Grammy Zombie Part 1

Alright, let's start on Grammy's head!

Grammy's head starts as a styrene skull that I bought last Halloween. Skulls are ALWAYS good bases for heads.

I took a pocket knife and cut her jaw away from the rest of her skull. Fortunately, the skull I bought seems to have been a multipart construct, so removing the jaw was REALLY simple.  I trimmed the back of the teeth some to make them a more realistic thickness.

The jaw is roughly wired/taped back into place, but hanging open. I like zombies to have their mouths open, because, you know, they are always hungry for brains or flesh.

I stabbed some bailing wire into her skull from the bottom to make a neck, then taped some card stock around it to flesh out a neck. The card is leftover packing dividers from my girlfriend's work. They're wax coated and not amazingly useful for art, but have been REALLY useful for construction material in projects like this, or for stencils and the like. Grammy Zombie is very inexpensive at this stage, and she won't get much more costly, I promise!

Now, I took some brown packing paper (The brown paper some companies wad up to cushion packages, instead of using packing peanuts) that I saved from packages I'd gotten (Yeah, I'm that cheap), and I glued it onto my skull and 'neck' with mod-podge. What we are doing here is half decopage and half papier mache.

More to come next time. More head stuff and starting the body!

(If you are actually trying to follow along with this, I'm sorry in advance. I don't know if this will be a 'tutorial' at all. I'm just talking through what I am doing.) Next part will be the body. It needs more bailing wire, more card stock/paper, more brown paper and more tape (duct and masking).

Building a cardboard shelf

Sarah's collection of Littlest Pet Shop figures was taking over her office. It honestly looked kinda obsessive and creepy, to be honest. She's got a billion of the things, roughly. She wanted a little shelf unit to display part of them on, but after months of looking for one, she still didn't have one, so I decided I would try to make one.

Let it be noted right now that I don't do carpentry at all. EVER. Wood was out, so I figured cardboard would work. I've seen some very pretty pieces of cardboard furniture out there, so I figured a shelf would be a snap. It really was, too.

I measured and cut six pieces of cardboard for the three shelves (two pieces of corrugated cardboard per shelf), then four pieces for the sides (two per side, again). I glued each shelf and each side together separately, clamping them together with clamps and clothes pins. I used Mod Podge to glue them together. Very simple stuff.

Next, I glued the sides and shelves all together using hot glue and masking tape, It was nothing fancy, but it worked well. I started with one side, and after the three shelves were stuck to it, I glued on the other side. I also covered the exposed edges of the cardboard with masking tape, just to make it cleaner for the next step.

Finally, I tore some sheets out of a book (don't worry, it wasn't a good book, and it had already lost a page or two. There was no reading it ever again, anyway), and tore them into little pieces. I used Mod Podge to glue them on, one at a time. After the whole thing was covered in paper, I went back over it with another coat of mod podge, and then left it to dry.

From start to finish, the entire shelf unit was only a few hours long project, and I think it turned out pretty nice. I wouldn't want to use it to store my weights, or an anvil or anything, but it's plenty sturdy enough for the Littlest Pet Shop critters.

My Kitchen Cabinets: A Project

As you can see, my kitchen has glass front cabinets, which look really pretty when you are going house hunting, and are completely empty. They look less charming after they become full of clutter and spices. There’s four above the oven and prep sink, and two more on either side of the kitchen sink, so that’s a lot of visible mess. I’ve wanted to do something about it for a while, but I didn’t really enjoy the idea of tearing out cabinets and putting up new ones (which I don’t know how to do, anyway).

I watch TED talks a lot, and saw a pretty neat one the other day which involved using what you have, recycling busted construction materials by actually using them in houses, etc. The man speaking was talking from a construction point of view, but it got me thinking about my cabinets again, from a different angle. I knew I could come up with some way of making those glass fronted things work.

Here’s what I came up with. With Fabric Mod Podge, it is possible to glue fabric straight to glass, which is kinda cool. I knew about it thanks to this video (which is a how-to! I’m addicted to how-to videos). Combined with my glass cabinet problem, I can see a really cool solution. Soon the cabinet doors are going to be backed with fabric bunnies! Yay! It will be fairly inexpensive, and should look neat. More pictures when I’m finished with it.

As I can never do things the right way (nor do I care!) I'm not going to be using fabric Mod Podge because it's extra expensive and after researching, it looks like regular Mod Podge will do the trick just fine. Now, I just have to figure out how to make 20" tall bunnies.