This years Hallowe'en challenge was to make a costume for a character from the game Undertale named Gaster.

My daughter loves this game and wanted to come up with a costume for this character. I am always up for a costume challenge.

The costume was pretty simple except for the face and hands.  We needed to make a mask out of paper clay that would still allow her to see through.

I was pulled back into the world of Minecraft again when I saw the kids using an online skin editor to make their own unique Minecraft skin.  I thought how could we make something like this in the real world.  

Using my computer I designed a paper template in the correct proportions to a standard Minecraft character.  From there I printed it out, folded and glued it to see if it would work.  Once I had my template successfully built, I printed out several more and got the kids to use their personalized Minecraft characters and colour their paper characters out using markers or coloured pencils.  We even used brads to make the arms movable.

The kids love having a real world paper model of their own Minecraft skin.

I have repaired and restored a few cat statues this past year. 

One was a statue given to me by a friend years ago upon the death of one of our cats. It has been in our garden for 10 years slowly crumbling away. I finally decided to make some paper clay to rebuild the parts that had crumbled and then repainted it to resembled the cat that we had lost.  I found a great water sealant to keep both the paint and paper clay sealed tight against the rain and snow.  It looks great and our memorial statue  of our cat "Pyro" is back in the garden again. 

It's been a lot of ordering online these days.  So much packing materials to recycle or throw out....or make art?

This foam insert was left over from something we had ordered and I just had to make it into something.  With the addition of a juice can lid, some cereal cardboard, a bit of paint and some leftover yard and this guys was done.

​I think of him as my studio mascot.

My mother gave me a totally amazing present for my birthday.  A digital piano. I grew up playing piano and gave it up when I was a teenager.  Recently with my own kids I have gotten back into music and taught myself ukulele and guitar.  Now with this amazing new digital piano I can refresh my piano skills.  I was so excited to start playing that it sat for 3 months on my long coffee table where I played it from sitting on the couch getting a sore backed from the awkward position.  

It was time to get to work in the shop and build a piano bench for it. Here is my result.  It is not the best built but it was made with what I had on hand and at the perfect size and height to fit the piano and myself.

I am so excited to start playing again!

There is a small problem I have.  I've been doing a lot of painting.  I don't have the wall space to frame and hang anymore but I still want to be able to display some of my new art pieces. 

The old throw pillows on my couch were getting pretty ratty and I have repaired them several times so I thought it was time to get new ones.  Why not get my art printed on pillows for my couch?

I found an online site that you can upload family photos and get them printed on canvas or on throw blankets or even pillows.  I took a chance and uploaded some designs and waited for the pillows to arrive.  I was quite happy with how they turned out and love how they look on my couch.  I gave several as gifts to friends and family as well.

While I was ordering a second batch of pillows I added in some umbrellas which were surprisingly cheap.  Each panel had a different piece of my art on it.  The contrast wasn't great but I was still pretty happy with the outcomes and now have a functional piece of art I can use on a dark gloomy rainy day.
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I love glass sculptures but have no means for making them myself.  I was able to make an interesting sea jelly sculpture out of plastic water bottles using only a pair of scissors and a small candle.  It was quite fun heating and warping the plastic strips and then assembling the sculpture.  It was also fun to experiment with the different shapes I could make.

I think these would be really neat if there were dozens of them hung up and maybe lit up somehow.  It would be a neat garden installation.

The nice thing about the game Among Us is that the characters are all relatively the same and are very simple.  That makes it easy to sew felted crew mates based on the game. 

​Which I did...many of them...in every colour.

Why not right?

I tend to use a paint rag when I paint instead of a paper towel.  After a while the paint rag is more paint that rag but they are sometimes so colourful I hate to throw them out or wash them.

So why not make them into stuffies?  I have made several paint rag stuffies and have even had my nephews make their own while teaching them how to use the sewing machine.

Sometimes I add paint or stencil shapes on my stuffies.  Sometimes I add accessories or felt features to them. Sometimes I draw on them with markers.  Sometimes I stitch random lines or shapes into them. There really are no rules or limits except your imagination and the materials you have on hand.

This guy was made by my 6 year old nephew Charlie.  I let him paint a rag however he wanted and then add stencils on top.  He then traced out a shape he liked and cut it out.  I then showed him how to use the sewing machine to sew it, adding on arms and eyes.  Lastly we stuffed it and closed it up.  His name is Goofy Guy. ​

He was so happy with how it turned out he made a second one.

Years ago the kids and I experimented with using modeling clay on a Styrofoam head to make a weirdly inhuman mask shapes.  They took forever to dry and the modelling clay was hard to pry out from the paper mask.  We painted them but they ended up just sitting around for years gathering dust, never quite finished.

I decided to revisit the masks this month and giving them an all new paint job, adding materials to them and creating glass eyes.

My first mask redo was a cat like mask with a ridge of bumps up the centre of it's face. Once painted, I added wool to create a mane and painted glass beads as eyes which I then mounted in behind the mask.  It looked even better when I lit the mask from within making the eyes light up.

My next mask was a tad weirder.  My daughter had originally made the shape by adding modelling clay to the mouth area before papering over top.  It had a strange gas mask-like appearance.  I ran with this idea but added bits of black spray painted plastic I melted with a match, small glass vials filled with different materials, a pair of glasses and again glass eyes lit form behind.

I love how it turned out even if it's a bit creepy.