Covered in Glitter and Screaming

Mystery gifts are my way of thanking some of the donors to a fundraiser I did some 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 gift's theme is Kitty Glitter, for someone who loves her tabby cat, her garden, cherry blossoms, and things that are pink and sparkly. Here's the short version of how it was made (30 seconds): And here's a more complete version (4 minutes): Lessons learned, materials used Okay craft nerds, this part is for you. During the trial and error phase of figuring out what the base mask should be made of, I tried revisiting the pattern I made for my Bast mask. I didn't love that overall mask shape to begin with, but thought I might be able to improve upon it. I was mistaken . I couldn't even get it to look like the original, I'm not sure how that happened. I also tried using Crayola Model Magic on a wig head because it's pretty light, but I'm not a sculptor and it jus...

Every wedding anniversary is associated with  specific items . The first year is the paper anniversary, the 50th is the golden anniversary, etc. A few years back we started taking photos of ourselves with those items. The traditional items for the 12th anniversary are silk or linen (traditional) or pearls (modern). Husband has a (probably) silk brocade jacket, so that set the formalwear tone. I made spider and pearl accessories to go with them. I started with a faux pearl necklace that looks like a spiderweb. After some sketches and image searches I realized that what makes it read as a spiderweb is if the curved segments curve up . It's not how it would happen in real life because of gravity, but even in my sketches if the arcs drooped down it looked more like a chandelier than a spiderweb.  The three strands that make up the main part of the necklace were harder than I expected, both to get the lengths right and to get all three to lay flat against my neck. But it works! ...

In 2020, a fairly obscure yokai called  Amabie  started to trend on Japanese Twitter with #AmabieChallenge.  There are variations to the story, but the legend says that a mermaid-like creature with long hair, a beak, scales, and three legs or fins emerged from the sea in the late 1800s to give a warning and advice. It predicted six years of good harvest and then a pandemic. To stave off the disease, Amabie said to draw its picture and show that picture to as many people as possible. Since this whole concept was still relevant in 2021 but not bad enough to cancel Halloween altogether, and Amabie has become near and dear to my heart, that's what I did. Process Beak There are two parts to the beak, the beak itself and the mask to hold it to my face (note: also thematically appropriate). While I was developing the beak from paper and then craft foam, I was also looking for me-colored masks to attach the beak to. Both of these took a few tries and some trial and error, but the...

 My illustration pen pal loaned me another  Griffin and Sabine book , and I returned it with a card holder inspired by modern kokeshi dolls . Process the process almost always starts with a sketch Some math was done to determine how big the finished doll should be then the sketch was traced and I used a grid to enlarge the sketch to the final size using the new drawing, I split out the individual pieces to be cut out The body (red) is cut from craft foam, the other pieces are cut from paper The patterned paper at the bottom is usually used for origami Front and back of assembled doll Front and back of finished doll holding the folded letter

My illustration pen pal loaned me another  Griffin and Sabine book , and I returned it with a letter and a puzzle. I already had a mandala design from a workshop years ago, so I started there. I made some tweaks and printed it out to decide what the colors should be like. Thanks to radial symmetry, I could get four different looks on the same sheet. Top: white background, rainbow shapes on left and metallics on right Bottom: black/white shapes on rainbow background left, metallic background right  Puzzles are made of chipboard (what hardcover books use, a little more hardcore than a cereal box) Let's feed that into the Cricut and see what happens Good news: the Cricut can handle drawing all the lines at this size, and it will successfully cut out all those puzzle shapes Bad news: all those frayed edges are not gonna work for me Second attempt: puzzle re-drawn and re-cut on two sheets of cover stock glued together instead of chipboard. A little less solid, but much smoother! An...

My illustration pen pal loaned me another Griffin and Sabine book , and I returned it wrapped in multiple layers of tissue paper so that opening each layer was like digging through the layers of the earth. Outer wrapper (shovel, address, and postage) Organic layer (grass) Topsoil Subsoil Reference -> sketch -> final The book was cleverly hidden under the fossil layer of tissue paper