Nerdy Wine Glasses!

So, I love cool glasses. A while ago I went on this cool coffee mug kick where I just wanted all the cool coffee mugs. Let's be honest, it's really still going on. Cool unique glasses of any kind just grab me. I have dreams of my kitchen dishes being this awesome, unique collection of quirky colorful handmade wonderfulness. Matched sets are boring. So of course, this fed into my love of wine and I obviously needed pretty wine glasses. I'd already half started down this road with the Sailor Moon wine glass I've already posted.

I'd always had this idea of cool painted wine glasses, I had found a picture online of wine glasses painted to look like Pirahna plants from Mario.

Now, those look pretty cool, and I've had the intention of copying them for ages, but I kinda wanted glasses shaped like that to get the same look. And I wasn't a big fan of how flat they looked, but figured there wasn't much I could do about that.

Then it hit me.

Polymer clay.

There is no reason in the world why I couldn't recreate that in three dimensions with polymer clay. I already knew full well wine glasses did very well covered in clay, and those were some pretty simple shapes. I'm not a sculptor, but I pulled that Sailor Moon glass off just fine.

So I bought myself another dollar store wine glass and some red, green and white clay, total running me less than $10, and went to work.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any progress pictures so you'll just have to deal with a vague description of what I did.

First, I divided the red in half and rolled it out into two fairly thin ovals. The idea was the oval shape would give us the rounded upper edge of his lips and the sharp Vs at the corners of his mouth. I just laid it out over the glass and trimmed off the extra where they overlapped. It did take almost the whole package. After that I covered the stem and base of the glass in green, and then shaped two fairly thick leaves that I lightly carved veins into and then joined to the stem as firmly as I could. I'm not gonna lie, those leaves seemed like a weak point to me, and I continue to be very careful with them, I'm very afraid of them snapping off.

The spots were done by rolling several small balls of white and smashing them flat, then placing them randomly. The teeth were made by rolling out a long narrow rectangle and then cutting in zig zags all the way down to make a bunch of triangles. Originally I had teeth placed end to end in the mouth, but there were so many teeth it looked like a freaking Stephen King Langolier. So I took out every other tooth and it was perfect. With the remaining white I rolled two fat snakes that gradually decreased to points at the ends. I placed those right over the border between the teeth and the red clay and joined them at the corners, smushing gently, enough to make sure it was firmly attached but not losing the nice round shape.

I had vague intentions of trying to make a clay pipe around the base of the wine glass, but in the end I wasn't sure how and didn't have much green clay left anyways. So I mixed the green that was left with the bit of red that was left to make a different shade of green and just rolled it and laid it around the edge of the base. If I ever redid this I would definitely figure out how to do a pipe, I think that would be awesome. But I'm not unhappy with what I have. I baked it and glazed it and there you are! I named him Petey (obviously) and I super love him.

So, I had my Petey, and I loved him and everything was good. I didn't really see any need to do anything else.... And then I had a thought.

Wouldn't a matching Chain Chomp be adorable? They'd be an amazing Mario wineglass set!

Well crap.

As soon as I had that thought I couldn't get it out of my head.

So, once again, for less than $10 I went and bought another wine glass and more clay.

My friends and I decided to have a crafting day, as we do from time to time, so I decided this would be my project for that. Once again I don't have any progress pictures, so words will have to do. I really don't know why it didn't occur to me to take pictures as I went along, I always do that! I love documenting my projects! I guess since these were pretty quick I didn't think of them as projects.

So the Chain Chomp started the same way as the Pirahna Plant, two thin long ovals laid out on the glass to make the rounded lip and the V at the corners of the mouth. His teeth were made the same way as the Pirahna Plant, just much wider. The eyes were the same as the spots, rolled up balls of clay smushed flat and then layered to look like eyes.

I guess there were actually a lot of similarities in the techniques for these two glasses weren't there?

The base was covered in brown clay, as Chain Chomps tend to be attached to wooden boxes of some kind, and then with a pointed tool I divided the base into panels and carved what I hoped would look like wood grain texture into them. The stem was intentionally left uncovered and clear. For the chain I rolled out a thin silver snake, cut it into segments and joined those segments into loops connected to each other, like links of a chain. I attached one end to the base, spiraled around the stem and connected the other end to the head. I could see immediately that the weight of the clay was pulling the chain links flat, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. Then Rachel gave me the idea of sticking little rolls of parchment paper through each link to hold it open while it baked, and it worked like a fucking charm. Although I think in the future if I did this again I would make wire shapes to cover in clay to make more rigid shapes. After it was baked I washed some watered down black paint over the base to try and add some weathering to the wood look, which sort of worked I guess. I was happy with the texture lines I drew though. Got it glazed and we were done! The chain links are great to fidget with, they're exactly the right size to stick my fingers through and I just know I'm gonna break one someday, haha.

Anyways, this guy's name is Charlie, and he's wonderful.

One other thing I did recently, while browsing through random clay ideas on Pinterest since it was on my mind, I found this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9_xEvUc_lk&t=2s

That is a pen covered in clay to look like Sailor Moon's Crescent Moon Stick. Obviously I had to have it. I turned it into a girl's night thing with Shannon and we made them together. I'm not giving you a description of the process, because it's all broken down very clearly in the video, we just added crystals to ours. Here's the results:

And yes, if you're wondering, it's incredibly awkward to write with, it's so top heavy and unbalanced. But I love it anyways. Plus the ink is easy to remove and replace so I don't have to worry about my cool pen running out of ink.

So, I'm by no means done here, but I have a lot of things to update on, so I think I'm going to do this in a few posts over time so as to not overwhelm both myself and you, dear reader.