Before Blog – Other Stuff

And now, for all the other before blog stuff that I couldn’t think of where else to put. Let’s start with a few things that I intended to sell at craft fairs – things that either never really took off at home sales, and never actually ended up at a fair.

This was my first decoupaged suitcase. A fine example of “green” crafting – making beat-up, old discards found at Value Village lovable again. This remains one of my favourite pieces, due to the wicked-cool wrapping paper that I found for it. I just couldn’t part with it though, so it currently stores supplies in my office.

But I tried to sell these others at a home sale one year, and I think I sold two of them. I have ended up giving the others away to friends as I no longer have big home sales, and they are too big to drag around to fairs. Maybe I’ll try them again some time, if I can find some more amazing papers. Or, if I get brave enough to try collage.

Another item that falls into the “too big to drag around” category are these paper mache critters.

You can’t really tell from the photo, but this dragonfly measures about 2-feet square. The original idea behind these derived from a time-killer at my old job. When I first started working at the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary, I had to sit at the front desk and count visitors and answer questions and the like. On a quiet Thursday afternoon, I’d spend lots of time just twiddling my thumbs. So I asked if I could make some decorations for the jail-cell-like childrens classroom, and this is what I came up with.

I am please to report that over a decade later, they (and others) still adorn the classroom.

As does the animal track mural I painted…and the mountainscape…and the ladybug cabinet…and the childrens dress-up bird costumes…and puppet show back-drop…and the painted foam eggs…and so on. Yeah, talk about finding a niche. 😉

Anyhow, I originally wanted to make these critters 3D – and I did. But I think I went a little too big, and I wasn’t sure that people would like the crazy quilting pattern, so I left them unpainted at the home sale (to be customized)…and, well. They didn’t really sell.

I ended up painting the dragonfly to match our bathroom, and I think the rest are still in the basement. When I get around to it, I’m going to go smaller and just paint them “quilty” and see what happens.

Huh. Even though I don’t actually quilt a lot, I sure do love the look of quilting it seems (one of my first ever projects was an embroidered quilty cat, seen in Stitchery). This is a painting I did of our dogs one year.

Now, I don’t fancy myself a drawer or painter, so it was quite challenging to capture their personalities…but somehow I think I did.

I could bore you with some of my “stuff I had to make in art classes to get my Photography Minor” here, but really, I’m a little embarrassed by it. Suffice to say, I’m still working on my drawing and painting skills.

An example of my university work. <shudder> I mean, I’m fairly good at duplicating somebody else’s work (which was a regular exercise in one of my Art 101 classes – see below), but my own work tends to be…how do we say this nicely…”naive”.

An Egon Schiele Self-Portrait I duplicated in university.

Copying 2D things to 2D surfaces I can do – especially when “naive” –  like painting up my old VW van with Winnie the Pooh characters.

Front (above) and back (below).

Ahh, lots of fun was had in that wonderful van. I sure hope she’s still running out there somewhere, making people smile. Now, there was also a leopard-spot-covered Corolla at one point…

It was my attempt to hide all the horrid looking rust spots, but it often got called army camouflage (and I often got called names – but that’s another story). My days of driving painted vehicles are looong gone, so lets just keep going, shall we?

Hmm, hiding horrible looking things, huh? What about this table? When I first found it, it had giant chunks of laminate missing, and somebody had coloured the underlying particle board with a crayon.

Much better. Another of my “green” crafting attempts – reclaiming the table using broken tiles. I never figured out how to deal with all the rough edges, though, so it lives outside on the porch. Speaking of ceramics…

Here are some of the “paint your-own-pottery” items I made whilst working at Fire Escape.

And a “colour your own” shower curtain, filled with my favourite quotations that I made for my first apartment.

And I think that’s about it for now. Let’s leave off with the oddest thing I’ve ever made…

…a giant 5×5 feet fabric-covered foam mask that was used to decorate some gala at some point, and which was later auctioned off to raise money for the gala’s cause. I wonder where it’s ended up?

And that, my friends, is the last of the “what did I do before blogging” posts. I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch, as it’s been a lifetime of effort, but you get the idea. 😉