Flight . . .

So, I have long been an admirer of the work of artist Kazu Kibuishi. He is the genius behind such graphic novels as Daisy Cutter (a favorite of mine), Amulet, and the annual Flight anthologies. I do not actually own any of the Flight collections and I DO NOT KNOW WHY. Possibly momentary brain damage that prevents me from purchasing them.

Anyway, I also like to paint, but I suffer from a serious case of I-never-know-what-to-paint-and-probably-won't-be-able-to-do-it-justice-anyway. So, I end up painting reproductions of other people's work. For me, it's a way of getting to know a work I love, and being able to afford to hang it on my wall. I certainly don't know Mr. Kibuishi personally, and I hate hanging posters of artwork, so this is as close as I could get to hanging anything he's done.

The image above is the original Canyon Town. The one below is a picture of my reproduction, captured on my somewhat-crappy phone camera. I spent the better part of Sunday working on this, and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I would never pass it off as my own work, and I highly recommend you check out Kazu Kibuishi's stuff yourself. If you don't hate hanging poster art prints the way I do, you can buy some of his work at Nucleus Art Gallery.

Thanks for the inspiration, Mr. Kibuishi.

* This is actually my second repro based on one of his works. My first is Tree House, and is now hanging right above Canyon Town on my wall!

DIY Decorating . . .

I found this project on Design*Sponge yesterday, and fell in love. An old suitcase, some hardware, legs, and a little time and voila: a highly original coffee table. I so want to do this now;)

1940's Hair Tutorial

This video is very poorly framed, I know. I couldn't get a good angle for the camera! I promise I'll shoot this again and do a little better, so you can actually see what I'm doing (which is, after all, the point of a tutorial!). For now, learn what you can from this, and I promise to do better next time!

Wedding Cake Project: Accomplished!

Wow, do I wish I had a completed cake picture to show y'all! Somehow none of us managed to take a picture of the finished cakes, so it'll be a few weeks before I can show you guys the professional pics. I sure can tell you about the process, though;)

First of all, if you ever take it into your head to make a wedding cake for a friend or family member: 1. Make sure they are someone you love dearly, and 2. Have your head examined by a professional. Otherwise, you will not survive the process. All in all, it took around 24 hours to produce this masterpiece of crazy.

I was very, very lucky that a friend, J, who used to decorate cakes for a catering company she worked for, offered to help me on Thursday. I'm convinced that this is why the cake was finished by Friday. But, I get ahead of myself. We have to start with Wednesday.

Wednesday was Baking Day. I had one pan of each size I needed: 6", 10", and 14". I also, I discovered, was lacking certain supplies. I made the first two batches of devils food cake so I could bake the 14" layer; each of the two batches was a double recipe, so there was a lot of batter. I did batches simply because I knew I couldn't bake everything at once, and tripling a single batch would produce too much batter to fit in a mixing bowl.

Then, I made two batches of spice cake for the middle tier while the first 14" round was baking. I then had to repeat the baking when I took the first batches out of the oven so I could bake the second batch of each. This was when I realized I didn't have enough butter, eggs, or cream to make the top devil's food tier, the ganache, or the buttercream. So, being broke, I had to wait for my sister to get off work and come home with what I needed. then, it was back to baking.

Then, it was the ganache that wouldn't set. I had decided in my infinite wisdom to torte the devil's food cake with peppermint chocolate ganache, but this frigging recipe refused to set in the fridge. After three hours, at around midnight, I was torting and crumb-coating the bottom and top tiers with liquid ganache and chocolate buttercream (thankfully not liquid). I was beat. And, I had a full day ahead of me on Thursday.

Thursday was Decorating Day. J arrived early and we started kneading fondant. it didn't take long to realize that 8lbs would not be enough for all three tiers, so we ran back to Michaels, stupidly bought black fondant accidentally, and had to return again when it was discovered. D'oh. Luckily, the actual fondanting process went, for lack of a better word, pretty smoothly. The cakes went back in the fridge, and we started working on the gumpaste flowers.

J cut them and started to shape them, and I hand-painted them and stuck them on wires. Then, I pulled the tiers out of the fridge one by one and started to hand-paint the birch-effect on each tier before adding the flowers (I'm glad the gumpaste we used dried so quickly!)

This is, unfortunately, the best picture I have of any of the completed cakes. This is the large 14" tier in my fridge; you can see the flowers and the hand-painting on it. It was all finished around 6pm, J went home, and I collapsed on the floor, exhausted.

The cakes really did turn out beautifully, and given how many things could have gone wrong, it was surprisingly and blessedly hitch-free. Given the chance to do it again, and given enough lapsed time for me to forget all the work required, I would probably do this again;)

Now for some assorted candids from Friday and Saturday:

It was cold and snowy when we transported everything to the venue Friday. Here are some of the centerpieces in the parking lot behind the Bistro.

The wedding party was a little unorthodox: A had a Best Woman on his side, and Tabitha had a Maid of Honor and Matriarch of Honor, our best friend B. that's A's Woman of Honor posing for the photographers with her brooch bouquet.

Oh, those centerpieces;)

Our friend and day-of coordinator K, setting up the escort card table.

Tabitha, looking pretty as she gets her hair and makeup done.

Tabitha's fabulous shoes;)

The venue before it was filled with people.

We're all ready to head over to the venue from the hotel . . .

I think that's it for now on the wedding;) When the professional pics come back, I'll post those too . . .

Centerpiece DIY - Finally!

I know I promised this centerpiece DIY ages ago, but what with a few major life changes, I just didn't get to it until this last weekend! Here it is, finally!

What we used:

-9 ceramic silver birch-bark vases

-newspaper

-9 blocks of floral foam

-box cutter

-28 manzanita branches

-silver wire

-wire cutters

-crystal garland (I think we used 3 or 4 of these)

-2 bags of reindeer moss

Directions:

1. First, I stuffed the bottom half of each vase with newspaper. since the floral foam blocks were only half as high as each vase, I had to take up the space with something! The paper was pretty firmly packed, which is important as later steps would compress it.

2. Next, I shaved the corners off of each floral foam block and shoved it inside the vases. I wanted a pretty tight fit, so they were left just a tiny bit too large and I shaved the last bits off when I shoved it down into the vase columns. This is messy, so make sure you're ready to vacuum and dust when you're done!

3. Starting to choose the branches. We ordered a sh#t-ton of manzanita branches, knowing that some would be unusable. I was looking for three that seemed to go together, in flow and feel, so there would be no bizarre gaps or openings. It was fun trying to choose the perfect branches, and we ended up having just enough!

4. Next: jamming the branches into the foam. This was probably the hardest step; most of the branches have blunt ends, and they didn't want to go in easily! For extra credit, you can saw the ends of each branch into pointed angles;)

5. I then wired the branches together really firmly, so there would be no shifting in the completed pieces. I stuffed reindeer moss around the branches and over the wire. It gave the pieces a nice pop of green!

6. Now for the fun part: stringing the crystal garlands! We used crystal graland curtains on jump-rings, which made it very easy to connect strands that needed to be longer, or disconnect sections to make it shorter. I draped around each centerpiece organically, draping some higher or lower, longer or shorter. Then, I wired each loop to the branch it was draped on, so nothing would come apart when the centerpieces are transported to the venue next week!

Ta-dah! It took most of the afternoon, but I finished all nine centerpieces! I think they look lovely, and I can't wait to post pictures of them in the venue space! Just 12 days to go!

The Sketchbook Project . . .

Thank you, Christina at Down and Out Chic for introducing me to this (if you don't already read her blog, you should!)

I know this blog tends to focus mostly on the headpieces and costumes I make, and it's easy for me to forget that before I worked with a sewing machine, I was at home with pencil and paper. It's been more than a year since I painted or drew anything; not so much because I didn't feel inspired, but I suppose just from plain, old-fashioned laziness. I look at the three blank canvases laying around my house, or the blank sketchpads, and I just sigh and shuffle them somewhere else. In my mind I see landscapes of vibrant colors or muted watercolors of purple and grey, but they stay there, in my head. But, any gift should be used, and I have let this stay dormant too long.

I was inspired and excited then to discover The Sketchbook Project. Art House Co-op in conjunction with the Brooklyn Library will be collecting moleskine sketchbooks from now until January of 2011, and for $25 they will send you a blank book with just one instruction: fill it up. There are a list of themes to choose from, or else you can let them randomly choose one for you, and the themes are brilliantly open: "In Flight", "The view from up here", "Capture the Flag", "Dirigibles and Submersibles", "it will be fun, I swear". There are 24 themes and each one is inspiring and evocative in some way. Which did I choose? "Nighttime Stories" of course. I can already see the pictures forming in my head and cannot wait to get started; a blank sketchbook is like a box without a label, full of the possibility of being.

Some previous sketchbooks

What's even cooler is that the sketchbooks will go on tour in March of 2011, and after that will be available to be checked out from the Brooklyn Library. Each book comes with a barcode label so that you can track your book and even see how many times it gets checked out! The tour is heading to cities like San Francisco, Atlanta, Portland, Austin, and even Chicago (my book will be there even if I'm not!). As the site says, it's like a concert tour, but for sketchbooks;) I'm breaking out my pencils and pens and paints right now . . .

Check out the Sketchbook Project and sign up; I'd love to see some of the things my readers do, and i'll try to post some scans of my entries as well.

And, at the Center . . .

It's official: the livingroom is now Centerpiece Central. Three boxes, one of them large enough to hold a body in, arrived on Monday, and they are now sitting about, mocking us with the space they take up.

The largest one holds not the result of a murderous rampage but instead 30 manzanita branches, those twisty, bleached, beautiful things that seem to remind me of so many things: coral, veins, lightning, you name it. We opened the box and stared inside at the interlocking, woven mass inside, and I immediately went for my camera. Soon, they will be taken apart and crafted into tall, gleaming, crystal-encrusted centerpieces, but for now they are this. There is a stark beauty in that box.

But, we definitely need to clear those boxes from the livingroom. Either that, or start charging them rent.

Save the Dates!

I can finally post about this! Yay!!! I had to wait until the first people started to say they had received them, so as not to ruin the surprise;)

Back in May, I did a Save the Date photoshoot with my sister and her fiance. They wanted a funny shoot that encapsulated their personalities: vintage and goofy;) I even put one of my headpieces in A's hair, and he borrowed a friend's '80's style fluffy meringue of a wedding dress. it was a wretchedly hot day for them to be wearing polyester layers, but they got into the spirit and we had a great time. Then the real work began: I had to put together the postcards in PS4. It took me quite a while to get everything just so; there were hundreds of frames to go through and weed out the three best, then they needed to be filtered and edited and all the text had to be laid out. All told, it was a nearly month-long project from shoot to mailbox, but I'm very happy with the results.

What do you think of my sister's Save the Dates, dear readers?

Brooch Bouquet DIY: Part 2

As promised, here's part 2 of the Brooch Bouquet DIY! I loved making these bouquets for my sister's wedding, and I'm tickled to share the directions with all of you;)

Supplies

-a circle of satin fabric with a rolled of serged hem

-a little square of the same fabric

-matching satin ribbon, 1 1/2"

-contrasting satin ribbon, 1/2"

-a pretty rhinestone button for an accent

-glue gun

-scissors

1. Start with the square of satin. I made it about a inch and a half square, just to cover the very end of the holder. Put a dot of glue in each corner and glue them to the holder bottom, making a little encased end.

2. Take your circle of fabric next. I made mine a little wider than the base of the holder, so it would come out a little over the brooches. Cut a hole in the center of the circle slightly larger than the stem on the holder, and put the stem through this. Then, start to pleat the fabric and glue it down to the base, going slowly and gluing each pleat down carefully so everything is held to the base and no plastic or foam is showing.

3. Next, take your ribbon and start to twine it around the stem. Glue the end first, and then glue at regular intervals to keep the ribbon very smooth and secure so there is no white plastic showing. My holder's stem was slightly irregular in shape, so this created wrinkles in the ribbon; that's okay! It actually gave it a less-perfect appearance, which was nice.

4. At the bottom, cut your ribbon and turn the end under, gluing it down so that every bit of white is covered in ribbon or fabric.

5. Finally, at the place where the stem meets the base, I took the contrasting ribbon and made a simple band, covering the seam with three tiny rhinestone buttons for a bit of bling. Remember that you'll be holding the stem pretty tightly on the day of your wedding, so you don't want anything sharp or uncomfortable where your hands will be!

Voila! Your brooch bouquet is ready for your big day! A few extra tips: as you can see from the pics, I turned the bouquet upside down to work on it; this was accomplished by covering it first with a cloth napkin and then holding the top as I flipped it onto my lap, so that none of the brooches went astray. It also protected my legs from any sharp bits from the brooches!

I hope this is helpful to those of you thinking of doing this project for your own wedding; it's time-consuming, but totally worth it! Happy DIY-fun, everybody!

Coming Soon . . .

Look for a DIY Tutorial for my sister's centerpieces! We made one this weekend, and it was easy, fast, and looks fabulous;)

Stay tuned!