Adelaide and the Fireflies

Adelaide in the firefly jar.

For months, a large mason jar sat collecting dust on my "ideas to bring to life" shelf at the mill. Yes. I do have a shelf with such a name. Anyone at the mill can tell you, it's full of a rather eclectic, albeit plain, collection of items. Most seem rather boring alone - like the jar - but put them with a faery and there's a story for each item.

Adelaide

Meet Adelaide. I've always loved that name and found out it's a name of a woman swinging high up the older branches of my family tree. I'd like to imagine that woman would love this faery (more likely: my ancestors gossip about me like those griping cartoon ancestors of Disney's Mulan).

Adelaide the faery is a little miffed, if you can't tell from her expression. Picture it - you're a faery (oh go on, imagine it... no one's watching... and honestly, everyone suspects you fantasize you're a faery now and then anyway so just roll with it). The cool night air mingles with the warmth of the remains of the first day of summer. Fireflies zip around you silently. You flash your wings, lure them in and SWOOSH! You caught a few! No.. wait... that was a loud swoosh. Faeries make tiny swoosh sound effects. You look around. You see fireflies... and glass. You've been caught by a firefly catching human!

Adelaide's Wings. ^_^ It's hard to tell but there are 4 of them. She had to have small dragonfly wings so that she would fit into the jar.

The green "fireflies" are actually LED lights. There's a battery pack on top of the lid so they'll never wear out. Adelaide herself is hand sculpted. You know me - I never use molds. Unlike my miniatures in bottles, Adelaide was sculpted outside the jar. I made an aluminum foil circle the size of the jar opening, and when I sculpted her, I did so on top of that circle so I knew she'd fit. She's mounted on a clay base that I covered with cloth, silk leaves and the occasional late spring silk flower.

The scary doll and other tales.

The scary doll's wabbit.

I realized with horror that my last post was in May. MAY! Where'd June and July go?? Oh, well let me tell you a few things I've learned. One: you want to have a booth or table in a show? You better realize you do at least 6 months in advance or all the spots are taken. I've been really lucky and managed to find the applications to shows and festivals a week or two before they are due. Two: some people actually do take your business card AND contact you in a few days. I always thought that was just a line people say to be polite. Three: Heat waves and polymer clay are not good bedfellows. We had a week where the clay felt like melting chocolate. I couldn't sculpt with it and it kept me craving dark Lindt truffles.

Well insert montage music here and allow me to recap the highlights of the past 2 months. :D If you care to go beyond the pictoral feast, I've included captions! Yay!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JANNA! (she turned old on July 29th) Ok - about the doll. No. She's not a faery. No. I cannot pay for anyone's therapy bills for viewing her. But yes, Janna has these sort of tastes at times. Janna is my best friend and needed a doll to act out all her Tim Burton-esque fantasies with. The wabbit at the top of the screen is the polymer clay "rag" doll in this doll's arm. This doll was sculpted with a mix of polymer clays, air dry ceramic, paint, fabric, vintage lace, llama wool and the theme to Coraline as well as the Dresden Dolls stuck in my head.

 

This gnome is my tiniest yet. Seriously. The bottle is only about an inch long inside. I've been having fun making very tiny miniature scenes. Gnomes are my favorite. This one comes complete with house and flopsy ferns. ^_^ Photograph courtesy of Andrea Pirkey.

This lovely vessel was handmade by Jason Powers of Powers Art Glass. With a tiny needle, I sculpted the grass, mushrooms and little faery to fit inside. We made a couple of these fantasy vessels; another contains a gnome! As far as I know, this little cutie is still for sale.

My newest faery baby. :) I can't believe I'm up to 23 of these little cuties! 

This fire phoenix was one of my favorites. I hand carved each feather and placed them individually. This was one of those instances where I found an item and instantly saw a sculpture in mind for it. This was a large, gorgeous daisy from a fabric store.

This baby sold a while ago - I just always loved this picture. ^_^

My "Naturally Shed Faery Wing Necklaces" have been fun to make this summer. They catch the sunlight so well and I was thrilled to actually see someone I don't know at the post office the other day wearing one! The metal is silver plate, but I also made some in sterling silver for a gallery in Chicago, IL. I'm thrilled to be there! :D

She needs a name - New Painter Faery!

I just finished her today!

click to enlarge

So new that she doesn't even have a name yet (nor does her little creation). I had been working on this cute little fae all week, and had created her painting last week. I was inspired by a little wooden easel I found at the dollar store made for collective plates. It's perfectly faery sized! Plates? Pshh. No thanks. The canvas and the painting are all made of clay. I started by cutting a rectangle out of white clay, then painted on the wet clay with a mixture of liquid polymer and ink. In the center of the painting is a door with stones leading up to it. And as it was the faery's creation, a little magic was in the paints. A tiny (seriously TINY) faery is coming out through the door!

I sculpted her with a needle.

The painter faery (wow... really need to get a name for her!) was really fun because I tried a couple of "new techniques" on her. For one, I had a blast blowing paint through a glass pipe at her to give her a true artist appearance. The splashes and smears are hard to see in the pictures, but she has lots of purple, blue, green, white and silver flecks.

When you stand in paint, you get a little dirty

Another thing I tried was simply dragonfly style wings. Instead of curling long "spokes" for butterfly ribbing, I made long oval loops with blue metallic coated copper and silver spirals inside. Lastly, I had sewed a little beret and created a little matching pair of overalls for her. Because she's not a jointed doll, she was extremely hard to dress (at least for me. I'm really not a seamstress in the slightest!). Making a pair of pants is easy enough, but you can't just slide them on because the legs are rigid. Same with sleeves.

New OOAK faerie! - "Oliver's Snail Mail"

"Oliver's Snail Mail"

Faeries can deliver mail at the speed of magical wings - be sure to specify "air mail" for that service. For all else, there's snail mail. This is Oliver's first job. He's already gotten rather used to the pace.

This art doll sculpture started with a large shell. I'm sure it's some sort of seashell, but it just screamed "garden snail!" to me. I thought about turning the shell into a garden gnome house with a little chimney and a lawn, but I wasn't in love with the idea. It sat on my shelf at the studio collecting dust for at least 2 months before I decided to create the snail that went with it just to see what it would be like with some clay breathing life into it. Once I formed that bizzare little critter, I was on a roll. I saw a mail bag, letters all over the place and a faery fast asleep on the mail bag as he delivered urgent letters. Hence, Oliver was born. ^_^

 

Oliver will probably go in my Etsy shop later in the week, but for now, you can also view him up close at Riverview Artist Mill if you're in the NH area.

(by the way - Charly, if you read this, I posted my letter to you this way. You should recieve it... soon? heh)

***NOTE: I'm doing a raffle for a wicked sweet handmade faery wing pendant for anyone who comments on my blog this week. See the bottom of my previous post for more details on the contest!****

Ash's Treasure - #1 from my OOAK Faery Collection

"Ash's Treasure"

#1 of The Silver Branch's "OOAK Faery Collection"

Created in January 2011
Not For Sale

Ok, I've seen far better. That self-depreciation out of the way early on, I will go on to say that while not nearly perfect, Ash is my first figure since I started claying again, and I'm rather fond of him. Sitting height: about 4 inches tall.

EVERYTHING was a learning experience! I learned a lot through Ash. First off, it should be noted that I'm not a fan of molds - so no molds here - all the clay is hand sculpted. I created him at the Riverview Mill, a place where free internet access is nothing more than a beautiful dream unless you sit in the parking lot, so I had no tutorials or images to help guide my figure forming. But aside that, the wings, the clothes, the hair - all a learning experience from scratch.

What everyone seems to like about him the most is his wings... probably the easiest part  to make in all honesty. Ah well. I have to admit, when I saw the amazing creations of my fellow artists in cyberspace, I was dazzled and enchanted by their wings too. It's one of those magics, that once you know what they are and how to make them, they significantly lose their luster. I won't jade you here - you want to know more about them? Shoot me an email. But, trust me, it's best to live with magic than without it. I will say that they are made with open flame - how can you not have fun with that? I make faery wing earrings too - check my etsy shop if you're curious.

His clothing taught me something else - ribbons are probably easier to work with instead of full swaths of fabric, and that I am easily frustrated when creating tiny clothes. How do all you art doll, barbie, miniature and figurine seamsters do it?! I loathe the idea of smearing glue all over the figure and sticking cloth to it. Ash's clothing is all painfully and clumsily hand stitched. His pants were the worst to make because of the way I positioned him. Heather from "My Sister's Closet" was a huge help and I eventually managed to create something presentable after a few hours - a few hours! Yikes! Anyone know any good doll clothing makers I could team up with? lol

Oh where, oh where is my hair?

His hair, while rather a fright in the end, was the product of impatience. I should have tried putting hair on a practice head first, but Ash was sitting finished and waiting for his hair for over 2 weeks. I just had to cover him up. I tried llama fiber on a practice head weeks before. It was a mercy that I did too because it didn't work. I needed llama wool straight from the fleece. I needed Tibetan Llama wool. It's tiny ringlets and fibers feels so real to how I imagined a tiny person's hair to feel, that it's well worth the wait for it to ship in from New Zealand. I order from Dollworld. So friendly and fast despite the distance. For some reason, that lovely country of LOTR was the only place selling TIBETAN llama wool. O.o Funny world, ain't it? Well, it's so fine that the special glue I use to attach the layers of hair to his scalp has a habit of leaking through the layers. Hence the girly headband. Now I had pipettes and precision syringes, so I'm hoping that is a flaw of the past.

But there you have it. Ash! And his treasures? That's an old bracelet I beaded for myself (to match one I made for my lovely friend Libby) and is now safely under Ash's guard. I also made for him a tiny leather pouch hanging from his belt. The pouch is adorned with a brass bell and a tiny head feather from my father's parakeet, Fleur. Inside? 4 raw garnets I mined from Wilton, NH. :)

How I started making Faeries

"Ash" - What a learning experience he was!

My focus at present seems to be on practicing polymer clay faeries. Yeah, I do spell 'fairy' in that geeky 'epic, fantasy' like way. Truth be told, this was the old english spelling and dates from texts at least as far back as the 16th century, so it's not as new age as many make it out to be.

Now where'd I get this desire? I do love my 'green girl' faces and faery doors and haven't abandoned them, I promise. But I've always had 'a thing' for faeries. It was about 2 years ago that I took a little ball of clay and tried to follow an online tutorial on how to shape it into a baby's face. I still have that rather scary baby. As you can see from the picture of it below, I was inspired from that point on to give polymer clay a long vacation: no pay and no guarantee that there will be work for it again once it returns.

About 6 months ago (maybe less) I picked up a pack of Sculpy again... mostly out of boredom I think. I was battling the worst kind of writers block. It was the kind where you have an amazing plot, and even characters to boot, but no idea where to start the whole darn thing! I needed some sort of release. I made a dragon. Note about Sculpy III - it breaks at the very thought of tapping it. Brittle, powdery bits of a young dragon all over my car! Well, I moved onto Super Sculpy. I made faces with leaves around them and painted them to look like antiqued copper and sunlight speckled forest canopies. My 'Green Girls' (so called because they look like the Green Man, but I always saw them as too feminine) I flatter myself that I grew better at making faces. Still, I remembered my little baby faery and put full figures on the back burner. I made faery doors, started a flower nymph collection (working on flower #3! Wooo!), gnomes, jewelry. Finally, I decided to try it out. I took some wire and created an armature.

Watch out for my upcoming blog post all about my first somewhat decent OOAK (one of a kind) polymer faery - Ash.