simple but turned out so cool.
So, at this point I thought I had pretty well covered Mario. I wanted to do a Koopa but hadn't really figured out how, so I started to look for a different franchise to hit. Stu and I had been playing Chrono Trigger at the time, and I decided I wanted to make a Nu.
I'm including multiple references here, because I really want you to know what he's supposed to look like.
Side note- the watercolor-y Nu with the pretty background can be bought as a print here:
It also just happens to be a piece of art I bought at my first con for Stu because he loves Chrono Trigger so much. Very talented artist.
Anyways. I searched all over for the perfect wine glass, I wanted a short stemmed pear-shaped glass- I think glasses like that are traditionally for brandy or something? I don't know. Anyways, I found just what I wanted at a thrift store and I had a plan.
And oh my god, I can't believe how great he came out. Lucky for me, my favorite brand of clay, Kato Polyclay, already comes in the perfect shade of blue, so I covered the glass up to around 3/4 of an inch from the top. I added some extra in the front for his mouth and nose, and then carefully made indents for them and filled them with black clay. The curve I got for his mouth is just... so perfect. And his eyes... god. I got his expression freaking perfect. His arms had to be positioned around his body, they would have just been too fragile hanging at his side. His hair was just a triangle of green clay that I shredded up with a sculpting tool edge. It ended up being too dark, so the color you see there I actually painted on. I originally built his legs up against the stem for sturdiness but didn't like the way it looked, so I just gently pried them out with a flat object and rounded his knees, so he's have that perfect bent kneed look. He's probably my favorite glass, honestly. I really love him.
So, after this, I finally came up with a plan for a Koopa glass. I decided I wouldn't do a full Koopa, I just couldn't figure out a way that the head and limbs wouldn't be terribly awkward to drink around plus just plain difficult to make. So I decided just to do a Koopa shell.
It's just a stemless wineglass covered in yellow and green clay with a long white snake for the edge, and details carved on by hand. I think it turned out pretty good. And it's pretty easy to drink out of, which isn't always true with these glasses.
Last but not least.
I took a long break from making these wine glasses once I knew I was going to be moving. I didn't want to make more things to move, plus I had no idea what my storage situation would be like in an apartment. (Bad. It's bad. My apartment has so little storage space it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. And I still gave an entire cupboard just to my wine glass collection.) We've been in the apartment a few months and I just hadn't come up with an idea until fairly recently when Stu and I were playing Dragon Quest 5 and then followed it with 3. Dragon Quest 8 is one of my favorite games in the world, and 5 and 3 were super fun, I really love the Dragon Quest series so I decided I needed a Dragon Quest slime. I looked all over in thrift stores for a glass like the one I used for the Nu, and found one that was the same shape, just smaller. Which wasn't ideal, but would work. I blended up a lighter shade of blue just because I didn't want it to look too much like the Nu, covered the glass and added the face.
Normally I'd show you more pictures, but really, there's not much to see here. His face is really simple, it took me very little time to have him look exactly right. He's adorable and I love him. He's hard to photograph though, I always have issues with lighting and he's somewhat smaller than my usual glass, so it's hard to get a good shot.
Someday, I'm gonna make myself a little photobooth so I can get good photos of my creations.
But that's it! That's all the wine glasses to date. I have an extra plain glass at the moment, it was one I thought might work for the slime until I found the one I used, which was better, and I'm thinking I'd like to turn this extra one into a Xena glass. It seems appropriate. I have this image of her chakram forming a ring around the middle of the glass, with the edge pointing outwards, but I'm not sure how yet. We'll see.
Oh, side note, another minor project I took on for myself when we moved into the apartment. Due to the limited cupboard space, the combination of my cool mug collection and my cool wine glass collection meant that I was gonna have a problem. So after some Pinterest research, I went on a grand adventure all over town to find me a wooden pallet, which was way harder than I think it should have been, and I ended up stealing a partially broken one from the back of a Whole Foods, brought it home, sanded, painted and added hooks to create a super cool mug rack I could set up against the wall on the island in the kitchen.
It's much fuller now, I used to have a selection of mugs I kept at work for coffee, but now that I work from home all my mugs are home.
I did have some drama making this. I broke two screwdriver tips screwing in the hooks- apparently the screwdriver set in the tool kit I bought when I first moved out on my own is some pretty cheap shit. But the biggest drama was the feet.
So, the bottom board on one of the sides of the pallet was broken. That was fine with me, I removed the board on the other side to create a gap so that we can still reach the outlet and the garbage disposal switch that you can barely see there behind the mugs. But it was still down a little low if I just rested it on it's own wooden beams. So I decided to get some kind of bowl or something to attach to the beams to lift it up. I found some cheap plastic flower pots at the thrift store.
MISTAAAAAAAAKE.
The bottoms of those flower pots were so thin and brittle they shattered at the slightest bump once I had screwed them to the bottom of the pallet's beams. It was infuriating. I'd have been better of with terracotta pots. But once I had them I was determined to make them work. I ended up basically replacing the bottoms with thermoplastic beads and worbla, and screwing them to the beams with the biggest screws and widest washers I could fit. I then dumped a solid two inches of white glue into each pot while it was upside down and spending something like two weeks letting it try to reinforce it even more. In the end I still don't really trust the feet, but they're holding. And I have a cool display for my mugs! Once I have a house and a china hutch though I'll probably scrap this thing and use the materials for something else. I'd rather have everything displayed in a pretty hutch, there's just nowhere for it to go in the apartment. The stuff we already had barely made it.
Anyways. I think that gets you pretty caught up on things I made over the last half a year. I'm still hard at work on Xena, but haven't done enough to be worth updating yet. I'll get back to you.
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