There and Back Again Book Purse: Handles and painting the cover

Finished and Unfinished

As I mentioned last week, I wanted to do a book purse based on the adventures from The Hobbit.  I decided to make my own book cover because it's a bit of a shortcut... I can design the cover myself and don't have to spend the time or energy looking for the exact book at the right price.  I can't see paying more than a few bucks for a book I'm about to murder the heck out of.  I ended up getting the fabric and book for less than 10 bucks at my local Goodwill.  This project is pretty involved, so I'll be breaking this up into 2 parts.

You're going to need a lot
more beer, kiddo.

So for my bibliophiles, these posts may be slightly traumatic as they depict graphic images of a book that has been dissected for the sake of art.  I'll make the appropriate offerings to appease the Ghods...

Some day.

So... on to the book murder!

There and Back to Nails

During some of my forays into the craftier side of the interwebs, I stumbled upon people who turn books into purses.  These things are so cool!  I love the idea of taking an old or destroyed book and giving it new life.  Instead of looking for an appropriate book, I'm taking a sorta-shortcut and making a book cover for a fictional book because, why not?

This week's inspiration is from J. R. R. Tolkien.  Bilbo Baggins writes a book called "There and Back again", about his Gandalf-fueled adventures.  I'm making my own version of his book and turning that into a purse.  

There's been a lot of problems to solve.  One of them is what kind of handles I'm putting on the book purse.  You can find some very nice purse handles for sale, but they didn't inspire me as much as I'd like.  I also had a whole bunch of pages and I didn't want to throw them away, but no idea what to do with them.  Then it hit me... glue them together and make handles from the pages of the book!  

I love the idea of having the handles relating somehow to the purse itself.  It has that artsy self-referential element that makes my outer geeky girl squee. Of course, that leaves me with the problem of how to attach them to the purse... and for that I'm recycling the hardware from a purse that's seen the end of its days.  So far, I'm hopeful that it will work, but I've never done this before, so it's all a guess.

Girly Nail Art Time

So for now, here's a simple manicure that I did recently.  It's very easy to do and pretty versatile by mixing colors.  Using black, white, silver, and gold will have a very different look from one done with pastels or neon colors.  Use what you have on hand and play with the density of dots.

If you don't have dotting tools, which are needed for this look, grab some household items.  Anything that comes to a point will work... pencils, pens, bobby pins, and toothpicks all make great dotting tools.  

I've also seen dotting tools and other nail art tools available in drugstores around here, so they're mercifully easier to find for 10 bucks or so.  If you plan on doing a lot of nail art, they're very useful to have around, especially since I use them for some sculpting jobs, too.

Star Trek Cabochons and necklace

Those of you who've been reading this for the last several months may notice a few new changes.  Now that I've got lots of crafts up, I'm adding a page to make finding a specific project easier, in addition to what I've got on my Etsy shop.  The numbers for this blog keep going up week after week and I want to make it easier for new people and crafters to see what there is to see.

Speaking of Etsy, I'll be producing some components that you'll see on the crafts here, like the cabochons in this project.  You can purchase them here.

Thank you to everyone who has come to my site.  I hope that I can continue to inspire you all.  

Star Trekkin' across the Universe

I remember sitting down with Mom, Dad, and my brother to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation every week when I was a kid.  Mom loved the original series, so we'd gather around the tv to watch the latest episode on UPN.  The Inner Light, where Picard encounters an extinct alien civilization, is one of my all-time favorite episodes. I still cry at the end!

I love seeing the evolution of Star Trek as it responds to new concerns and values in our culture at large.  It's always been a groundbreaking show, and I hope that future incarnations, whether fan-made or Hollywood made continue that tradition.  I follow several former cast members on social media because they seem like genuinely nice, interesting and compassionate people.  I've seen every episode of the original series and TNG, a few seasons of DS9 and  Voyager, a few episodes of Enterprise (Didn't like that one), the animated series AND the web series Star Trek Continues.  I've watched documentaries about the fandom and the wonderful series hosted by Shatner called The Captains, but I don't consider myself a Trekkie or Trekker because I'm not involved in the fandom. 

I was looking at a cameo and I wanted to do a simple design that would have a lot of visual impact. I decided to do the iconic Starfleet insignia.  My original idea was to do some sort of piece glued into an ornate bezel to resemble a cameo.  I wasn't able to find any bezels that I liked, so I ended up wrapping the cabochon in wire.

Fun fact... The delta shape was originally the insignia for the Enterprise crew on TOS.  You'll see different insignias on the crews of different ships.  Lore has it that it became the Starfleet symbol after the Enterprise was the first ship to return safely from its 5-year mission.  

Aw, hell.  Maybe I am an antisocial Trekkie.  There are worse things to be!

Dr. Who TARDIS mini Journal and necklace

I can't wait for the new Dr. Who to start up this month, it's one of my favorite television series! I'm going to miss Matt Smith, but I'm excited to see what Peter Capaldi will bring to the role.  I wanted to do a Dr. Who craft for the blog, but I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do, until I went cavorting on my one of favorite craft inspiration sites, YouTube.  I stumbled across some book making tutorials and because I'm a little nuts, I thought it'd be a lot of fun to do a miniature of River Song's TARDIS journal.

I wasn't satisfied with the tutorials I found.  The crafters did a fine job with their materials and came up with some great journals, but they didn't look like the stills from the show.  They'd glued
something, usually card stock or cardboard on the top of their existing journals, which gave very sharp edges to the journal, however the prop makers seemed to have embossed the leather instead. I wanted something that looked closer to the prop, so I went looking for a material that I'd be able to work with that wouldn't cost me a ton of money.  I had some craft foam left over from a previous project and so I decided I'd give it a shot.  I think it looks a little more like leather than some of the examples I saw.  Of course, after painting, mine's not an exact copy of the journal from the show, either, but distressed items rarely look the same.

I wanted to make a necklace after seeing some of Jill Weisman's beading tutorials on YouTube, so this was a perfect opportunity to combine them both into one very stunning necklace.

Oh, and NEWS!  I have an Etsy shop now where you can find all of my crafty goodness for sale.  Most of the items listed there will be one-of-a-kind items all inspired from the blog.  You can find the pieces at the shop tab up at the top, too.  It'll take you to Etsy to purchase.  Go check it out!  I'll be here when you return, I promise.  :)

Cosmos Jewelry part 2: The Spaceship of the Imagination

When I saw Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, I knew I wanted to sculpt the Spaceship of the Imagination.  If you haven't seen either of the series, the spaceship is a magical creation that can travel anywhere, from distant stars to subatomic particles.  In Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the ship appears as a ball of light or we see the bridge.  This time, Ryan Church designed a beautiful, sleek oblong ship that ushers us along our journey with Tyson.

My original inspiration was an amazing steampunk choker that I picked up at SoonerCon from C.C. Guice of A Wench in the Gear.  I loved the cascade of chains from the bottom and the large focal point and the buckle closure in the back.  It's one of my favorite pieces to wear... I get compliments on it all the time!

This project hasn't gone as well as I hoped it would.  My original intention was to cast this piece, but my molds have all been consistently crappy.  It's been 15 years since I made a mold using sillicone, and despite all the YouTubing, I've been unable to get something that works using homemade soloutions.  I broke down and bought some mold putty, which will hopefully allow me to cast this in resin like I want to.  I may need to phone a friend.  (the link contains nudes and may be NSFW)

Since I wanted this project to be ready by the time I publish the blog, I tried to turn "Frusturating failure" into "happy accident".