Covered in Glitter and Screaming

One of my engineery-crafty* friends got a Cricut, so we lately we've been for-real pen pals with analog letters and low-stakes paper crafting projects.  The first exchange was fairly normal letters (although his was miniature and mine was written on shopping list paper because that's all I have for stationary right now), and then he sent me a foam-and-paper creation with a tab-operated camera iris and a background light, so obviously I had to step up my game. 2020's been a tough year, so that was my theme. Note: ideally I would have made this out of black or other dark-colored card stock, but I was using what I had on hand, which was white cover stock and black construction paper. The Process First the concept sketch, then a very rough prototype from scrap paper for proof of concept (found a design flaw immediately and was able to correct for the second draft). Then I went back and added measurements to the sketchbook page. In hindsight, I should have combined two of these ...

Mystery gifts are my way of thanking some of the donors to a fundraiser I did a few years ago. I ask for a theme, and then I make a thing in as much secrecy as I can manage and send it to them. This particular theme was "dragons, dinosaurs, or dump trucks" because that's what was relevant to the child's interests. I went with dragons, because that is also relevant to my interests. THE HEAD I wanted to build the head around a baseball cap to avoid problems with sizing, since I am not physically near the recipient. I got hat and jacket sizes from a parent and crossed my fingers that I could get it all together before he outgrew those sizes. I saved myself a ton of time by starting with a  Wintercroft  mask template for the head. You do not have to be a pro artist to be able to assemble them, and they look amazing! Check them out. I knew I liked  this dragon head , but I also knew that I needed to make it smaller because they are designe...