More Nerdy Wine Glasses!

Okay. So at this point I have a sweet Sailor Moon wine glass and an amazing set of Mario themed glasses. Now I'm getting into it. I'm loving working with the clay and it's probably one of my least expensive crafts I've ever picked up and I have so many other fandoms I'd love themed wine glasses for and I don't think I can stop.

So. What's the next fandom? Well, Legend of Zelda of course. And what's the new idea? A wine glass that looks like the hilt of the Master Sword. Genius. I love it. God, that's a lot of details and much more involved than the others. Are you sure? Do you have any other Zelda ideas? No? Master sword it is.

This time I do have progress pictures.

I did some research first, I had to decide which Master Sword I wanted. They're all similar of course, but there are some differences. Ocarina of Time is my game, but the sword in that one is kind of plain. So I went with a some what simplified Skyward Sword version. Sort of a merging of OOT and SS you could say.

So I started by wrapping the stem in a thick layer of aluminum foil to give myself a thicker handle, more like a sword hilt, and I wrapped some wire around the top of the stem and had it extend outward as a support base for the wing like hand guards. I was really excited when I found the idea to use foil like that, I wanted a good thick handle but definitely did not want to use the amount of clay it would take to do that.

This glass went much more slowly than my others, they were all single sittings, this one was in several stages over days.

The next stage was blending my custom color for the shade of blue I wanted, and then starting to cover things. I was using Kato Polyclay brand clay, and I mixed 1 oz of their blue with a quarter of an ounce of black and a quarter of an ounce of silver. It gave me a nice slightly shimmery metallic dark blue.

I covered the base, handle and about a quarter of the bottom of the glass with this blue.  For the wings, I basically rolled several snakes in various lengths and arranged them using the Skyward Sword picture for reference. In the future if I did this again I think I would use a clay extruder with a square shape and arrange them at an angle, point to point, for a more rigid angled shape, but I'm not unhappy with how this looks. I do sort of feel like I could do better though. 

If the colors seem super saturated in that picture, it's because they are. I had really bad lighting in this photo so I did some quick editing to bring up the contrast so you could actually see the shapes. 

After this it was mostly details, green straps around the handle, custom mixed color the same as the blue but with green instead, bands around the top and bottom of the handle, adding points on each side up from the hand guards with gold squares at the tip, the big gold jewel right in the middle, and of course, the Triforce front and center of everything. I had thought about doing a Hyrule Crest instead of just the Triforce, but I wasn't sure I could do it small enough in the available space and have it look good.

After that it was just baking and glazing, like usual. I tell you what, that bitch takes up some serious space on the shelf with those wings. I do think I could do better, but I am not at all unhappy with the result, especially for something with this many details combined with my relative lack of clay experience.

So, I'm still having a great time with this. Although I have learned using nicer firmer brands of clay leads to bruised palms, which was a new experience for me. I want more wine glasses. Of course I want a Final Fantasy themed one, but I can't come up with anything brilliant. I'd love to do more Mario glasses but I can't come up with any ideas that would really work on a regular wine glass. Boos, mushrooms, goombas, all would be awkward to build. Cari makes a joke about Boos to hold her booze and it gives me a powerful desire for this but I still don't have a good solution for this, it needs to be a very round glass to get the right shape and that's hard to find.

And then one day, I was at the dollar store with Shannon.

And we go through the fake flowers and whatnot section. There's a bunch of vases. And among the vases is a perfect bubble shaped container that is the most perfect glass I could have imagined to be a perfect little stemless Boo wine glass. I couldn't believe it. I mean, sure, it's technically a vase, but that doesn't mean it won't hold wine. I immediately buy three. One for me, one for Cari, since the booze joke was hers, and one for Rachel, because for just ages and ages Rachel's text message sound has been a Boo laugh on my phone.

I bought a giant brick of white clay, I had been gradually building a stockpile of clay colors so I didn't need anything else. Unfortunately, once again, I have no progress pictures.  So here's the description. 

(Also, just assume I'm doing all of these things three times, I worked on the three glasses simultaneously rather than making one and going to the next.)

First, I covered the entire glass with white clay. The whole damn thing. Next I made cones of foil with the ends turned up to look like Boo tails, and covered them in clay and attached them to the glasses. (You'll see pictures of this soon, you'll understand why in a minute) I made smaller cones for boo arms and attached them, turning up the ends a bit. I sketched the face out on a piece of paper to make sure I made it the right size for the glass. I had intended to do three dimensional tongues sticking out, but it just didn't look right so I made them flat instead. Added teeth, eyes, eyebrows, the whole thing. And this is how they turned out:

God, the lighting in my kitchen is so bad for taking pictures of these. I need to find a new place for pictures.

I love them so much. Cari and Rachel had no idea they were coming, so that was a fun surprise. And of course as soon as Cari has her Boo, she insisted she needed a shy faced Boo so she could have the set. I had no problem with this. So I went out, bought three more glasses and another brick of clay.

This time, I do have progress pictures.

So, same beginning steps. Cover the whole glass in clay. Make little foil cones and cover in clay. Attach. You'll notice there are bits of clay scattered around the foil cones, that is to fill in various dips and divots. I learned with the foil handle of my Zelda glass that (naturally) the clay forms to the unevenness of the foil and creates a rather bumpy surface that can be filled and smoothed from the outside, but is much easier to just avoid in the first place.

After this I made a custom pink blend, I'm afraid I don't have any idea what the proportions were, I just added tiny bits of red until it looked right to me. I rolled them out into very thin ovals and smoothed them on to the area where the face would be.

The regular Boo in the background was there for reference... and also to hold my wine.

The eyes and mouth were very simple, just little black segments of clay arranged in vaguely down turned curves.

The arms were a little bigger and thicker than on the original Boos, since I needed these ones to be partially hiding the face. I played with the shape until I liked it, then attached them.

I baked them, and then I spent an amazing amount of time trying to get the blush lines on his face just right. Those are hand painted on and were an absolute bitch to get looking right. Stu helped me, offering opinions and suggestions until it was right. They came out ridiculously adorable. And now all three of us have matching Boo sets!

I realize I have far more wine glasses than I need but I'm not sorry. I also have a blue, purple, and yellow wine glass all without specifically defined projects but the intention is to do something fun and clay related with them. I also have two other glasses I painted with glass paint, one is green with the intention of sculpting a tree around it, and one is red with the intention of attempting to make it look like Sailor Moon's Cutie Moon Rod. That's probably the next clay project. I tried to just buy a red wine glass for that but I had a great deal of trouble finding what I wanted. I found a set of red ones on eBay that had kind of an iridescent orange color too, but that was fine. They also had cool twisty stems and were made out of real crystal. The problem with using them for this Sailor Moon glass is that when I pulled them out of the box when they arrived, their beauty was absolutely breathtaking and I knew I could never alter them in any way, they were perfect exactly the way they were. Plus, they were crystal, which means that if you wet your finger and run it along the rim they sing. Clay would ruin that. So I just bought glass paint and painted a dollar store glass, it works just as well.

Okay. So, I do have one more thing I made, but I'm tired of typing, so that's another post I think.

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.

Just a couple little things

I don't have any major projects right now, which is starting to make me a little antsy, but I do have a few small things I can post about here.  I did mention my New Year's dress, but I haven't posted it yet, and I'm pretty proud of that.

So, first of all, yeah, I totally fit into my high school junior prom dress. I don't care what anyone says, or who gets mad at me about that, I'm damn proud of that. I've worked freaking hard to get myself somewhere where I could be happy with my body and I'll be damned if I let anyone make me feel bad about being proud of that.  When I pulled it out of the box to try it on, I did the math and realized it had been about 14 years since I last wore it. I put it on, had my daughter zip it up, and about cried when I realized not only did it fit, but I even had just a bit of breathing room in it. There are not many people that can wear something they wore 14 years ago when they were a teenager.

Unfortunately, the only pictures I have of me in the dress in high school are not great ones, and due to the fact that it's silver, it's shininess means it didn't photograph well, but here's what I have to give you an idea of what I was working with:

There you are. High school, 16-17 year old me. Man, I remember that prom date. I had such a crush on that boy, and basically ran a whole campaign to get him to take me to prom. I had literally everyone who knew both of us telling him to ask me to prom. God, that's so embarrassing. Protip, past Jessica. If a boy likes you, he'll ask you out. If he doesn't, you just embarrass yourself by forcing the date. I mean, we were friends, but he wasn't interested in anything else. We had a fun time anyways, but uhg. I suppose if your teenage self doesn't embarrass you though you probably did something wrong.

Anyways.

So, once I'd established the dress still fit, I needed a plan. I knew I wanted to remove the sleeves, and shorten the skirt. After trying the dress on I realized the skirt definitely needed to be widened as well to be more flare-y and twirly. I wanted to incorporate the shawl I was wearing as well.

Removing the sleeves was easy, I just used my seam ripper and then tucked the silver fabric under into the lining, which I also folded over, and then just stitched around the armhole. Super simple. Man, those sleeves were so restrictive, I couldn't move my arms hardly at all with them on there. I knew those had to go first thing.

After that, I put it on, marked where my knees were, and then just cut the skirt off right there. God, it felt so wrong to cut into the skirt like that. This dress cost $130, and it was so pretty, it felt like I was going to ruin it.

The dress had princess seams, going all the way up and down the dress, so after cutting it off at the knee, I used my seam ripper and opened up all of the seams from the knee to about where my hip would hit. I then took the piece that I cut off the dress and cut it into seven triangles as wide as I could make them, two for the front seams, two for the side seams, two for the back seams and one for the center back seam where the zipper was, for maximum skirt flare. I carefully pinned and stitched the triangles into each seam that I opened, basically adding godets to each seam to add width to the skirt. I hemmed it up and everything looked great.

I made one further adjustment, I'd intended to wear a petticoat with the dress, but realized that the bottom of the dress had a tulle ruffle to make it a little fluffy. Of course that got cut off with the bottom of the dress and liner, so I took that piece and had to gather it a bit to fit, and then pinned and sewed it to the liner of the dress roughly around my hips to create a built in petticoat. After that all I had to do was serge the raw cut edge of the bottom of the liner and the dress was done. It was really pretty easy.

For accessories to go with the dress, I took the silver shawl and tied it into a big bow and safety pinned it to the back of the dress. I wanted to sew it in, but the place where I wanted to sew it cut off the zipper too high making it too difficult to get into the dress, so I stuck with pinning it.

I bought another pair of those great cheap ballet flats from Walmart (the same ones I used for Princess Peach's shoes) only in grey this time, and covered them in super fine silver glitter (that I am STILL finding all over my house in the strangest places) and then like four or five coats of spray on Polycrylic, in an attempt to trap as much glitter as I could. I was doing a pair of red glitter heels at the same time for a vague future idea, but I'll cover that later when I really launch the other project. I glued a few plastic jewels to the silver shoes for fun and they were good to go.

I made myself a new necklace and new earrings and a pretty dangly hair piece with a bunch of sparkly crystal ball beads I had, and on the day of the party I covered myself in body glitter, did super sparkly makeup and even sprinkled glitter in my hair and hairsprayed it in place. I was all glitter all the time and it was great.

Of course, the pictures don't really capture the sparkles well. But I looked great, and now I have a super awesome fancy party dress that I'm very proud of.

That last picture I'm holding my little brother's light saber replica, cuz the glowy saber was just fun with all the shininess.

The only other thing I've done lately is some minor alterations to some things. I got a few new tshirts from Kohl's lately because they had some really neat nerdy ones, but only in the MEN'S section. (Angry side-eye at Kohl's. Girls have nerdy interests other than Disney, Kohl's.) So I had to run my shirts through my serger really quick so they'd be flattering. I got a Duck Tales shirt, one with the Nintendo 64 logo and one with the Playstation logo, and one with the Punisher skull on it, because I recently finished the Netflix series of The Punisher and kind of fell in love. Those shirts were easy fixes though, I've done that hundreds of times.

The last thing was something I was pretty excited about. So, I went with Stu to visit his parents for Christmas this year, and his mom always takes him shopping for new clothes while he's there and I got to go along this time. At one store while we were waiting for Stu to try stuff on I happened to spot this gorgeous moto/biker style jacked with a burgundy fur collar, and I wanted it so bad. I was hesitant because, let's be real. We all know there was no chance in hell that would fit me, the sleeves would never be long enough. I tried it on anyways, and I was right, but it wasn't disastrously short. Stu's mom offered to buy it for me and I just couldn't resist. I'd always wanted a jacket like that, but I'd always been too afraid to waste money on something that might not work. But after some sales and coupons the jacket only cost her $17, which is a freaking amazing price for a jacket like that, so I didn't feel too bad.

I intended to go buy some black ribbed fabric to add cuffs to the sleeves and the bottom of the jacket, but I actually ended up stumbling across a long sleeved shirt in a thrift store that was made out of exactly the fabric I wanted. So rather than gambling on a fabric store having what I wanted, I just bought the shirt and cut it up. It ended up working perfectly. I got the cuffs in and took in the side seams of the jacket just a bit for a little curvier shape, and was very happy with the result.

The one on the left is as it was originally, on Christmas morning. The right is after I added the cuffs. I realize the differences aren't super visible, but it looks good and I feel great in that jacket. The fur collar of that jacket is removable too, so I can wear it with or without, and I can use the collar to make other collars to change up the look however I want, it's pretty great.

Well, that's all I've done lately. I'm feeling that project itch though, so I've got to come up with something. I'll let you know when I do.

Final Christmas projects!

So, I finished up my last few Christmas projects in great time. There was no stressing over time limits, and it was so good after the clusterfuck that was Halloween. 

So, let's start with the Pikachus. I made two, one for my niece Alara and one for Shannon.

























The pattern I used is here: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/bigger-pikachu-pokemon

So, basically what I did was I made the body and arms and legs in the blueish grey yarn. Then I kind of fudged a pattern for the ears and tail (not pictured) based on what I remembered from when I made a regular Totoro for my brother's old girlfriend, and later again for my daughter. I then made a white circle for the tummy, and a yellow one for the face, and after the face was sewn on, I picked up a ring of stitches around the face and crocheted a few times around to create a hoodie-type look. I think they're pretty damn adorable. I did make the face and tummy a little bigger for the second Pikachu because I felt like it looked better, but they're both pretty adorable. Getting the faces right was hard, though, and I still feel like I could have done better. But Shannon and Alara will love them, that's all that matters.

The other thing I had to do was paint my mom's tiles for her gift. I did five tiles, figuring if I messed one up I'd have an extra. I based the color scheme on the fact that she has one wall in her living room painted sage green, and worked on complimenting that. I took freshly poured and after dried pictures of each tile so you could see the way they changed as they dried. Dirty cup pours are so fascinating!

You can see the way the cells changed shape and new ones formed as it dried. Also, I have no idea where the purple came from. There was no purple in this mix, it was all greens and blues and one brown for contrast. That happened after I put the clear coat on top, and I'm completely mystified.

I like the way the dark blue lines twisted and bent on this one. Sorry about the glare on the edge of the dried tile, these things were so hard to photograph laid out on the table the way they were.



























I loved the big brown spot that opened up near the center of this one. Also, this was another one that had some mysteriously appearing purple.

I was super, super into that random dark blue slash in the corner, it was just so dramatic with all the lighter colors around it. I was a little sad that it kind of got smaller as it dried, but it still looks amazing.

This one basically just developed a lot more cells and circles, but it was probably the least changed when it was done.

So I decided to keep the third one for myself, since it had the least amount of green showing, and then I attached wall hanging hooks and felt pads to the back of each one, so these have the option of either being used as coasters or trivets or whatever, or being hung on the wall and used as art. They were super fun to do, and really quick and easy. The cool thing was I used the same colors on each one, poured in the same order in each cup, but each one is spectacularly unique. I want to make so many more of these, they're just so cool! And doing it on tiles that cost 46 cents at the hardware store, it's a pretty cheap hobby too. As long as you get cheap paint, since you're gonna burn right through it, haha.

The last Christmas project I had was Shannon and I wanted to make pajama pants, because new pajamas is a Christmas tradition. I usually just bought them from Old Navy, because Old Navy sold pajama pants that came in tall sizes, but apparently they discontinued that, so fuck those guys.  So Shannon and I went to Joann's and bought some cute polar fleece and made warm cuddly pants for ourselves, using pants we already owned as a pattern. There's dozens of tutorials for how to do that on the internet if you're interested, I didn't use any specific one. I just kinda figured it out. I also allowed Shannon to do her own sewing and cutting, so she made hers basically on her own, I was very proud of her. And proud of myself for resisting the urge to take it from her and do it myself because my perfectionist brain was dying a little watching her do it. But I let her do it, that's how she learns.  Unfortunately, I have neglected to take any pictures of the pants, so I'll have to get back to you on that.

When I bought the fleece, the stuff I picked out just happened to be near the end of the roll, so I got an extra yard of fabric for a steep discount, and now I have so much left over that I think I'm going to use it to make myself a new hoodie. I'll get back to you when that's done.

I have one more project that I'm working on right now, but it's not for Christmas, it's for New Year's. My friends Matt and Cari are having a New Year's eve party, and it's "Thrift store fancy dress". Which is a very loose guideline, basically dress fancy if you want, but keep it thrifty, thrift store purchases get extra points. And I decided that what I wanted to wear was my old junior year of high school prom dress, because with all the weight I've lost I was pretty sure I could fit into it. And I was right, with a little room to spare. So I'm overhauling the dress to make it more fun, and I have a whole outfit planned around it. But that is a project for another post, when I have pictures. 

It's gonna be amazing though. You'll see.

Crafty Things and Christmas Projects

So, I've been crafty again. I mean, it's nearly Christmas, so that makes sense, I'm exactly the type of person that loves to DIY Christmas presents, and not just because I'm broke! It's just what I do.

First of all, this isn't strictly a Christmas project, but it led to one. I learned recently about acrylic pours, or dirty cup pours, or whatever you want to call them. Basically it's where you mix paint with water and a little silicone, and then combine several colors into a cup and dump it onto a canvas or whatever and let it spread and mix and see how it comes out. (Also, for some reason I totally just typed 'color' with a 'u' in it, which is the weirdest typo I think I've ever made. Apparently I get a little British when I'm sleep deprived. Might need another cup of coffee today.) I thought these dirty pour painting looked amazing, and I also thought it would be a great thing to do with Shannon. So I picked  up a bunch of cheap acrylic paint and some silicone power tool lubricant and we tried it.  Here's the result:

The one on the left is mine, and the one on the right is Shannon's. Initially mine came out really muddy, I think I overmixed or something, so I actually added in more orange and turquoise and used a swiping technique to spread it and mix it, and in the end I was fairly happy with it. Shannon's was just beautiful from the beginning, she was very proud of herself. However, after drying for some reason the orange in mine faded to almost invisibility, making the whole thing look rather dull, and I was not happy with it. Shannon's stayed lovely, and was left alone. But I decided to do a new pour overtop of mine and try not mixing quite so much.

The second time I chose a different color palette. 

This one came out super, super cool and I was amazingly happy with it. Look at all those cells! And it dried just fine too, which I was also happy about. However I had too much paint mixed up for pouring, so to avoid wasting it I needed something else to pour on. I ended up using a smaller canvas and an old clock I had from years ago, which I intend to buy new clockwork for, because it looks so cool now.

Here is the small canvas:

This one came out super amazing, I love the way the cells form in the middle of the paint. What's really fascinating about these pours is that more cells and shapes will form as it sits, making it look cooler and cooler as it dries. I'll show you here with the clock I painted, the one on the left is right after I poured the paint, and the one on the right is after it had been sitting for a few hours.

You can see how there are a lot more cells and swirls in the second picture, it's so cool! 

One of the youtubers whose videos I watched to learn how to do this does all her pours on six inch ceramic tiles, which gave me the idea to do a set of them as coasters for my mom for Christmas. I haven't done them yet, but that's coming, you'll get pictures when I do.

The other thing I decided I wanted to do as gifts for people was etched glasses, wine glasses or beer mugs, depending on the person. I got the idea because I wanted to get one for Rachel with the homunculus tattoo from Fullmetal Alchemist, but even when I could find a reasonably priced glass, the shipping would cost twice as much. I knew that Danny, Stu's roommate, happened to have a bottle of glass etching cream he had used for something some time ago, and had told me previously that I was welcome to use it, since I've been curious about glass etching before. So I decided to make my own glass for Rachel. And then the decision I made to go with Stu to his parent's house in Arizona for Christmas led to me needing gifts for them, which led to more custom glass ideas, and then that led to a set for my dad and step mom, and then my brother, and then birthday presents for some friends with an idea I'd been wanting to do for ages, and then one for Danny for letting me use his etching cream since I know that stuff isn't cheap... and well, I etched a lot of things.  

I bought a lot of beer mugs and wine glasses from the dollar store, which was pretty great, because I knew it would be cheap and easy to redo if I messed something up. I also bought some stick on shelf liner from the dollar store because it would make perfect sticky but removable stencils. I printed off all my different designs at work, and then I would tape each design to a piece of shelf liner, cut it out with an xacto knife, and stick it to the cup. It worked really well, with only a few small instances of etching cream seeping a bit under the edges.

  I started with the glasses for Stu's parents. 

Simple monogrammed glasses.These were just stickers and tape, no shelf liner here. I got a little fancy with borders, but I kept it pretty straightforward since this was my first time doing it. But they came out really well, and I'm happy with them. Nice, simple gifts for my boyfriend's parents, since I'm spending Christmas with them.

Next I did Rachel's glass, but the placement was bad so I decided to redo it, and it came out much better the second time.

Photographing etched glasses is so hard, the flash brings out the etching but creates so much glare on the glass. Plus, with this one, the design was a bit big to easily capture. But it looks really cool.

After that I did my dad and stepmom's.  Wendy loves dragonflies, so that was an easy choice. For my dad, I chose to do his crest from his persona in the medieval recreation society he's part of, basically it's the symbol that he paints on his shield and things like that to represent himself.

See what I mean? Glare. Uhg. But they both came out really well. My dad's was a challenge with all those little details, the dots are actually supposed to be stars, but I tried to cut out two stars and realized this was never going to work. Luckily one of my dad's shields does have circles instead of stars, so this is totally legit.

Next was my brother Josh's gift. My family always just does a name draw for Christmas presents, since I have four brothers and that's a lot of gifts to buy. This way we each only have to buy one, and I got Josh.

This is another one where it was difficult to capture the full image. Josh is a Denver Broncos fan, so it's just a Broncos logo and his name. Pretty simple, although cutting out and placing some of those thin lines was a challenge. I nearly put his name as 'Doshie' instead of Josh since that's what I used to call him when I was little. It might have been funny, but I decided against it.

The last actual Christmas glass I did was for Danny, to thank him for letting me use his etching cream. I wanted to do the sign of the Prancing Pony from Lord of the Rings, because Danny is super into LOTR. But goddamn, did that have some fine lines and tiny details. Just getting it cut out was a challenge. I was not sure it would work. After it was cut out I actually placed a second layer of shelf liner over it to hold everything in place while I took the backing off and then stuck it to the glass, and then very carefully removed the top layer. It actually worked pretty well.

There's a little bit of blurring of lines around the horse's front legs, but it wasn't a complete disaster, and I'm pretty happy with how that came out. Not that I want to try something that detailed again, haha. That was a challenge.

After that, I did two wine glasses and a beer mug with a phrase I'd seen on etsy and wanted, but didn't want to pay nearly $30 a glass.

It says "Because Kids" if you can't read it. I did two wine glasses because one is for me and one is for my friend Cari, and the mug is for her husband Matt. I already have a Christmas present for Cari, so these glasses are going to hang around until their birthdays, I think.

So that's all the glass etching I did. It was quite a bit, but a lot of fun to see the designs come out. It did make me wish I owned a Cricut or a Silhouette cutting machine so I didn't have to cut all this stuff out myself though. I still own two other plain wine glasses that I think I may try to come up with something for before I return the etching cream though, because cups with designs are just so much more fun. 

Speaking about fun glasses, some time ago I found a wine glass on Etsy that I just had to own.

I mean, it's the goddamn Crescent Moon Wand from Sailor Moon in the form of a wine glass. I just... I just didn't understand a universe in which I didn't own this glass. Sadly for me, this one was already sold. So I immediately messaged the Etsy shop owner offering just all the money for one of these. This was in April of this year. And I got... crickets.  Nothing. No response. I investigated the seller's shop, all the reviews were good except for the most recent one from December of 2016, where the shop owner basically stopped communicating with the customer, never sent the ordered item, and ended up just cancelling the order with no warning or reason. There had been nothing since then, despite the fact that the seller's shop appeared to still be up and running. I realized for some reason this seller had dropped off the face of the planet.

I continued to wait for a bit, hopeful. But I eventually realized I wasn't going to hear anything. And then I had this idea. I mean, I'm a crafty person. The decorations on this glass were made of polymer clay, and I may not be a sculptor, but these were really pretty simple shapes. I bet I could do that. So I bought an extra wine glass when I was buying stuff for etching, and got some pink and yellow Fimo from the craft store. 

I used this image for reference, along with the picture of the original wine glass:

To start with, I made a long, fairly wide yellow oval and pointed the tips. I cut a slit a little further than halfway to allow me to wrap it around the wine glass stem, and then shaped that to the curve of the glass.

It actually ended up being slightly too far to one side, so I just rolled a small snake of clay and pressed that into the too narrow side and smoothed them together, using an xacto knife to neaten and straighten the edges. 

After that I covered the stem in a thin, but not too thin, layer of pink clay, and covered the base in a layer of yellow. I rolled a thicker snake of yellow that went around the seam between the pink and yellow at the base. Then I made a ball out of the pink clay, just sort of eyeballing the size, cut it in half, and then, lining it up with the direction the crescent was going, smoothed that into the top of the stem.

In the end, I got this:

For the decorations on that round part, I made two small yellow disks, slightly smaller around than the pink part, made two smaller red circles out of the clay I still had left from my Sailor Pluto earrings, put those on the yellow circles near the top, made small crescent moons and the little wing/ribbon things that come out of the top of the circle, and a dozen tiny yellow balls. Put them all together based on my reference, and got something that looked pretty damn accurate.  After that was done I added two small pink stars just under the round part. Obviously since I was making two of everything I was mirroring each side so they'd both look good no matter which side you looked at the cup from.

For the record, my version is more accurate than the Etsy glass, she just did a sparkly ball with some weird wing things that don't look anything like the real thing. I modeled mine after the details on the actual Crescent Moon Wand.

I was terrified of the baking stage, I was so scared that the wine glass would shatter. I baked it for two hours at 230 degrees. When it was done, I turned the oven off, but didn't open it, let it sit for a half hour, then cracked the oven open and let it sit for another half hour, and only then would I remove it from the oven. I let that thing cool nice and slow to avoid temperature shocking the glass.  This is what I had when it came out:

Picture made larger so you can see the details at the top of the stem.

Upon retrospect, perhaps I should have expected the pink clay to darken like that, I didn't pick the lightest shade of pink, really. But other than the too dark pink, that looks pretty damn sweet. I was so excited at this part. I knew the pink was wrong, but I also knew I owned some pearly pink paint that I had bought for yet another Sailor Moon project (Makoto's pink rose earrings, freaking forever ago) that would be exactly the right color, and I know polymer clay has no objection to being painted.

So I painted. And painted. And painted some more. It took like freaking five or six coats to cover that dark pink.

This is like three coats in I think? And look how blotchy it still is. Geez. But I did eventually get it smooth. I also ended up doing like three coats of yellow over the yellow parts, there were some bits of lint and things in the yellow clay that I didn't like the look of, but since I wasn't actually changing the base color it didn't take as many coats as the pink. 

Partway through this process, Rachel had just the most amazing idea. You know how partway through Sailor Moon using this wand it gets the silver crystal planted in the crescent? Well, obviously with this wine glass the glass itself is kinda being the crystal, but what if one were to buy an actual round crystal and glue it to the bottom inside the glass? How amazing would that be? I promptly became obsessed with this idea and started looking into it. Obviously I couldn't just use any old glue and crystal in something I intended to pour liquid into and then drink, that's just asking to get poisoned. So after exhaustive research I located a food safe waterproof silicone adhesive that was meant for things like aquarium repair, which sounded perfect, and a nice safe non-lead poisoning glass crystal. Goddamn, did I search hard for that crystal. I didn't want to order it online because I didn't want to wait, but after hitting every damn craft store I could find and getting nowhere, I broke down and ordered one. 

Once it arrived, I glued it in, added the red, yellow and green gems to the red circle, (which I already had from some other project, I don't even remember what) added a coat of clear Minwax Polycrylic, (god, I love that stuff, I use it on everything) just on the clay parts to protect the paint finish, and then my Sailor Moon Crescent Wand wine glass was complete!

Oh my god it's so pretty, I love it so much. So, if I had ordered it from the Etsy seller, she had been selling them for $40-$50, I believe, and I don't know what shipping would have been but for something like this it's gotta be minimum $10, and I'd count myself lucky if it was that cheap.  I spent $1 on the glass, $4 on the clay, $4 on the glue and $4 on the crystal. And I don't really count the glue, because I used such a small amount, and now I have the tube to use for whatever else I might need it for. It'll be handy for things like dish repair, if it's ever needed. And obviously the paint and gems don't count, since I had them from a previous project. So, even if you count the extras that I already had, this still cost me less than $20. And really, only cost me like $13. I'd say that's a pretty damn good deal, and I can't wait to drink out of this glass. 

Okay, okay, I swear I'm almost done here. There's just one more project to mention, it's not done yet, but I'm working on it. I decided I wanted to just crochet something for my niece Alara, she's only one, so crocheted toys are perfect, and I was gonna make her a Totoro. But then I found this image on Pinterest:

Oh my god, isn't that so cute you could die? Shannon saw it and immediately demanded one, but there was no pattern for it, just an image.  But after thinking about it, I realized it was really just a pikachu pattern done in grey with a yellow face and a border around the face to make it look like a hoodie. I could totally do that. So that's what I'm working on. Once I get it assembled I'll get some pictures. And yes, I am making two, I couldn't really just make one for Alara when I knew Shannon wanted one too that badly. I should have plenty of yarn, I hope. 

Okay. You tired of this post yet? I totally am. And I'm out.