I love my synth wife but they can't solve captchas

Today's song is one of ours <3

dirty furry transsexual faggot shit and the junk

long time no blog.. I got both of my necklaces mounted and dropped off at the art gallery >:3c and I have something fun coming in the mail that I will post about when it gets here. I'll take some pics of my stuff on display at the opening next week too!

Today's song is rituals - pill friends

I really need to make a gallery tab. Anyways, it's finaly time to talk about making something again! This project had been a-brewin in my brain for a while, ever since I noticed how many broken "bff heart" charms seemed to pass through the thrift store. I must imagine they don't sell very well without their other half, and they're undeniably a little bit sad. A little graveyard littering the jewellry rack. I began to pick them up whenever I saw them, in my mind trying to piece together a necklace to tie them all together in some sort of "memento mori" of friendships. I ended up with 10 in total, 5 of either half. I used 8 of them in the final project, although I'll admit when I first started collecting them I had this vision of layering tons of them, like this massive monument. Turns out that takes a lot of time and money, which I will burn plenty of on the end result. In an effort to save money, I left behind a lot of on theme charms that didn't fit the bill. I think the most interesting one was half of what was clearly a mother/daughter version of the best friend heart. That one felt rough.

What took this project off of paper and a pile of charms was the looming of artist submissions for a local art exposition. Until now it had been kicking around in wait of a concrete vision to pursue. With a deadline inbound it was time to start putting things together. I did a final loop of every thrift store in town to parse out any remaining charms I could add to my collection, which might've been a much more interesting addition to this story if I found any. It was a good sweep - but the only thing I found relating to my project was a pair of kiddie shape-cutting scissors. My original plan used an ornate pair of antiwue nail-cutting scissors I know I own, but have lost somewhere. I thought these fit the bill perfectly since I had matching nail polish to tie them in. I had all my best luck at the biggest chain thrift store in town, since they're much less picky about what they sell. Doing this loop gave me some time to think about the structure of the necklace, and when I came back to my "workshop" a red leather collar I had laying around caught my eye. Around this time I had been rehashing my old Warriors special interest, showing MAPs to my wife and such. I started to piece together the idea of creating a collar like Scourge's to display the hearts. I wanted this project to invoke childhood nostalgia, and Scourge was a very nostalgic character for me. I loved him, both as a kid and an adult, for being somebody who was feared and respected despite being small and non-threatening. IFYKYK, but despite Scourge's collar being purple in canon I still choose to colour it red mostly to invoke the mouth to accompany the dog's teeth. Origially I had planned for the detachable chain/necklace part to be all rainbow pony beads, reminiscent of Scourge's popularity with scene subcultures and the common fandom riff of putting BloodClan cats (specifically bone) in a rainbow collar. From this chain I would hang two clay hand charms, making a "pinky promise" pose, and connect them with a wire lined with red seed beads - the red string of fate, tying them together, and looping under a set of scissors. Once I got this in my head I bought some fine-guage wire and began beading the red string at home on the couch. Tragedy! My tin of tiny, tiny red seed beads (alongside some red droplets and slightly larger, white pearlescent seeds) falls squarely down the crack of the couch and immediately mingles with a layer of dust and crumbs. After a slight breakdown I painstakingly rescue what I can and complete the string of fate.

As you can see, I originally wanted to add a secound line of text across the claws that read "rien du tout!!!!" (nothing at all!!!!) as a callback to my childhood in french elementary and the friends I made there. After waffling about with the thrift stores and throwing some money into the creative pit, by the time I had a solid plan to pursue I only had 3 (week days!) to pull the whole thing together. This project had a lot of moving parts for me to create. The claws, the hands, the string...Step one was to figure out how to mount the claws to the collar. My mother suggested the idea of pounding nails through the collar to anchor the claws. Thanks mama! This worked great for pretty much every step of the process. The claws slid snugly on and off to be worked on seperately. As a sidenote, hardware/fish and tackle shops are a great resource for DIY-ing jewellry. I got the nails for the collar and the clips for the chain from Surplus Herby's.

I began by laying the collar out and marking a cross roughly in the midle. I placed these crosses one finger-width apart. My ideal was 5 claws on either side, but the setting I was basing the collar off of (second smallest, as that placed both sizing holes at the back evenly apart to anchor the chain to), fit 4 at best. Although this is pictured on styrofoam, I had to nail through the leather on a piece of cardboard so as to not completely absorb the hammer's blow. Hammering the nails in became trickier the more were added, but I sucessfully sunk every one without hammering any of my fingers.

After fully spiking the collar I moved onto sculpting the clay components. Here is where I must admit that I'm abysmal at using clay. I may have spent a lot of my childhood crafting with it, but it certainly didn't impart any skills. In order to create enough usuable white clay, i mixed my block of white and my block of glow-in-the-dark clay. This meant that I spent a lot of time kneading together hard claw and that the claws have a glow to them in the dark. I cut my chunk of white/glow in the dark into roughly 8 equal segments, then rolled each into a tube in my hands before pressing it down on the clay. Once I could see where the nail sat, I tapered and bent each claw. Finaly, I poked holes through the tips to hang the charms from. The clay hands were made using a mold before I cut and bent them. Nailing the collar, creating and cooking the clay elements of the necklace was everything I was able to do on day one, but It was by far the most daunting part of the task. Once I was able to see the claws arranged on the collar, the whole project went from being a vague idea to a feasible reality. I should mention that my "workshop" space is my old loft room. Now that I live pretty much full time with my partner, I was coming to a 2nd house after working and before eating and going to bed to work on this project. Out of the oven, one of the claws split when sliding it onto the nail. It's a shame, but due to the nature of these being claws it didn't really ruin the illusion for me. I biked home around 11pm.

Day 2 meant it was time to detail, paint, laquer and mount the claws. I started by scribbling some red sharpie at the base of each claw and smudging it out with my fingers. Despite my incompetence at using clay, I think this makes them look more like organic claws. From there I remounted them and painted each claw with sparkly red nail polish, as blingee emo blood and to match the scissors I would be using later. After the nail polish dried, I laquered the claws by mounting them on a loose nail and dipping them in a cup of laquer, then hanging them to dry. I had to do this process 3-at-a-time due to the number of clips I had to suspend the drying claws. Between each coat of paint or laquer I would bore out the charms holes with a nail to ensure they stayed open. Toward the tail end of this endeavour I messed up the tips of two claws, to which I reapplied nail polish and spot-fixed with a quick drying nail topcoat. If I had more time for this project I would've done another laquer dip if not two, but I don't, and getting the collar fully assembled took almost all of day 2. Once I had decided on using the collar, I went back to thrift store in search of a full heart labelled "best friends", something I had seen before and passed up. I considered trying to jb weld two hearts together, but ultimately landed on scratching my own text into a blank heart I found.

As I waited for the laquer to dry I worked on the detachable chain. When I got into my "workshop" this afternoon I had the nagging idea of underbeading the entire string with a bunch of tiny plastic beads I had just gotten. They were mixed in with a tub of plastic kid's beads I bought at the thrift and I thought their little jumbly colours matched the vibe I was looking for. Since the pony beads I was going to use had such large guages, I thought allowing th whole chain to slide around and revel the beading underneath would look super cool. I spent at least two hours hunched over this tub of beads, carefully extracting only the tiniest ones to cover maybe 18 inches of string. When I finally threaded on the pony beads and scissors, though, I found the end result underwhelming. At this point I was feeling good about having pretty faithfully recreated the collar I was picturing, but the chain felt lacking. Sliding around on the underbeading didn't work as well when holding up a prop like the scissors, and just the neon rainbow I had pictured felt like it was lacking visual interest. The aforementioned tub of beads I bought had a lot of fun and interesting, but plasticky, beads that weren't going to get used very many other places. These all had guages too small to thread over the underbeads. With this in mind I resolved to redo the chain tomorrow. After the laquer had adequately dried I super glued the claws to their nail mounts and I capped off the day by finally hooking up the charms to the claws. I really like the visual of the claws each "holding" one of the hearts. Each broken heart, a remnant of something beautiful I killed with my own hands. The visual metaphor certainly worked. I truly am the scourge of all who love me.

Today was day 3. I headed out to my workshop in the morning to work on re-beading the chain, although I was called out to work in the middle of it. I scrapped most of the miniscule beadwork I had done yesterday, but kept a section of small beads on either end of the chain to keep them present. This time I used virtually no pony beads, as well as mixed up my alphabet letters, and I think the final product was much more "kidcore" (although I hate the term) and visually compelling. Most importantly, it displayed the scissors/hands/string in a way I was happier with. As it stands, I think I ought to line the collar with moleskin (which I have done in the past) to pad the base of the nails. They're not pokey, but one nail got glued sticking out into the neck a bit. I designed this piece to be wearable, although it's more meant to be displayed. As of yet I don't have a good bust to display anything on. My next order of business is to find or make one before I need to install the piece at the showing. I'll post photos of the finished product once it's done on display.

thrift store treasure

2nd panel has entered our daily lexicon so i drew it. Rip Firestar and Greystripe you guys would have loved Halo

most of these pictures are and will be taken out of my notebook. everybody should have this btw

wolves and dragons go together like squares and triangles

ah shit I'm posting about my feelings on the internet again. Remember this all comes from my twisted mind and isn't objective lol

We're gonna put her in a slightly bigger terrarium(tupperware)