lamb enamel pins

After a long time of obsessing and putting it off and looking all over for a lamb like this, I finally produced my first enamel pin!

Soon I might post about the process of making this, but the main thing is that I drew a bunch of India ink drawings and scanned my favorite--a completely analogue process.

The backing cards are handstamped with a handcarved block of easy carve linoleum. My favorite.

The material is hard enamel (also known as cloisonne, the highest quality kind) with silver details and  the lamb just an inch and a quarter tall at its highest point.

You can check this lamb out on my new etsy. Oinkshop! We have Eve to thank for the name.

Thanks so much for looking! I am grateful to all the various sympathetic and tender people and readers who have supported this and all the other animal-based DIY projects I have pursued over the years.

DIY: Birds on a Branch

Here's a fun little project that's infinitely adaptable--making your own tiny painted animals. I made a pigeon, sparrow, blue jay and robin, to sit on a branch I found in a Bed-Stuy gutter. (Why would you want to do this? I don't know, why wouldn't you??)

I've never been good at sculpting clay, but fortunately, you only need a roughly-correct shape for your little animals to come out gorgeously.

Things you need: Sculpey (I bought the "hazelnut" color because I liked the idea of little bits of brown poking through, but white might be easier to paint), armature wire (just for their little claws, if you want them to be able to grip the branch), and some acrylic paint (I bought four colors--white, red, yellow, blue). And a paintbrush. And an oven.

The process is very simple.

1. Form the shape of whatever animal you're sculpting--look up reference photos! Different birds have surprisingly different body shapes.

2. Bake them according to whatever type of Sculpey you bought (with my Sculpey III, I did 275 degrees F, 45 minutes).

3. And then the fun part--paint them. I painted mine in stages, with basic colors first and then little feather details on top. They really came to life with the paint. It was a very exciting experience.

as you can see, I didn't spend a ton of time perfecting the little clay bodies. which was fine!

the first layers of paint were rather loose and general.

all together! <3 <3 

i couldn't resist making a little clay suki as well...

I think she's into it!

PS Here's how to make a rubber stamp business card. And other DIY posts are here!

diy rubber stamp business card (on rubberstamps.net!)

Because I am trying to convince myself to embark on a photo project that would possibly involve asking strangers for their photo, I decided it's time to get some business cards. Plenty of stationers sell customized business card stamps for like $80 each. But I wanted to do my own. If you start Googling this topic, you'll quickly find RubberStamps.net. It is not a very beautiful website but these guys know what's up. This was the most fun I've ever had on a DIY project.

1. Draw and high-quality scan your design.

I just used a pencil and pen and drew a goat inspired by one in the Pictorial Webster's. (Rubberstamps.net also lets you format in some text online. I also considered printing out the words and gluing them on before scanning, but chose to write it all myself.) It wasn't necessary to draw it as small as an actual business card (2" by 3.5") but I just wanted to be able to visualize it.

2. Upload.

I thought this was going to be a huge problem because I didn't know how to change my image into a pure black and white thing with no "noise" from the paper or anything...turns out their unbeautiful, genius software just figured out exactly what I wanted. Here are all their wood-mounted options. Mine was $23...which is great as far as business cards go!

3. Wait around for them to mail it to you. Mine came in 6 days. Awesome.

4. The one thing I'll say about the stamping stage is that you don't have to press as hard as you think!

the paper source has a big selection of blank business cards.

you can also choose to add a wooden handle on, but i thought it would be easier to stamp this way.

When Eve came home and saw all of them, tears actually came to her eyes, which was pretty much how I felt too.

ps. another recent budget fun diy.

we painted our desk!

the chair's color above was the original color. this is a desk eve found by the side of the road in philly. we painted it "black ribbon" by behr...a beautiful slate gray-blue.

~free~ color-theory inspired diy

i love colors.

i love josef albers, though i am ashamed to call this a josef albers diy, because it's not rigorous enough. but maybe i'll try doing one of his real exercises ("make two colors make like the same color by putting them on different backgrounds," "make one color look like two different colors," etc) next time i go to home depot.

i love color-aid, except that the nice set is more than a hundred dollars, and i'd feel bad about cutting up all those beautiful colors anyway.

this is where home depot comes in! they have those sumptuous FREE paint chips in splendid array all over the walls of the paint section, and since they're actually painted, not just printed on a printer or something, they are a wonderful substitute for color-aid, i think. 

i went around the paint chip section, first pulling down the colors that were most appealing to me (i love periwinkle blue and ocean blue, dark teal, cadmium red, etc) and then pulling down colors that i found grotesque but worthy (olive green, ballerina pink, etc) and i fanned them out and looked for any weak spots. there aren't too many really bright yellows on the market, but i found a eye-piercing chartreuse that filled in that gap.

i came home and cut off all the written-on parts, resulting in lots of pieces of pure color in many different sizes.

huuuughghhghghghghghgh

i tried a lot of different arrangements. i planned to keep all the pieces as rectangles, but i didn't like the overlapping-shingle look. they were beautiful laid out in a tidy spectrum, but on a rectangle of paper, i couldn't find a pleasing order. i just wanted to keep all the potential of rainbow there...you know how a palette often ends up more beautiful than the painting it was supposed to be in service of?

get on me, beauteous color assortment

so i hit on the idea of cutting the rectangles into squares, and then cutting the squares into 45-45-90 little triangles. that way i could pair them off and be a little more organized about it, matching color to color, like a puzzle, till i was satisfied.

the finished thing ended up with some rainbow on the side and then lots of triangles. i was inspired by these absurdly beautiful children's blocks. yes, color rally! that is exactly how i want to feel!

here's the final result, slightly skewed in front of an old monoprint.

and one last note if you want to pursue the freewheeling joys of a color collage yourself: i found my super glue was more helpful than my glue stick for keeping down the cardstock-thick color samples.

diy shadowbox gift

since i was so profoundly inspired by this shadowbox-filled house on the selby, i made this little shadowbox from a bamboo drawer organizer from bed bath and beyond, steiff animals, some felt, tissue paper, and the all-important super glue from a craft store, and these battery powered string lights!

i didn't really know what i was doing. but it came out okay. eve, for whom this was a birthday present, has some strong feelings about t-rexes and goats, so that's why they make an appearance. one huge benefit to this kind of project: it's fully customizable! i bought some junk food japanese erasers to give that t-rex a snack.  i think i might add onto the background some trees or mountains cut out of a national geographic. i will post an updated picture when i do!

that beautiful painting on the easel is by my roommate marina!