Not actual work.

I just got back from vacation, so I have not been working on anything! ^^;  Instead I went over to my aunt's house and picked up a box of old gaming things that she was ready to throw away.  I already have... all of this, but I couldn't bear to see it be thrown out.  It's not even worth much if I were to sell it, but I'll hold onto them for a while I think.

Hair embroidery

Well, turns out hair is hard to embroider with, who would have figured?  I'm trying anyways haha ^^;

It's so springy that I doesn't like to lie flat on the fabric, I haven't figure out any real 'tricks' yet except to work in short sections of hair at a time, only 5-8 stitches per length of thread.

I can post finished things!

I figured for once I could post something finished.  So here's the finished Davesprite obitsu that I did!

Inevitably there are a lot of things I would have done differently if I were to do it again, but overall I'm pretty happy!

More fixing things

So last time I strung up my loom I had two ends crossed, which caused them to cross over each other and not come apart cleanly.  I put off fixing it a little bit, but finally did!

Pretty simple fix, but not fun if you've JUST finished stringing everything only to find it.  You just have to untie the bundle that the opposing threads are in and identify which ones it is.  In hindsight it might be easiest to tie a thread around the ones that need fixing, so you'll be sure to know which ones they are when you've got them out.

For this one all I had to do was switch their positions in the reed, simple!

I held the one bundle taught and lifted the harness to check that it was fixed and that I hadn't made it worse or something.  Look good?  Good!

Perfect, a nice pristine shed!

I am starting to wonder if using this thin yarn was a mistake... 8I

Fixing the painting

I did a post recently about a painting that we had brought to Michael's to have framed, and was damaged when the employee removed it.  I'm not saying it was an expensive painting, but an apology or a discount or something might have been nice.

So it was bequeathed to me to try and fix it, or at least make it less noticeable?  My original thought was to do it with acrylic paint, but I decided to start out with pastels since hey, chalk pastels are pretty innocuous and if they don't work no harm done.  They're also pretty easy to control with a brush, and I have a fairly large collection of colors.  Another good point is that it's easy to mix the right color, since if it's wrong you can brush off some of it and add a new color on top, mixing them without really covering up another color.

Well I didn't really want to touch any of the glue, even though it is on the actual painting, since if it was some type of watercolor I could really screw that up.  I don't even know what kind of glue it is.

I started with the green and you can see where I've stopped.  It's a very small area, so it's not like it's going to be the first area the eye sees anyways, but the green is a bit off.  One problem with the pastels is that it's difficult to get a very sharp 'line' with them, so a little bit of it got around the edges of the tears, darkening them too.  So the whole area that I was working on has a slightly darker halo around it.

Almost all the say done!  I did a little more touching up after this, and did my best to clean up around the edges of the area I touched up.  The white chunk you see sitting on it is a piece of a Mr. Clean Magic eraser.  I take them and cut them up into little rectangles like that and use them for projects since they're great for cleaning without any liquid!  It's a micro-abrasive, so you have to be a little bit careful, but it really helped me smooth colors and clean up edges.

Done!  I didn't seal it or anything, so the repair isn't very delicate, but it's going to go under a frame anyways so it's not a big deal.  We'll just have to mention it to the framers not to touch the corner at all...  I don't think the repair is really noticeable unless it's pointed out at least :)

Damnit Michaels...

So my mother wanted to have a picture from our house re-framed, and we brought the whole thing to Michaels because we're lazy and had them take it out of the frame for us.  It was painted by my grandfather's uncle.

Well when the guy came back out it had a big tear out of the picture, ugh!  I mean obviously this picture was not matted properly the first time (looking at all that glue makes me queasy), but clearly the guy just ripped it off all willy-nilly too!  I mean come on, if I had known I would have taken it off myself at home and given more care.

The guy didn't even apologize.

So we bought the frame anyways, since it wasn't worth griping over after it already happened, and it's not like it's a piece that we paid money for, it was given to us.  But we brought it home and I'm going to try matching some paint and at the very least making it less noticeable.

My forte is more with matching skin tones, but I'll do what I can.  I'm not even sure what medium it's done in though, pastels? Watercolor? Gouache?

Still busy!

I'm working up to getting working on everything again!  I've had this warp made for a while now and since I finally finished my last warp it was time to start all over!

Unfortunately I picked such a thin yarn for this one so that means MORE ENDS.  This one has about 160 I think, and anything over 100 tends to get tedious I think.

Unfortunately I got two of the threads twisted when stringing! x(

So that means I have to untie the bundle that those are in and string those two through the reed in the correct order again, then tie it back again.  I had to step away though because I was getting pretty tired of stringing, and I think I was pushing my luck for breaking an end.

Wiiings!

Well I went ahead and finished the feather wings that I had started before, since if I wanted to try again that meant buying more materials and I'm being honest I don't have moneys for that right now!

I used all 20 feathers to make them, so shockingly there's about ten feather's worth of feathers in each wing?  I really underestimated how many I needed, I think I could have used twice as many as I did.

So the easiest way I could think to attach them was to drill holes in the back of the body and just stick the wings on there.  Keep in mind that I made the wings with this plan in mind, so the base wire had two prongs of wire sticking out.  If I wanted to get fancy about it I would have bought some magnets, but I wasn't into it.

So I took the torso apart so that I was just working with the back plate.  The reason that I went with two holes for each wing is because if I did one, the wings would have a tendency to droop down.  With two holes it will keep them pointing straight out!

Holes drilled!  They're not 100% perfect, but they're going to be covered in feathers in a minute!

Yeah wings!

When choosing where to drill I was lucky that there wasn't any obstructions inside of the torso to block where I wanted to put the wires through.

Put it back together!

Pretty okay I think!  And since they're made out of wire and hot glue I'll be able to pose them pretty well too.

2-2 Twill

I haven't worked on this in way too long since I just haven't touched my loom, but it's a 2-2 twill!  (that means it goes up two down two)  Not my best choice in yarns I think T_T;  I was limited in my options, so mostly I just want this piece to be over?

Just some yarn!

So I bought some random yarn from Joanns.com since I wanted free shipping, and two of this type of yarn brought it up to the minimum price (they always get me with that... I love free shipping).

I'm thinking it might go nicely with the white warp that I have ready to be put on the loom, I'm not 100% sure though yet.  It's just so fuzzy and nice!  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to try making a warp out of it.

Skipping out on updates again!

Sorry, but I have another excuse!  My brand new computer is super broke :(  It crashed randomly, and just won't come back up, some of the hardware is broken but I don't have the expertise to figure out where.  I hope they will let me return it, it's less than thirty days old...

For now I'm working on my ancient tablet PC, it's functional, but far from perfect.  I miss my computer.

Anyways, I do have things to update with, more work on Davesprite!

I airbrushed him orange (which turns out is just one of the shades of yellow that I already have), and I made his tail!

If anyone wants to know more about how I made the tail I can go into it, but I didn't take any photos of the progress, whoops!

So now I have to decide what to do for his eyes?  There's just no good reference for his eyes!

Tiny orange wings

So I've started working on the wings for the Davesprite Obitsu!  Unfortunately... I don't like them x(

My biggest problem: I didn't buy enough feathers.  I bought twenty, thinking it would be enough, but in reality I just needed more even if I wasn't going to use the full feathers.

Now I'm thinking I might try some other material for the wings, or just buy some premade resin ones or something :(

Momentary lapse

Sorry I've been gone for so long, but my father's recovery from his heart surgery took longer than expected!  He's still obviously recovering, but he's home now so it's so much easier than having to go to the hospital every day!

Now that I'm back I'm working on another little Homestuck Obitsu, since I ordered two more from theJunkySpot.com

I'm going to be making a character called Davesprite (he'll come up under google if you want to look), who's got orange skin this time.  So that means I have to change the whole body color of this doll first!  Or, well, half of it.  He has a 'tail' kind of thing instead of legs, so I separated the body at the hip.  At first I was worried that I was going to have to break something to get it apart, but Obitsus are surprisingly easy to take apart!

All I had to do was pop the little balls on the top of the thighs off with some pliers, and the hips popped right off after!  Since there's such a nice arrangement inside with the joints, it will be perfect to attach elastic to for the tail!  Some kind of armature would be ideal for the tail so it could hold poses better, but I think strung elastic will work just fine.

Now I also have a random pair of hips and legs for... something else?

Next I took all the pieces that I could apart!  I could have taken the stomach piece off too, and probably will before airbrushing, but didn't for the photo.  I had to make sure to remove ALL of the joint pieces, since they're what I'm working on right now.

So here they all are!  Very small, but a huge nuisance.  Since any kind of surface paint that I put on kept chipping off, no matter how many layers or what type of sealant I used, the only other option I could think of was to dye them.  I decided to just go for it since if they didn't turn out well I would have to go back to finding a different surface treatment to cover them, and it would cover up a bad dye job if need be.

I didn't think of it until I had already tried it, but these joints actually come apart into two pieces if you're handy with two pairs of pliers.  I should have done this first since for some reason that I can't fathom they made each side out of a different type of vinyl, so each half takes the dye differently from the other.  What this meant is that one half took dye much quicker than the other.

It wasn't a difficult fix though, I just took them apart after, put the lighter pieces back in the dye bath and then put them back together.  They're not perfect, the dye went on slightly uneven (I used RIT fabric dye, but it was the powdered version and I had trouble getting the crystals entirely dissolved) but since they will be mostly hidden inside the joints I'm not that concerned.

The point is that dyeing the joints actually WORKED!  I'm so pumped, this means that I won't have to edit out huge white splotches in photos where there's chipping in the joints.  The rest of the body I can airbrush since there shouldn't be an issue with rubbing.