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Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Roach clips

In an effort to explore other ways to use recycled bullet casings, I spent some time fiddling around with them this past week.  Long story short, I was thinking cicada, but got cockroaches.  Bullet 30-06 cockroach hair clips.  Roach clips.  Heh...







These will be going to a show this weekend, but I plan on adding some to the shop next week maybe.  :)

Oh, and I think I mentioned the commemorative bullet keychain before.  if not, a new customer came buy after having shot a beautiful trophy deer.  He wanted a commemorative keychain made from the bullet.  It is now finished  as well.


Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Dabbling, because my ADD told me to.

Thats about it.  Boredom hits me pretty quickly and I flit from one thing to another.  Etsy tells me, as a store owner, its much better to have 1 kind of thing instead of lots of things.  Sadly, if I focused on 1 kind of thing, I would be one kind of asleep.  I sometimes think that is the real difference between an artist and a crafter.  An artist is all flitty and do whatever.  Their work is from their hearts.  There are no patterns and no plans.  It just happens.  The crafter is structured, refined, expert even.  They have a plan of attack and rarely waver. Crafters are predictable.  I can't say that is entirely a bad thing.  I mean, if I want a handmade coffee cozy, my best bet is to find a crafter who has thousands of them.  In my store I might have one or two, but its only because I thought it might be fun to add hair to one, or feet.  Absolutely everything in my shop is an experiment.  I never have a plan.  It just comes and if I love it, I list it.  if I don't love it, it gets put away somewhere until another idea strikes that will make it better, or I destroy it.  Either way.

So it all started when I was digging around in the deep freeze for some hamburger.  In the corner I saw a bag that was questionable to say the least.  I opened it and found the hide from a pheasant a friend had harvested for me during last year's season.  The feathers are beautiful and it had been a while since I played with them. I felt it was high time to separate the feathers from the hide, wash, sort and strip them and if I still have the gumption, make something.

I had the gumption.

Feather fascinator and others...
Happily, I sold one right away.  This beautiful lady is also a 
etsy seller and makes wonderful meditation pillows.  Her husband also makes
gorgeous handmade pottery which is sold in the shop as well.
By all means, go and see what she has!

I flitted around with this and that, but looked over in the corner at a gallon sized pickle jar I had, full of seashells.  I decided to play, but was not thrilled with my lack of imagination.  I had made all this before.  It was then I discovered that I had Polymer clay.  
Since seashells are indeed cast offs from various sea monsters, 
I thought a mock taxidermy of sorts would be fun.  I ended up with  some pretty cool little monsters
growing out of those seashells.


Alas, my thoughts turned back to my bullets.  They are, after all, my favorite medium.
Something different though.  After the invention of the corseted bullet, I really felt I needed to step it up.
I went out to the shop and broke out the cutting wheel and started hacking away at a bullet hoping something would come of it.  At first, I was really going for some kind of  sculptural thing.  I beat on it with hammers and trimmed off bits and pieces, when I kind of saw something in the rubble.  
It wasn't long before I had a plan-ish and hacked away until I got this shape:


I don't know.  A cicada?  I filed away at it for a while before bringing it inside to stare at it for a bit.  
I had a fella, who had shot a very beautiful deer this season, ask me to make something cool out of the bullet he used to harvest his deer.  While I was digging through some scraps of filigree trying to decide where to go with THAT project, I spied a piece that was still whole.  It was then my 30-06 cicada became a 30-06 cockroach.  

Of course, as the prototype it is far from perfect, but seems to be well on it's way to being a recycled UniqueEuphoria original.  
Hair clip I think.  I mean really, what woman doesn't invite bugs to crawl through her coiffure? 
Especially when they are made from spent bullets and scraps of filigree.  I'm just sayin'