EVEN MORE TAROT CRAFTING and some wine glasses. And stuff.

 Yeahhhhhhhhh I'm not done yet. But this is really just tarot extras, not more card trimming or edging. Just some other stuff I did.

First of all, one of my favorite artists for tarot decks recently came out with these lovely suede satchels for his tarot decks. I got one with a Kickstarter he launched a while back for a Lenormand deck he made, and they're very nice, just a neat little package to wrap the deck up in that extends out a bit to create something like a mini-mat for laying out cards. I loved the one with my Lenormand deck, and was highly tempted to buy some for my other decks by this artist. If you want to see, they're right here:

https://www.jamesreadsmerch.com/

Seriously. Check him out. His art is so beautiful. I've bought multiple decks, and prints that are hanging on the walls. 

In the end, I talked myself out of spending unnecessary money, because I was fairly certain I could make something like that. And what do you know, I totally did!

For my first one, I measured out a rectangle that would fit my largest deck and guidebook. Basically I cut a long strip of fabric the right width to wrap around and extend out. I also cut small rectangles for the ends roughly approximating how wide I would want the satchel to be to have enough space for a deck and a book. 

I also made a liner out of silk, since silk is a good classic wrap for tarot decks. The outside is actually made of scraps from the shorts I made for Danny when we dressed as The Producers a while ago, and I got the silk from an old robe I bought in college and dyed red. I used the trim to hide the seams on the outside since I didn't have enough of the brown suede to cut it all in one piece. The cord was salvaged from some old pillow shams I disassembled years ago. It's actually the same set I made that red brocade corset so many years ago. Feel free to backtrack through my posts to look if you like, but it's really not relevant.

It's honestly hard to describe exactly what I did, but you know, cut, sew together, sew lining in. I'm afraid I can't really give you a clear tutorial on this. If someone really wants one, let me know and I can try harder to break it down, but right now I don't think it's necessary. 

It's a really nice way to safely bundle up a tarot deck and a book, either a guidebook or a notebook or whatever and take it with me. I can tuck a pen into the cord when it's wrapped around as well.

I also made a smaller one that just fits a basic deck, and it's fine, but it's honestly just not as useful.

I also decided to do something to make it easier to lay out card spreads. I had a spread cloth I had been using, it was basically a sarong wrap I'd bought and would lay down before reading cards, but the thing with regular fabric is that whenever I try to pick up a card off of it I would always grab the fabric too. I wanted something like the playmats I used to use back when I played Magic, with the value of some Magic cards I knew it was a good way to protect valuable cards. And obviously I need a cool custom one. Luckily based on my custom printed decks I'm familiar with custom printing things. And I decided I wanted it to look just like the cloth I had been using, since I had been using that basically since I started reading. 

So I took a picture of the cloth, tweaked it a little to clean up shadows and stains on the fabric, and upped the color saturation just a bit for fun. Sent it in on the biggest mat size I could get.

I also ordered some for Cari and Rachel for their birthdays, but I don't have pictures of those. Cari's had a cool Harry Potter Ravenclaw picture and Rachel's had an image of The World from the Wild Unknown tarot deck, which is another favorite of mine and hers. So, you know, not something I made but my idea, I guess?

I also made a few more wine glasses. I really slowed down due to the fact that I was living in a very small apartment for about a year where my frankly excessive wine glass collection just barely fit into the woefully inadequate cupboard space. But I did make this:

I love this thing. The pattern was made with random chunks or clay rolled into a tube and then sliced off in circles and pressed all over the glass. The letters were made using fondant cutters. I also recently made similar ones for Rachel and Cari, because who doesn't need a wine glass for "fuck it" days?

I also made this one:

That, if you don't know, is one Fat Gum from My Hero Academia, one of my favorite characters from that show. He's sweet and caring and just amazing. And very very fat. Perfect for a nice stemless wine glass. 

So, I think that's the main crafty things I've done that's completed. Also, in case you missed the past tense of me living in an apartment I BOUGHT A HOUSE. 

It was a crazy situation, all the sudden my mom has decided to move to a bigger house because my grandma needs to move in with her and she had this great opportunity for a great house so she took it. And in the process of this, she says to me, jokingly, "Want to buy my house?" 

I laugh. Hahaha, like I'm in a place where I can buy a house. I mention to Stu, "Hey, isn't this a funny joke my mom made? Haha." And instead of laughing, Stu goes, "Wait a minute."

And it all just fell into place from there. We were able to get approved for a loan at a great interest rate, mom knocked the price down for us, Stu's parents helped with the down payment and suddenly we were moving into a house. My mom's house, of all things. I was even able to contribute more than I thought I could due to the oh so useful corona virus stimulus check the government handed out. 

Since then I've had several house related projects, I repainted some cupboards, replaced some fixtures and installed some new towel bars, toilet paper roll holders and whatnot. I got super handy with a drill and a screwdriver. I even learned to install blinds all by myself. It's been great, and I'm so happy to be out of that apartment. I have a lot more projects planned, but there's only so much I can do at once, you know?

Also, if you think I'm not doing a Halloween costume just cuz corona virus means we can't have a proper Halloween party, you got another thing coming. But you'll have to wait for that one. :D

Drinking wine is just more fun this way....

So, in the vein of catching up on things I didn't blog about  that I made and still want to get put up here, over the course of the last..... 7 months or so, where you didn't hear from me at all, I also made.... um, 6 new wine glasses. Although to be fair one of them I made last night.

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:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/203319609/chrono-trigger-nu-portrait-art-print-of

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.

I'm sorry, did you think I was going to stop making wine glasses at some point? I think that makes you the crazy one.

Yeah. I have more wine glasses. It's just... Shannon likes to hang out and work with clay together, and if I'm going to make something I want it to also be functional. It's why I always do mugs when we do her birthday pottery painting trip. I want to use and admire the pretty things I'm making. 

In my previous wine glass post, I mentioned I had already started on another one, but that was all. It took me a really long time to get back around to finishing it, it has the most small details I think I've ever done.

So, my friends and I decided to start a "craft club" where we get together, do crafts, and drink. We're all crafty people to different degrees and we all enjoy drinking together, so it was obviously a perfect idea. I ended up kinda picking the craft for the first one, we did polymer clay wine glasses. Everyone had seen what I'd been doing and were interested in trying it. That became my opportunity to finish this.

(Warning: We're about to get real image heavy.)

You can see the level of detail here. I've never worked with such small bits of clay. I knew I wanted a Studio Ghibli glass, but I couldn't decide which movie. And I knew I wanted the glass I had painted green to be a tree, but like, a cool tree. So I decided to combine everything!

So this is supposed to be Jiji, from Kiki's Delivery Service. I guess in that he's a black cat I succeeded? I don't know, not my favorite piece.

Kodama! I just love the kodama in Princess Mononoke, and I can't have a Studio Ghibli tree and not have tree spirits

Same with soot sprites. They're in at least two movies, they are required.

This right here is my favorite piece. I had so much trouble getting the face right for San's mask, but I totally did it. And there she is, just lurking in the tree.

More kodama!

Why shouldn't Calcifer just hang out in a campfire in the woods? He can do what he wants. 

More obvious ones. I absolutely had to have some little totoros here. I just did the two small ones at the tree, you'll see why in a moment. 

Everybody loves No Face! He's even got a little handful of gold he wants to share.

Last but not least, here's Ponyo hanging out in her bucket. Those eyes, man. I don't think you can really grasp from this photo how truly, truly small those are. It was.... a thing.

So, I finally got that done, and I'm super happy with it. But at the time I took it to craft club, I had everything but the leaves done, so it didn't really take me long to finish that up, and I knew I would need something else to do.  Luckily, I had a plan.

Big Totoro! Which is, of course, why I only have the small ones on the tree. I always planned to make this guy as a companion. 

Originally I had found this perfect, short, fat little wine glass at the thrift store that I planned to use, cuz the shape was just so much better for a totoro, but in the process of starting to cover it in clay, apparently I underestimated my grip or something because the damn thing cracked in half in my hands. Luckily it didn't shatter, it was just neat pieces that I was able to easily remove from the clay and start over. And extra luckily, Rachel had brought an extra wine glass she didn't need that she had spent like 50 cents on and didn't mind giving to me. So I made Totoro! He's super simple, as you can see. That is a custom mixed shade of grey though, which took some time, since I still insist on using the firmest brand of clay. I love the way Kato Polyclay bakes up, but damn, blending is problematic.

But of course, I wasn't done here. I don't know if I'll ever be done. I decided I needed a Goomba to add to my collection of Mario creatures. I found another short, fat wine glass at the thrift store, this time hoping I wouldn't crush it with my Hulk-like grip.

Short and fat as the glass was, it still wasn't quite right, so I covered it in foil to get closer to the correct shape. Obviously after my Moogle experience I wasn't going to try to build it out with clay. Plus I was custom mixing a color again and I didn't want to mix up that much clay, even if the color was just half brown and half copper.

This is only partway through the smoothing process, with all that foil this thing was a lumpy mess for a long time. And I never did get it as smooth as I wanted. I ended up baking it once I got it smoother, "saving my progress" as Shannon put it. It was so hard to keep this with any kind of smoothness, and I did not want to be fighting it while adding the body and feet and face.

I sorta stopped taking progress pictures here. Basically I mixed up a nice cream color for the little hockey puck of his body, covered that, and then made up a nice dark, dark brown for feet and made two flat oval shaped pieces and covered them with that. They ended up looking like severely burned chicken nuggets. Stood him on his feet, made him eyes, eyebrows and a mouth, baked him again and he was good to go!

Of course I added a gloss coat like I do all my glasses, as well. I think he's adorable. I toyed with the idea of having his eyebrows actually stick out off his face, but that just seemed like pieces that were going to snap off. So I didn't. He's very stable, I worried that I wouldn't be able to get his body and feet flat enough to be secure for a wine glass, but he's just fine. I'm super happy with him. 

So, Mario creatures have been on my mind lately. Next month is Emerald City ComicCon, which I am going to with Matt and Cari, and the plan was to do the nomad musicians from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I was gonna be the dancing girl, since the rest of the group is musical and I am not. I can however, sway and flail my arms. I thought it was a great plan.

And then Cari and I decided we needed to go out dancing with all our girls. And Cari managed to slip and fall and break her wrist. Since Cari was supposed to be playing a flute player, this is kind of a problem. And me not being musical means it's not like we could just switch characters or anything. So this got put on hold, and we started playing with ideas.  We played with so many ideas and I got so antsy, I started planning and shopping for my Halloween costume, because I needed something to do so bad. It's Xena, Warrior Princess, if you're wondering. I haven't done much more than shop at this point, I'll get back to you with more info on that.

Eventually we settled on anthropomorphized Mario creatures. Danny had the idea of having us look beat up and smacked around, like we lost a fight with Mario, which I'm not super crazy about, but I go with the group, you know? Anyways, Matt is a Shy Guy, Cari is Bowser, Dante is King Boo, Danny is a Hammer Bros, and I am a Chain Chomp. I don't have any pictures of the progress of the costume yet, there's not much to take pictures on, but my inspiration is coming from here:

Basically, I'm making a black circle skirt and a black corset, both of which will be edged with white "teeth" made of white ribbon, and I'll wear my red petticoat underneath. I'm going to dye my hair black and slick it back in a bun, that I'm going to wear a little pink bow in, in reference to Link's Awakening, and the little pet chain chomp you have to go find. I'm also going to have manacles and chains like the artwork, and I'm making little chain chomp earrings just for fun. I'll get some pictures and give you more details in a bit.