The Gryphon's Feather Studio

Email hour

Gwen:     "Any idea what it is?"
Jack:       "Not a clue. Could be a weapon. Or a really big stapler."
   

Having Torchwood on during my email hour is infinitely more fun than using a timer.

DIY: Costume Horns

 

 

Every year, at Halloween, I end up in my own personal version of the SyFy show Face Off.  If you haven't ever watched the show:

Face Off is a competition/elimination series exploring the world of special-effects make-up artists and the unlimited imagination that allows them to create amazing works of living art. Each week the artists are tasked with using their considerable talent to create original movie-worthy characters such as aliens, human-animal hybrids, horror villains, cyborgs and others. Challenges incorporate a wide range of skill sets including design, sculpting, molding and application. It all builds to incredible reveals of the competitors' finished work and the drama of one artist being sent home by the expert panel of judges.

In my version of Face Off, I am madly problem-solving my way through ONE little's Halloween costume, as the clock ticks down to the last moment. I am the contestant who will be sent home. The other two costumes are resolved and finished, but one costume always consumes three times more hours than expected and requires way more brain power than I'd planned.

 

 

Last Year's Costumes:

This was THE ONE last year.  Started it two weeks in advance. Looks straightforward.  Wasn't.  Talking about it makes me twitch.

I altered one of my SCA costumes to fit a ten year old.  

The corset was going to be a problem, as I was going to cut it down and add in new grommets. Instead, I had a brainstorm and used snaps!  

I took in the skirt the easy way by sewing down folds, and made the peasant top smaller by taking in the sides and arms, and then opening up the casing that held the elastic, shortening the elastic, and sewing it closed.  

The eyepatch was made from a leather scrap and painted with acrylics.

This all should have been a pain, but it went smoothly. 

 

 

Enderman from Minecraft.  

This also should have been simple; it is just a cube, for goodness sakes. Which means, it wasn't simple.

I built the box from foamcore, which was straightforward, but just when I was feeling smug, I realized I had to figure out how to keep the box level on his head SO HE COULD SEE where he was going. Yeah....  

Of course, it had to be spray-painted inside and out, far enough in advance that the paint fumes weren't going to kill my kid.  

Oh, and did I mention I started it the day before Halloween?

(why? see mermaid costume above... still twitching...)

*** After posting a photo of Gryphon in his Halloween costume, I had a couple of messages about how I made the horns and what I used to attach them to his head.  This post is in response to those queries, so the step-by-step isn't well illustrated. If I had planned ahead for it to be a DIY, I'd have done photos while I was making the horns. Sorry. ***

 

 

Ah, but I am ranting about the distant past.  Let me get back to blathering on about the recent past.

This year, the challenging project turned out to be just part of a costume, the HORNS.

(We also had last minute fang-failure, but that was a product defect and therefore beyond my control.)

 

In the Daughter of Smoke and Bone world, there are beings called chimera who are composed of a mixture of animal and human body parts.  Gryphon wanted a chimera-ish costume.  We planned horns, wings, fangs, and human clothes.  

 

I have a huge pair of soft, grey, goose wings I was going to mount to a leather holster set-up (like a 2-gun shoulder holster) with the wings fed out through a coat I found the coat while thrifting.  The coat is wool, very well-constructed, is slim cut, and fits Gryphon wonderfully. We both agreed the coat was too cool to slit open.  He didn't want the harness on the outside, since that defeated the ruse of being naturally winged.

The horns became the key element. Many beings have fangs, from vampires to cats, so the horns were the thing.

 

 

We considered real deer antlers, since we have a stash, but I quickly dismissed them as an option because of the whole attaching-to-the-head-without-a-hat problem. Deer antlers are heavy, like balancing a stack of books on your head heavy.  Real horns- goat, antelope, kudu, sable, ibex, what have you, are hollow (or can be made that way by removing the core), but since I haven't any, and time was of the essence, that wasn't an option. 

Google-searching for "horns antlers cosplay" came up with a plethora of links on how to create really short horns. (Homestuck style, mostly.)  Finally, I found a link with potential on Instructables, "Make 3D, Light-up, Twisted animal Horns!"

 

 

I didn't need the horns to light up. I was planning on painting them; the appeal in these instructions was in the supplies- garden support wire, foam garden tie, parchment paper, crepe paper, hot glue... items that would result in lightweight, and thus easier to attach to a head, horns.

For the rest of the post to make complete sense, you might need to look at the original instructions linked above.

 

 

My modifications to the above instructions:

 

 

The first dilemma came when I couldn't locate twisty garden supports.  Okay. Instead, I bought a square tomato cage, which was on clearance for $2, and took it apart. The foam plant tie was out of stock (not a shock, our growing season is quite over), but I did find soft plant tie with a rubberized coating.  Amazon had the twisty garden supports & the foam plant tie, but they were priced at twice what they would have cost had I been able to buy them at the store.

While looking for the foam tie, I pick up a couple packs 3/8" polyfoam caulk saver, which while lacking wire inside, was lighter  and less expensive ($3 vs $5, 20' vs 16') than the rubberized soft plant tie.  (just in case... you'll see why this was important soon enough.)

I took two long wires from the tomato cage and bent them into spirals using a large pipe with a suitable diameter.  (the supports that hold up the second floor of our garage, although anything sturdy enough, round, and the right size will work.)  

The helices of the horns need to spiral in opposing directions.  I bent the wires in opposite directions: one bent around clockwise, the other, counter-clockwise.  I stretched the spirals until I had the shape I wanted. 

I laid them on the floor and played with them until I could determine how I wanted them.  I didn't need the whole length, so I cut them.  First I marked where to cut them. (have them lying next to each other, so you can be sure they match.)

The Instructables version called for wrapping the wires in packing tape until the desired widths were achieved.  That's a whole bunch of packing tape! (cha-ching!) 

Instead, I cut cheapo 8.5" x 12 " craft foam I already had into 1" x 12" strips and wound that on, taping down the end of each strip with masking tape before starting the next.  I used packing tape to wrap the finished form.

 

 

I followed their instructions for wrapping with baking paper.  The baking (parchment) paper acts as a release paper. The hot glue doesn't stick to it, allowing you to remove the finished horn from the form.

Wrapping the slick tape-covered horns with parchment paper was the hardest part of the whole damned thing.  I'm not sure the tape is necessary if the parchment paper is sufficiently overlapped, but since I couldn't remove the tape without ending up with a bare piece of wire, I soldiered on.

 

 

I wrapped the soft plant tie around, and hot glued as per instructed.  Epic fail.  Waaah!

The rubberized coating and the hot glue didn't hold together.  When I attempted to remove the horn from the form, I ended up with chunks of hot glue and a long piece of plant tie. 

 

Yeah, there went a few hours of work.

 

I tested using the glue gun set for high-temp glue, but that didn't help. (the instructions call for using a low-temp glue gun.  My glue gun has two settings.)

 

 

I started over, this time with the polyfoam caulking. 

 

(yes, it was 7pm on Oct. 30.)

 

(yes, my child needed these for school in the morning.)

 

(sighing, tears. mine, not his.)

 

The polyfoam caulking worked wonderfully.  It did pull apart in a couple places when I removed the form, but a little more hot glue fixed them easily and perfectly. (low-temp hot glue is a necessity.  high-temp will melt the polyfoam into oblivion......)

The next step would have been to wrap them in crepe paper adhered with watered-downfoam glue as sort of a paper mache coating. The crepe paper layer might provide the perfect texture but would need to dry completely before I could paint them.

 

It is now 9pm. 

I despaired.

ARGH!  Wailing! Pulling of hair! Gnashing of teeth!

 

I glued a small coil of polyfoam caulking together as a test piece, and spray-painted this test piece without the crepe paper coating.  Sufficiently chimera demon-ish. Whew.

 

I spray-painted the horns over the next couple of hours. Too much paint at once would have been a mess.  (Think "puff, puff puff" when spray-painting a light coat.)

The horns needed to be completely dry in order to handle them without removing paint, so while waiting I made Maggie's headpiece.

At Wal Mart, I had found this headband:

The headband was made of two widely-spaced, firm, sturdy headbands joined at the tips.   The tips are flexible which makes them fit well and comfortably. It came in a few colors, including black! 

I bought two- one for Maggie's headpiece and one to use to attach Gryphon's horns to his head.

Of course, this isn't Maggie.  She was asleep when I took this photo.  

I hot-glued black flowers (Dollar Tree) into place. (three rows in the center, with the middle row glued taller, two rows on the ends)  

The plastic skulls came in a bag from Walmart (97 cents), and I used the rest of them to make "jewelry" for her costume.  

Poor thing didn't get to wear it though; she's been sick.

 

 

Since the paint was still tacky and it was getting late, I put the headband on Gryphon, sorted out where the horns went, and marked the edges with a white water-soluble crayon so I knew where to glue the horns. I set my alarm for 5 am and headed off to bed. (Remember when I said there was always one costume that took hours and hours?)

In the morning, before I attached the horns to the headband, I wanted to stabilize the bottom part of each horn so it wouldn't wobble comically.

To do this, I bent two pieces (6"- 8"?) of soft plant tie in half. After trimming off any wire protruding from the coating, I pinched the cut ends close together and the bent end left wider. I slid one wire into the base of each horn up to the first curve. I widened and flattened the bent end at the bottom of the horn. The soft plant tie was perfect for this - very flexible, thick, and covered with rubber which meant there weren't sharp ends to poke through the horn.

The horns were hot-glued into place with low-temp hot glue.  Once that hardened, I checked them, and added just a bit of high-temp hot glue where the low-temp hot glue made contact with the headband to make it more secure.

The wide spacing of the headband made the horns very stable on Gryph's head.  I used a chopstick to pull hair out from under the headband which hid the headband wonderfully.

 

The horns survived all day at school.  I checked over them before the night's festivities, and touched up the hot glue + headband joins, just in case.

 

Gryphon went to a friend's for trick-or-treating, and despite the rain that poured for the whole two-hour time period, the horns arrived home still on his head and intact.  The horns were a bit droopy, as the polyfoam absorbed water, but I laid them on a pile of scrunched-up paper towels (absorbent, supportive) to dry.  They're still good as new.

Leather Wrap a Purchased Journal: Another Graph Paper Journal Hack

Gryphon prefers to use graph paper (quad paper) in his sketchbooks because it works equally well for drawing and writing. He uses them to work on drawings, RPG character designs, logos, poetry, and fiction. He and his closest friends often develop creative story lines they all work on simultaneously, writing fiction and drawing characters.  Sometimes the works are collaborative and meant to fit together into one whole; other times the work is parallel, and exists in the same story arc.  

When he filled his latest sketchbook (wire bound, black covers, serviceable but dull), Gryphon asked if we might find something that would have graph paper and be "cooler."  I poked around online, not really finding anything.  I realized I probably was going to have to create something for him.  We took a field trip to Barnes & Noble so he could look at the way various writing journals were constructed. He loved the ones that had the leather flap that wrapped around and tied.  He also really liked the embossed leather designs on some of the lined journals.  Gryphon had one of them a few years prior as his special "writing notebook" for a language arts class, but lined paper just wasn't going to work.

Barnes & Noble had some refillable versions of both the wrapped and embossed types of leather-bound journals, but there weren't versions with graph paper, even as refills. Rather than drive myself insane trying to find a graph paper refill online and then try to match that refill size to a cover, I decided I could make one at least as nice as what Barnes & Noble had, and, most likely, make one nicer.  (yeah, I know- not terribly modest of me!)

I did not want to deal with having to source sheets of graph paper large enough to use for pages to bind a book from scratch, so I purchased one of the very same journals you saw here in my DIY planner hack. (except this one was black.)

Note:  Barnes & Noble sells these Miquelrius blank graph paper journals for $9.95 in their stores & online.    (You have to search Miquel Rius as two separate words. Also, I'm not a Barnes & Noble affiliate.)  Amazon carries the brand, but only seems to have the more expensive version of the same book for $15.99 - $23.99. The only real difference seems to be that the more expensive version has an elastic closure, which doesn't seem to justify the price difference. 

 

I helped Gryphon find his old writing journal, and he agreed to sacrifice the cover for his new sketchbook.(Of course, we saved the book block full of writing.)  I also snagged the ribbon bookmark from that journal. I dug through my leather stash, and found  a leather upholstery remnant in the perfect color to match the cover piece.  If I hadn't had green leather, I would have used black or navy.

I also found a zipper pocket I had cut out a thrifted leather bag that was about the right size for the project.  (I had left the fabric interior pocket attached, so I had a fully working lined pocket.) The leather pocket  was used to create a built in place for drawing/writing supplies.  

TIP #1:  Leather Sources

Your local Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store will have leather garments and bags that provide more leather for the same, or lower, price than you can buy the same amount of pieces of leather elsewhere. You'll find variety in color, texture and thickness.  Be sure to read the label to be sure you are purchasing leather. 

Also, upholstery remnants can be purchased from various decorator fabric places/re-upholstery places that work in leather. 

TIP #2: Don't Use Leather?

Thrift stores are also a terrific source for quality faux leather materials.  You can find lovely faux leather in the form of garments, and bags.

 

How to's are fairly straightforward:

I simply cut two pieces from the leather remant- one to create the cover and the other to create the tie.  

To cut leather, and have it come out straight and smooth, I prefer to use a rotary cutter.  Of course, I use a straight edge for the straight lines, but I used a dinner plate as a guide to create the curved edge for this cover.

TIP #3: Adhesives

I glued the book into place using Beacon 527 glue.  Beacon Quick Grip would also work well. I use these glues when having a flexible, clear, waterproof bond is necessary. Both glues can be found at Wal Mart, Michael's, JoAnns, etc.   

I glued the front cover of the Miquelrius book first and weighted with several heavy books.

After allowing to dry for 24 hours, I glued the bookmark to the spine, and glued the leather across the spine of the Miquelrius book.  

Next, I glued the back of the Miquelrius book to the leather.

Before weighting it down to dry, I smoothed and tugged the leather tightly across the spine and back cover.  Before weighting it down from the top, I placed a stack of books next to the spine, and a stack right next to the fore-edge of the newly adhered Miquelrius book; then, I stacked books on top to weight it all down.  (the books on the sides prevented the Miquelrius book from sliding off the leather and helped keep the leather on the spine nice and tight.  I allowed it to dry for 24 hours. 

I glued in the leather tie, making it stronger by feeding it through the leatehr cover in a couple spots.  This takes the stress off just one point.  I glued all points of contact between the tie and the cover.  I weighted it down, also, and allowed it to dry.

Next, I glued the decorative pieces we had cut off of Gryphopn's old writing journal. Besides using the cover, I also used the spine.  I placed waxed paper on top of and under the cover, wrapped the leather around, and weighted it down.  

To attach the pocket:

I trimmed the scavenged pocket, making sure it fit and the whole thing would wrap nicely. Then, I tucked wax paper inside, and glued the leather front of the pocket to the fabric interior pocket.  I weighted it down, and allowed it to dry.

Next, I replaced the wax paper with a clean piece, and glued the back side of the scavenged pocket to the interior of the leather flap.  I weighted it down, and allowed it to dry. To create a zipper pull, I cut a bitty strip of the green leather, threaded it through the loop on the zipper, and sewed a few stitches through the green leather strip near the loop to hold the zipper pull in place.

The drying time required between each step might seem daunting as it makes the project take a few days.  However, given the sketchbook was going to be carried around in a backpack full of school books, get lost in a teenage boy's messy room, fall off any number of flat surfaces, I really wanted it to hold together.  Allowing adhesives to dry completely, and weighting down the surface are important for creating a strong bond. 

In fact, the photos you see are what the sketchbook looks like after several months of use!  I just shot these images this week.  (This morning, I found Gryphon's sketchbook open and tangled in the blankets on his bed looking just fine!)

 

One Singular Moment

We receive gifts scattered through out the many days of our lives, gifts of singular moments.  Moments which, despite the clichéd nature of the phrase, are "once in a lifetime."  

I want to show you a gift I was given.  But first, a bit of a background story: 

Joe, Gryphon, Sunny, and I were out in the boat exploring the river. Tooling around in our old jon boat is something we do often, of course, since the front yard of the river house literally ends with the Allegheny River in the same way other front yards end at a road. I almost always take my camera bag with me. For this river adventure, Gryphon was using my Canon SX10-IS, and I had my Canon Rebel XS.   

Shooting has a way of bringing me more fully into the moment, of narrowing the focus of my awareness into what is right there around me.  Shooting grounds me, brings me more fully present. There are no to-do lists running through my head when I have a camera in my hand. I am looking; I am seeing. I am completely here in that exact moment in time, in that exact location in space. Being present is a key part of being whole, being spiritual, of being able to hear the divine that exists in each of us, in the world around us. Photography as a path to being present is one of those gifts I feel a powerful obligation to share.

 

You might have noticed I collect "found hearts" - images of objects, scenes where I find hearts hidden in plain sight. My "found hearts" are secret messages reminding me I am loved, reminding me to love.    

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

 This quote, while often attributed to Ghandi is actually a distillation of his words:

"Gandhi said “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”

(Brian Morton, The New York Times, Aug. 29, 2011)

My "found hearts" remind me to change my own nature, to risk, to fear, to love and be loved.

     

© 2013 Gryphon Ludwig

 

 

© 2013 LK Ludwig

 

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.                                                                                John Lubbock         

 

The real gift, that day, wasn't the astonishing sight of a heart-shaped cloud drifting across the sky. The gift was having Gryphon, Sunny, and Joe with me in the boat.  The gift was seeing their bright smiles, hearing the joyful laughter bursting out spontaneously, and sharing that exact moment to remember for ever, creating a memory, a treasure to be pulled out of a pocket and rolled around in our fingers whenever we need.

Hunter's Moon

 

Who says you cannot hold the moon in your hand?
Tonight when the stars come out and the moon rises in the velvet sky, look outside your window, then raise your hand and position your fingers around the disk of light.
There you go . . . that was easy.

Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

 

June's Moon- Flower Moon Rose Moon Strawberry Moon Honey Moon can be seen here. (not previously posted.) 

 

* all the images I have shot of the moon were taken with my point-and-shoot, a Canon SX10-IS.

My "Brain-in-a Book": A DIY Custom Planner Organizer Catch-All Hack

I wanted to share a recent project where I converted a graph paper journal into a handy planner, organizer, and catch-all:

I needed a new planner, as my pocket size Moleskine planner had just a couple months left.  In recent weeks, I had found that style of planner was not working out well for me; I needed a different set up in my new planner.

In the past, I've been a fan of the binder-style, customizable systems for years.  I prefer to mix and match the planner inserts between brands (daytimer, dayrunner, dayplanner)  to come up with a system that works for whatever is going on for me at any given time. I referred to my planner systems as my "brain." I talked about this in a blog post HERE and in this interview I did for Lesley Riley a couple years ago:

Check Out Art Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Art And Soul Radio on BlogTalkRadio

 

However, I really cannot afford to purchase any of that stuff these days, so I set about making a planner from a blank book and other materials I had on hand.

I started with a Miquelrius graph paper journal/sketchbook I had in a studio cupboard. I love graph paper books; I'm particularly fond of using them as what I think of as "catch-alls." I fill them up with snips from magazines, quotes, lists, notes, plans, sketches, website addresses, love notes from my littles, and all manner of flotsam, until the book is full, bursting with stuffed-in goodness.  

This particular journal sells for a good bit less than it's Moleskine counterparts, has a flexible cover, and 300 graph paper pages.   In order to convert it to a planner & organizer, I made several modifications:

1. I scavenged an elastic closure, accordion pockets and ribbon bookmarks out of my filled, archived Moleskines.  
2. I attached the elastic closure through the back cover. 
3. 
   
4. I reinforced the inside covers of the journal, front and back, with lightweight cardboard, which I covered with a text weight paper.
5. I glued accordion pockets inside the front and back covers.

Then, I did something of which I am very proud!

I STOPPED!  I THOUGHT!   I RESEARCHED!  Instead of plunging ahead willy-nilly, I took a deep breath and PLANNED!

 I looked around trying to determine what I wanted to include and how that might all work.  I browsed Pinterest and Moleskine, and googled for "DIY planner", "planner hacks", and "Moleskine hacks."

Moleskine has free planner printables availble for download on the myMoleskine community site.  You do have to register to download, but it is free.  I haven't been bothered by any spam in the year or longer I've been registered. 

Making a list of what I wanted in a planner was key in not creating a big, fat monster.

I knew I needed a monthly calendar to keep track of family appointments, commitments, events, and such.  

Since I wanted to commit to blogging regularly again, and have some amazing concepts for my creative business underway (more soon), I wanted a second monthly calendar for organizing that arena.  

I have always worked well with a weekly planner.  Besides the obvious weekly reminder of any appointments, I use the weekly planner to make brief notes about a given day- what I've done with my time and what I have to remember to do.  Knowing where I have spent my time, and being prompted about specific tasks  is very useful for me. (I have ADHD.) 

I also like to jot down notes from phone coversations, ideas that have popped into my mind, things I need to research, items to add to lists, phone numbers that don't need to go into my contacts list... that sort of thing. I knew I wanted more than one page for notes related to each week.  

I still wanted to use the book as a "catch-all" because I wanted to have just one book in my everyday-bag.

 

I downloaded monthly calendar and weekly planner pages from the myMoleskine site, and scaled them to best fit my pages.  The files can't be edited easily, so I simply opted to scale them in the dialogue box that comes up for my printer. Some pages I scaled larger than 100% and others smaller. I printed them on the lightest weight paper I could find in the house.

Before going any further, I removed a ton of pages from random spots through out the journal to accomodate the girth the calendar & planner pages would add. I know that the catch-all portion will cause the book to get nice and fat.  I didn't want the book to start out looking like a filled journal!

After calculating how many pages I needed for each section, I counted out the pages in the journal I would need to achieve my desired layout, and divided up the book.  Since I carry my book around in my bag, divider tabs would just get trashed. Instead, I glued scrapbooking paper to the front and backside of a page to create a sturdy divider. I added another one of those scavenged accordian pockets to one of the dividers just because.

 

 

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• 

 

 

I carefully peeled back the cover to lay bare the spine of the book.  I glued 5 ribbon bookmarks into place on the bare spine, and glued the cover back onto the spine.

 

For the weekly planner portion, the blank weekly calendar went on the left-hand side of the page spread, leaving the right side, and the next whole page spread blank- four pages for each week.  Every week has 2 two-page spreads.  I included only a few months worth of weekly planner spreads because I wanted this portion to balance with the catch-all section. I didn't want to run out of space in the catch-all section before I ran out calendar/planner pages. 

To recap a bit, the section in my new "brain-in-a-book" are:

• monthly calendar- business (1 month per page)
• monthly calendar - family (1 month per page)
• weekly planner (4 pages in two page spreads/week)
• catch-all

I wanted to have place to store some paper extras- forms or bits that I didn't need every day, but I use here and there.  These I will just glue onto pages as needed. To create a storage folder, I removed the black thin cardboard cover from a knockoff of the Moleskine Cahier journal, leaving both sides intact- still in one large piece.  Using some more scavenged elastic, I created places to store those bits of paper. I glued the storage folder onto one of my divider tabs.

 

 

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• 

 

Note about adesives:
I used Krylon spray adhesive to attach the printed calendar & planner pages, scrapbook papers, and accordion pockets.  I used "Quick Grip" glue to attach the elastic, the bookmarks, the carboard reinforcement on the covers, and the folder for extra paper forms.  I chose "Quick Grip" because the bond is quite strong and dries flexible.

 

While I did invest time in the creating my new "brain-in-a-book", I didn't have to spend any money to create what has turned out to be a terrific planner for my needs!