I made the kelp necklace before I had my “bigger, simpler, more garish” epiphany, so it is small, delicate and softly colored. But I had beaded it already, so I’m incorporating it nonetheless.

The top part is a large tube so that if it’s possible I can slide a thin strip of LEDs into it and they will shine through the glass seed beads. I’m creating a lot of semi-translucent and / or pierced and / or hollow elements in the hopes that some of them can be wired for light. I’m not expecting all of them to be, but I don’t know which ones will be feasible and which won’t, so I’m making a bunch of them lighting-friendly.

Seastars. Big, simple, orange, with reflective sequins. I’m making two more seastars in pink, and they will be slightly larger and have more reflective sequins.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of ocean research, and the thing I have learned about the shores and most coral reefs (which is where I’m basing my costume on) is that it is not very colorful. The rocks and the sands and the kelp and the seaweed and the coral is predominantly four colors: medium brown, bottle-green with some yellow in it, muted grape-purple, and sickly dusty pink. Mostly the brown and the green with a smidge of the purple and the pink. A jazzy yellow fish or a bright blue anemone pop up all over, but the majority is rather bleh. So the base of my costume will be brownish-greenish with brightly-colored characters scattered about. And I won’t be making any fish. I will have crabs, sea slugs, sea worms, the above-mentioned seastars, snails, anemones, urchins, clams maybe, and an enormous jelly. The closest thing I’m going to have to a fish is putting scales on my corset. It’s just everyone when they think of ocean think of fish, and there are so many other under-appreciated oceanic beasties that I want to highlight.

Speaking of one of those beasties, here are my barnacles. I put a pencil into the photo to give you a sense of scale.

I’ll keep updating as I create more pieces of this exciting ensemble.

2. Also pertaining to my work, I made a logo for a yogurt shop, and they asked for a repeating band they could put around the store as a chair rail, on the napkins, on the website, etc. So I designed one and it’s very cheerful. I’m posting this primarily because people are always saying, “Why is everything you design with the creepy forests and the monsters and the like? Don’t you ever want to draw a golden retriever puppy gamboling in a field of daisies?” Hey, people who say that, check it out. Happy happy yogurt in cups. Not even remotely macabre.*

3. There’s this artist named Adam, I think his last name is Ellis, and he has a delightful blog called Books of Adam which has caused me to snork my beverage more than once. He does portraits of people for about twenty-five dollars a pop, and they are really, really special. Here are some of my favorite of his blog entries:

http://www.booksofadam.com/2011/04/last-best-place.html

http://www.booksofadam.com/2011/03/more-stupid-cat.html

http://www.booksofadam.com/2011/02/mahalo-come-again.html

http://www.booksofadam.com/2010/11/poor-stupid-cat.html

http://www.booksofadam.com/2010/10/there-are-no-facts-only-interpretations.html

And here are some of my favorites of his portrait drawings.

*If someone wants to pay me to make something with a puppy romping in a field I will more than happily draw it for them. I love puppies. However, if I ain’t makin’ paper I will draw what I want, and that’s insects and deep sea fish and skulls. So shush already.

And I made myself a drawing so I had some reference point.

There’s headdress/facscinator with a crab and some tube worms, then there’s the beaded necklace that looks like kelp, followed by the two sea slug bracelets, the corset covered in scales, and the hoop skirt with starfish. This drawing doesn’t include the snail shells on the shoes or the jellyfish umbrella. CRAZY amounts of work. I’ve already started beading the necklace. I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to yell, “Hey, pipe down! Can’t you see I’m working on my kelp necklace?!”

And everyone was so excited!!! because they could check their hair and/or makeup in the hallway, so I felt obligated to make another mirror for them this time as well. This time I went with a sunburst using Diet Coke cans, Stop-n-Shop Diet Orange Soda cans (they have a great pattern on them), and Fanta cans. It’s a big hit. Here’s what the window looks like in its entirety:

And here’s the mirror.

You can’t appreciate it because it’s being lit by frosted fluorescent tubes, but in sunlight or incandescent light the cans shine in the most charming way.

The preciousness of this cake, it slays me. I was inspired to make this for my mother’s birthday party (which was this past weekend). Here’s the problem: I have never baked a cake. I think I made some brownies in high school, and then I made some peach cobbler a couple years ago, and that’s it. So I have no prior cake knowledge to pull from. Here’s what I did in case you wish to make it for someone you love:

1. Buy Dr. Oetker’s Organic French Vanilla cake mix, vanilla frosting and rose pink food coloring. It has to be vanilla cake so it’s pale. This particular cake mix was the least synthetic of the mixes, and since I never bake I didn’t want to buy a ton of supplies I would never use again (flour, sugar, baking powder, etc.) If you want to make cake from scratch, more power to you. Just make sure it’s a pale-colored batter (no chocolate).

2. Get a myriad of 8″ springform baking pans. I just have one, so this took FOREVER. Try to have at least two. Borrow from friends. Whatever you gotta do.

3. Mix the batter in a big bowl. I used two boxes and their accompanying ingredients (eggs, milk, oil). Then take five identical bowls. Pour equal amounts of batter into the bowls. It should look like this.

4. Arrange them in a row. Put a whole bunch of food coloring at one end and no food coloring at the other end. Then, using miniscule amounts of food coloring, try to create a gradation from no pink to bright pink, like so:

5. Pour the lightest color into a pan and bake. Check frequently, almost obsessively to make sure it’s not turning brown. The edges can turn brown, but if the top starts to get any color, pull that sucker out right quick.

6. Take a knife and run it slowly around the edge of the pan. Pop the pan off. Then run a big ole bread knife underneath the cake until it separates from the base. Place on display thingie (I have a raised Martha Stewart cake display thingie, so that’s what I used). Use the bread knife to level the cake if it’s higher on one side, or poofy in the middle. Lightly frost with frosting.

7. Repeat with the next darkest level. Over and over and over until you hate cake and you want to punch cake in the face.

I also made my mother the adorable flag thing that was on top of the cake with her name on it. Here’s what it looked like when it was finished.

Then people cut into the LoveCake and surprise! It worked!

Since my camera is kinda average it looks like the two bottom stripes and the two middle stripes are the same color, but in real life it was a beautiful gradation. People were like OMG PINK CAKE STRIPES HOW DID YOU and I had to explain it to a variety of people and they all were impressed. So if you like to bake I recommend you make this because it will garner rave reviews. And it was tasty and delicious (bonus!).

Has everything been made for TV that’s going to be? Because I feel like we’re bottom-feeding in the Marianas Trench now. For you kids at home that managed to make it through the Nineties without hearing about Heidi Fleiss, she was a real famous madam in New York who had a bevy of faaaahne women working for her, but alas she was caught and went to prison and got hooked on drugs…and if you look at the picture I’ve included, she clearly, at some point, had a whole bunch of face work done. Watching her smile is like watching a spectre trying to grin after a root canal. Geesh.

And now she has twenty parrots (loud ones, macaws) hanging out in her house. I’m glad I know this now.

More importantly, I made myself a festive fascinator (translation: stuff stuck to a headband). I saw this on a crafting blog:

http://news.holidash.com//2010/04/23/mothers-day-corsage/

And I didn’t want a big brooch, but I did want a shnazzy headband, so I adapted it for headband use. First, I individually dyed each petal with alcohol and ink.

Then I glued them all together but because they were stiff from the alcohol, they didn’t mash together, causing gaps. To make the gaps less…gap-y, I made dark purple polymer clay twisty thorns and scattered them in and out and all around. Finally, I thought it needed leaves so I found some super-green peacock feathers and made some orange wire stems and poof, fancy headdress for me.

Now I just needed to get invited to a party with a Frida Kahlo theme or something so I have a reason to rock this thing in public.

This one:

And my personal favorite:

I’m surprised Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum haven’t outlawed Mallard ducks. If I were them, I would.

By the way, the funniest thing I saw there was a security guard who was clearly hired from some big agency and was profoundly displeased about working at MoSex (as the kids call it) with a black and shiny gold tie that read “I LOVE JESUS” over and over and over. It was his tiny little protest. Cricket and I were like, oooh honey, you need to find another line of work.

In somewhat keeping with the sensual theme, I went with Neenernator to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Alexander McQueen exhibition. Alexander McQueen was a brilliant fashion designer who recently died, and this was a big retrospective of his work. I was vaguely familiar with this clothing and accessories, but now I think he might be my favorite designer. He was extremely concerned with taking the normal lines of the body and reshaping it – making different parts look longer or shorter or thinner or fatter, putting things in the incorrect place. Artists like Lady Gaga and Bjork really liked his work. McQueen stated that some of his influences were Tim Burton, The Brothers Grimm and Edgar Allen Poe. You’ll notice there’s a lot of references to death in his work, as well as S&M. At best, his clothes were uncomfortable to wear, and at worst they were probably a bit painful. I’m going to show you some of the more impacting pieces.

At the end of most fashion shows, they finish with the wedding dress. I love the fact that McQueen used antlers in one of his. I was told by my mother that under no circumstances was I allowed to ever get married with antlers on. She never lets me do anything.

One of the things McQueen was most well-known for was the lobster shoe. It is a ballet-shoe with a crazy-tall heel and the front bit protrudes out, making it look like a lobster claw.

Here’s a tattoo someone got of the lobster shoe. Hardcore, dude, hardcore.

My favorite dress that changed the perceived silhouette of the body was a dress I called the Christina Hendricks dress, because, well, it puts padding where one would have it if one was Christina Hendricks. Here two pictures of Christina Hendricks:

And here’s the Christina Hendricks dress:

My favorite dress was the horse dress. It’s molded to look like a nude woman on top, and then the bottom flares out and has horsehair hanging below. What makes this dress so great is the bottom flounces like the ponytail of the snottiest cheerleader in your high school.

And if you watch this video from 2:59 to 3:09, you can see the skirt-flouncing in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5gY5DXrb48&

My second-favorite item was the jacket made from the skin of a Thompson’s Gazelle with gazelle horns coming out of the shoulders. You don’t need to wear makeup or earrings or anything with that, the horns do all the work for you.

There were also some stellar accessories on display. Like the face disc:

And the metal jaw:

And let’s not forget the external metal skeleton corset or the feathered ear things:

But, not surprisingly, I was drawn, once again, to wearing dead things as ornament. Specifically McQueen’s dead bird phase. At one point I turned to Neenernator and said, “IMMA GO KILL A DUCK.”

So, today I went on the internet and looked up dead birds I could purchase. It turns out that whole dead bird skins are kind of expensive. I wanted to buy this Grey Peacock Pheasant skin, but it was $300.

And since I have less than no idea what I’m doing, I decided to go with some starling skins that are a mere $7.00 each.

We’ll see what I make of this. I have been inspired. I may very well go and see the exhibit again. I recommend you see it too. It closes August 7th.

This weekend I hope to make a felt dahlia with dyed ink edges and maybe a drawing or two. We’ll see how it goes.

And here’s what the dangly end looks like when it’s hanging.

My mom likes it so much she commissioned one, so it looks like I’ll be making another one. Eh, it’s a good thing. Keeps me occupied, keeps me off the streets.

Luckily, as I have gotten older, my tastes have become more refined. And over time, I forgot about my childhood lust for royal headwear. But then the Royal Wedding happened, and the fire in my belly was ignited again. I don’t work in metal so I couldn’t weld anything, so I decided to go with wirework. I bought a bunch of wirework magazines and books and looked through them for ideas. I decided I didn’t want the wire to be gold or silver, but a darker, more muted bronze-brown color. It made the objects near it really pop out. And then I went with clear AB crystals, both in bicone and round. Normally I avoid AB crystals. AB is short for Aurora Borealis, which is this rainbow coating on one half of the crystal bead. I was going to go with plain clear crystal, but the ABs had a bit more life to them. Once I had all the ingredients, I hunkered down and started to work. And pretty much immediately there was a big pile of failure. Working with wire is HARD. It’s squishy and soft, or it’s hard and difficult to bend, and it has a tiny bit of elasticity, so it is damn near impossible to make everything match perfectly (which is how I wanted it). However, after accumulating a pile of spent wire, I finally kind of got the hang of it, and this past weekend, I finished the crown. I must say, it turned out really well. Here’s a picture of it on my dining room table only lit by sunshine from my window.

And here it is lit at night lit by my dining room lights.

And the best part about it is that it has dangles, so it sparkles with almost no motion. Here’s an animated gif to give you an idea.

I couldn’t, for the life of me, get a picture showing the sheer twinklitude of this piece, but take my word for it, it is Twinkle City. Oh yeah.