Serena Kuhl's random ramblings about creativity, resin and fake fur

Imaginative Bloom

2010-12-29T17:28:00.002+08:00

The lovely people over at Imaginative bloom featured my zen brooch in their latest Flickr group picks! Very kind. Check it out here.

Principles of jewellery design: Scale

2010-11-14T08:27:00.003+08:00

This was gonna be a fav resin designer post, but when I looked again at images of the Monies work I realised that scale is a huge part of what appeals to me about their oevre. If these pieces were ten times smaller, or larger, would they have the same impact?
This photo in particular just had me in awe when I saw it. I LOVE the massivity of their pieces, would love to be working on this kind of scale myself if I had the confidence . That someone was, successfully was incredibly inspiring to me. For some reason to me, big has a kind of expansive exuberance to it. It shoves all else out the way to make way for it. I'm sure you'd slowly dislocate your shoulder wearing one of those bangles above for a long time but wow!

Beautiful resin pieces that are not mine #3

2010-11-14T08:20:00.001+08:00

Not sure if this is made from resin or not. I suspect not, a stronger plastic polymer or something. Anyway, nothing intelligent to say except sigh... Love the scale, love the shape, love the complex pierced lightness of it...

post baby production and Craft Fairs

2010-11-14T08:09:00.002+08:00

I think I started to reach the limitations of being a mum, and not doing anything else in the second month. Bubba was starting to hit his stride, I was starting to feel more on top of the whole caring for a baby thing. This was pre-smiles, Bubba took until 11 or 12 weeks to start smiling regularly, so I was in a house, with a baby who cried or stared at me (or pooped, screamed or slept). Whilst still feeling the love, the lack of sleep and being at the beck and call of a fairly grumpy or expressionless little person was starting to get me down. I'd hold this little person and feel a great rush, but still, needed something else. This was the point I realised it was time to start doing something else as well, or risk good ol depression coming back to visit
All good in theory. I scurried out and started pouring resin again when Bubba was asleep, suddenly able to move at subsonic speeds to make sure he hadn't woken up and gotten upset in my absence. But, like many things I do, it kinda got out of hand...
So, come and see my excess of resiny goodness if you're a local at the Territory Craft Christmas Craft Fair from 10.00-3.00 on the 21st of November. I seriously went overboard! I made hundreds of pieces with my super ninja resin powers and you can see a lot of it here!

Resin Jewellery company of the Week

2010-10-27T08:44:00.002+08:00

If you're Australian (like I am) when you think of resin jewellery, you think of Dinosaur Designs. Not sure if they were first in Oz to start using resins to make frosty smooth sanded jewellery, but in recent collective memory it is the Dinos that introduced Australia to the jewellery and homewares potential of the medium.
I remember reading a critical reading of one of their pieces, marvelling at how the soft moulded original form, presumably made in clay or plasticine, had been captured and transformed into something rigid through the moulding process, that there was an interesting tension in the pieces, where the former squishiness is retained in the shape, yet when you touch it, you realise it's something else altogether
Loved by fash mags and art institutions alike, Dinosaurs is as far away from glitter and 100s and 1000s encased resin pendants as you can get. They give amazing surface. All have that amazing perfect smooth surface that still retains a few of the subtle lumps and bumps that indicate it was handformed and lately they have played a lot with almost painting with resin. The Sun and Moon and Fungi collections are good examples of this.
It was the work of the Dinos that had me inspired to take a stab at resin in the first place. I was very keen on it in the 90s and desperate to find out how to use resin, even contemplating going back to Uni to study jewellery to find out how. Lucky the internets is a great resource for info about it now and I missed adding to my already mammoth HECS bill!
They have a new collection out right now, called Bones. Check it out!

Resin Jewellery company of the Week

2010-10-09T14:39:00.003+08:00

I stumbled upon Shanka designs site when trawling for images for other people's resin bangles. I looooove the massivity of the jade and the grey piece. I'd already been fooling around with making what I call 'sander jewellery' (see below) using the sander to create irregular flat planes but found the use of form in these pieces very enticing.

There seems to be a kind of revival of very geometric forms, in the vein of neo-80s fashion that still reigns (sigh...). Gotta admit though, this cool, angular Tron style is much more appealing than skinny jeans and ra-ra skirts....
Follow them on Facebook!

Beautiful resin pieces that are not mine #2

2010-10-03T11:47:00.004+08:00

This is a piece from Dinosaur Designs Bowerbird series I think. It's just freaking amazing. I looooved this series, it took me a little while to figure out exactly what was going on with this necklace but (I think) it has lots of specimens of rocks etc all encased in blobs of water clear resin threaded onto this one amazing necklace. There's rings with the same effect and they did a similar thing later with a necklace that had butterfly wings encased in resin beads. Stunning visually but I was tickled by such an amazing using of embedments in a piece. You normally think of embedding as being those lurvely spider gear stick knobs or other such tack-o-rama. To use what is essentially a cool technique, to such amazing effect without the tack is kinda cool in my book

The other (and perhaps best) creation

2010-10-02T12:43:00.002+08:00

Killian Alan Prendergast. Pretty cute I reckon, considerably more painful to make than other pieces and still a work in progress....

Resin Jewellery company of the Week

2010-10-02T12:30:00.003+08:00

Been meaning to do this for awhile to. There's some super amazing stuff out there happening in resin jewellery making land, so intending to feature a few here in these humble pages. Solrojo which means red sun i think? Are a company from Brazil which make some quite interesting structural type resin jewellery. They tend to do tonal pieces rather than the riotous combination of colours Sobral does, which I like as it can make the forms a lot more prominent. And what forms. Love the brooches with the flower shapes. Not much of a girly girl myself but for some reason these really appeal. Probably because they are a combination of quite clean organic shapes in that sandblasted beach glass type resin that they use. Loooooove those jelly bean like earrings, not sure why, have used kidney shapes myself for a long time in my work, but as soon as I saw them I was like *love*! And I'm not very into earrings. They do another lovely piece which I couldn't find a pic of which uses spherical resin beads tied into an organza style ribbon, very simple but somehow reminded me of seaweed or something. Anyway, check em out!

Beautiful resin pieces that are not mine #1

2010-10-02T12:26:00.003+08:00

I collect a heap of images all the time, jewelery related and otherwise to get the ol noggin moving and ideas coming and decided it might be time to share some from the archives. Love love love this. love the geometric pattern, love the sculptural quality, love the predominance of magenta, love the stripes revealed by the carving/mould/spines/whatever. Not sure who did it, or if it is indeed from resin, but it is awesome!

How in Christ's name do they do that?

2010-10-02T12:14:00.004+08:00

So people ask me on a semi-regular basis how to make things. They've seen something on the internet and want to have a go themselves and haven't been able to work out themselves and so try so other silly sod for the answers and sometimes, that's me. I can help with some stuff, I have enough knowledge of the basics to do most simple things in resin, but bubbles, bubbles escape me....
I saw these beautiful Sobral pieces early on in my resin adventures and loooooved them. Hey, what's not to like, they're playful and pretty and colourful and awesome. I also just loved the bubble pattern, I have a bit of a thing for dots and nubbles and other ball like adornments on some days. I was able to work out how he made his lurvely stripey pieces (see top) by either layering colours in your mould, or casting a chunk of layered resin in a big tray and then cutting out your bangle (to get vertical stripes rather than horizontal you'd need to put your chunk, or your mould on the side), but no bubbles. Couldn't find tutes on how to.... nothing
Then I came across this picture on the Sobral website where it looks like a squeezy bottle of liquid resin is being squirted into... clear resin? Water? Boiling water? Not sure kids and herein lies the problem. I actually had a stab at this with resin and water and no luck for me. I got a mess and that's about it.
Not sure if the technique perhaps lies in the fact that many resin companies use acrylic and have to heat set it somehow to cure it or what, pretty sure they aint using stinky polyester resin.
But, dear non-readers and random people who stumble here, if you reckon you've got it sussed, let me know in the comments below!

Post Baby Resin-y Goodness

2010-09-29T15:18:00.002+08:00

I have a seriously gorgeous little boy asleep in his crib in my bedroom next door. Three weeks ago he was pushed into the world, and it's been a sleepless crazy cycle of sleeping and waking and changing nappies and making bottles since. I just started to feel like I was starting to get on top of it the other day (as long as we don't leave the house, haven't got that proficient yet), which of course was followed quickly by a niggling feeling of dissatisfaction.
I love my son, he is seriously awesome, I am still in that dazed feeling of "seriously? he's mine?" where you stare endlessly at the little person to the disgust of all around you, amazed at what your body managed to make, but it doesn't stop the fact that I haven't been able to do anything jewellery wise since last year when I found out I was pregnant, due to the toxic nature of resin in liquid form.
My first step was just to clean my workbench of the accumulated mess and clutter and dirt at 12am, a stolen moment when my partner was asleep with the baby and the house was quiet. The second to get the tin of resin I haven't opened for months to see if it was still alright. The third.. well, see for yourself

soooo... where the hell have I been?

2010-06-30T16:53:00.002+08:00

If you are the 1.5 people who read this blog, my absence since December might have registered on your radar! I kept meaning to post about this, but as I am gonna have my first baby in August, not much happening resin wise. Polyester resin is kinda scary in it's styrene content and the articles I read about mums to be working in fibreglass factories/pool shops etc was enough to persuade me that a self initiated hiatus might be in order! Not totally sure how I'm going to be able to safely use either epoxy, polyurethane or polyester to continue making jewellery when the baby comes, but will cross that bridge when I get there!

Serena 2.0

2009-12-06T06:25:00.003+08:00

Okay, so long time, no blog. In my defence I have been studying full time, working full time, kicking depression to the curb finally and making lotsa stuff so yknow.... I have also been using other means (I am sorry Blogger, they meant nothing to me!) to hawk, nay, try to capture the jewellery wearing public's attention.
So if you are the 2.5 people who come here once a month to see what else I'm crapping on about, you can find Serena in her various incarnations here

Behance: quite a flashy looking portfolio/community thingie. I feel out of place with my raffishness...

Society6: reminds me a lot of the Illusive books of illustration. Lovely stuff, few other jewellers.
Not really the right place methinks but whilst were throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks....

Kit and Caboodle: created by an Oz jeweller for other Oz jewellers. I should fit in here right? Not sure. Having not gone to art school to study jewellery I'm using my dodgy sculpture background as my compass here. Havent really found that many other people going the same direction...

Anyway, I post more regularly there and often have micro blog stuff going on...

Really, all I want is one uber social network to rule them all and then I can input this stuff once!

Ill be right back....

Twitter!

2009-08-13T17:59:00.002+08:00

Twitter is my new blog of sorts. I'm studying currently to be a teacher librarian, so my time is spent mostly trying to understand the intricasies of AARC2! But Twitter is perfect for me (and all the other 30 sumthins, not the kiddies mind) to voice my thoughts on stuff...quickly . Follow me there, you'll get an up to the date, minute by minute glimpse into my tortured synapses...

I hAZ tHE aNSWER!!!

2009-06-03T21:02:00.003+08:00

Egahd! I had the answer all along.

In the future, everyone will be Sockington for five minutes...

How does this shit happen?

2009-06-03T20:23:00.003+08:00

Was reading a bit about the mammothly influential Dinosaur Designs whose altar I worship at, and world renown fash label Tsubi. No doubt, both are companies full of extremely talented, focused and driven people. And Australian! How bout that. But I was struck as I perused a book and a mag at work (one good thing about being an art teacher, reading about designers is seen to be a good thing!) is that both described their rise to meteoric fame and fortune as almost...a matter of luck. Both described the context in which their brands arrived (Dino 80s Sydney, Tsubi 2000 same I think) as being empty of similar stuff like them. There wasn't a lot of people thinking resin=jewellery and no else making jeans like Tsubi (this seemed really odd to me, I always assume Sydney is full of languishing fashionistas, that even the homeless are really just working the grunge angle). One of the Tsubi guys talked about getting a call from someone when a designer flaked on Sydney Fashion Week and they pulled together an impromptu collection and then became the now darlings of world fashion (I'm probably oversimplifying here just a little....) That Dinosaur Designs admits that they've never really done anything early on in their career to promote themselves on a big scale and simply good ol word of mouth and being out of the ordinary in a way that appealed simply ended up with them being the darling of many a stylist which saw their stuff splashed over the pages of Vogue and the like. But they also said that few others would be able to get away with it, in the way they did, that a fortuitous connection of talent and kismet I guess equalled incredible success. There also might be just a little typical Australian modesty here. Don't want to be a tall poppy.....
If you went to art school, like I did, I think this, 'leading lady breaks her leg so the plucky understudy finally gets the spotlight' kinda thing really resonates. There's all the stories about Picasso languishing in his studio, holding onto a rolled up Demoiselles de Avignon for years until people started to get that he was THE Modernist artist of his age. People like Paul Durand-Ruel, supporter and canny marketer of the Impressionists have this huge impact, taking hapless artists from obscurity to fame with some hard work and knowledge of the market.
It's kinda never going to be like that anymore now, is it?
I remember that silly movie with Christian Slater in it, Pump Up the Volume where he exhorted kids everywhere to take to the radio waves and free up media. Well it kinda happened with the 'digital revolution'. Now it isn't a matter of trying to get your stuff out there, it's getting it seen amongst the immense sea of stuff.
Adam Arber has an interesting viral campaign going. His Roadkill Toys have been supported by little roadside memorials he's been creating to his creatures. I look at this stuff in frank admiration and think 'how the fuck could i do something like that?'
Because that's the thing. I don't make enough from teaching to support my art habit, I need to sell enough of it to at least pay for itself. And much as I wish that someone would swoop in and sell myself for millions whilst regaling me with tales of my fabulousness, it aint never going to happen.
So, I live in the middle of nowhere, produce some reasonable jewellery and toys, in a world where a lot of people create good stuff and I am promotionally retarded. What AM I going to do about it!

I have red dye!

2009-06-03T20:18:00.002+08:00

For some reason I never bothered to get an red PTSF dye for my translucent resin pieces. I've had a bunch of red oxide sitting on the fridge for ages and not bothered to use it. Dunno, for some reason I'm not feeling a lot of red. I used to LOVE scarlet paint when I was a teenager, now it's all secondary colours...purple and violet and aqua and lime and mint..sigh....

Anyway, here's some pics of it, in the form of my newer Lump Rings. Made completely from scratch and now can be sized at whatever suits.

A trial by fire and the gaining of wisdom....

2009-06-03T17:20:00.003+08:00

I seem to have a binge and purge relationship with this blog, and bad luck kids, it's binge time again...

As a young and exceedingly arrogant kiddy I used to often bemoan the cynicism and world weariness of my elders (yeah that was about two years ago....) I found it really trying that people were so suspicious, that people were analysed, profiled and a mental dossier was created as soon as they walked in the door, simply from their clothes, their manner. I still find this irritating, it always seems like some kind of mental laziness. As soon as we start simply falling back on a pat stereotype for every person we meet, we start to lose the ability to see new traits and patterns in people's behaviours, if only so as to create new stereotypes!

If you were not yet aware, I'm employed as a high school teacher, and this has to be a profession that is rife with cynicism and world weariness. I know...I'm feeling pretty cynical and world weary right now! It's an effective mechanism, teaching sometimes feels like one long stream of consciousness experience where you dole out advice, help, and coloured pencils with endless abandon. It's hard to watch so many young people get pushed through the machine which you are an integral part of, striving at all times to do the best for all the disparate needs of those in your care.

And here's why.

Whilst I am a pretty rough and ready teacher (my Year 12s used to have friends coming into my class, amazed and fascinated by the crazed frenzys I'd work myself up into to try and get them completing their work on time. Some wanted to do year 12 art, just to get yelled at...???) not really the warm fuzzy kind, though there is a special kind of Year 12 girl who often has a soul type bond with me. But what I have lacked in sweetness, light and lack of foul language I've usually tried to make up for in passion. I give a shit....really.

Which would be why I found last years bout of depression particularly devestating. Why would this happen to me? I sit up at night thinking madly about how to help the kids out. I spend hours refining curriculum to try and get the best possible result. I think I have just about every book on Takashi Murakami. This shouldn't happen to me.

Which was when I realised, at some point probably, every teacher I've ever loathed for being slipshod and just fronting up to class, seeming to be satisfied with keeping the kids in the classroom, let alone achieving anything academic, has experienced the same thing.

Humbling.

I probably really didn't like them partially for this reason. Whilst I was busting my arse, trying to make a difference, I looked at them and saw a very possible future me.

The same with the cynicism about other people. We had a fire at our house on Friday night. We woke up at about 7am, found the windows to our granny flat smoked up and smashed, water everywhere and a flatmate who had covered the windows with a sheet to stop us from looking in.

We slept straight through the whole thing, neighbours reckon they saw it from their bedroom, flames coming out of the ceiling. No one called the fire dept, not even the flatmate. He, in his inebriation, put it out with our poor water pressured garden hose. The room was the one right next to our house, also right next to our gas bottle. it could have been all kinds of tragic and fatal. Instead it looks like insurance will sort it all out and hopefully things will be fine.

Now, I can see, is the time in my existence where I can pick up the mantle of cynicism and world weariness and really make it my own. Let it become all snuggly and comfy. A dark place, albeit, but still, somehow satisfying. I'll understand everything, as everything will be fucked in one way or another. When you look for the worst in people, you're rarely disappointed. Because, I guess, we're all pretty flawed. Why wouldn't you find the worst?

I don't know if I won't. Perhaps this is just the way it works. Every stage for every age, something you grow into, like a middle age adolescence. But now your angst has matured into something finer and sharper... I dunno. Funny thing is, most people who know me casually would assume I'm already there....

Who knows? I'm supposed to be moving into a different area of teaching next term and will be getting a new flatmate once the flat is renovated. I'll keep you posted...

Artfire-alicious!

2009-06-03T17:11:00.003+08:00

In an attempt to spread myself even thinner (yet not get thinner, what's up with that?) I've signed up for yet another online CraftBay thingie. You can check it out here. Not sure why...maybe to test out what the competitors offer? There seems to be some different pluses and minuses to each. Not sure if I can offer anything intelligent to say about either right now. Perhaps it was simply because of the mention of fire in it's name....maybe that's it :)

On a side note, I managed to sell a silly amount of jewellery on Etsy, without doing very much. Not quite the quit your day job stuff that some people seem to manage, but still, considering my effort put in was nil.... Perhaps I can become the queen of Slacker Etsy? Nah...that smacks of effort...

Get Creative Magazine!

2009-05-17T08:25:00.002+08:00

The lovely Jacqueline Byron interviewed me for Get Creative Magazine. Get this months (May's) edition and you'll find a huge spanky spread on me and Adam Arber's work. I actually expected it to be pretty brief and only have a few pics, but I'm pretty sure anyone would be pleased with the amount of pics and text! Thanks very much Jaq!

Is this ring too big?

2009-04-26T20:53:00.003+08:00

Okay, for the 2.5 people who look at this blog every couple of months, I have a question for you...is this ring too big? I made a rough example after casting some resin in a balloon. I'd been doing some plaster in balloons last year and wondered if this would work as well with resin. I like the smooth round Mod like shapes and the colour...but...is it ridiculously outsized?

I always seem to make big things. Even when Im holding back i look at the final result and wonder where I'm going to find the ten foot tall person suitable to wear the thing. I can't seem to help myself! Perhaps it's my sculptural background. I'm itching to make great big monoliths when I'm only making rings and bangles. I made this one to size (for me) and kept trying to make material off to make it slimmer and smaller and less Holy Shit Did You See That Ring! It's comfortable enough to wear, but I wonder, am I teetering at that place where it all just becomes ridiculous dress ups for grown ups stuff?? I'm considering just putting it on some leather and wearing it as a pendant instead. Anyway, I'm open to feedback!

Me on the radio....again!

2009-04-26T20:46:00.002+08:00

The lurvely Kristine Walker of Hot 100 radio fame will be interviewing me this week, after I sold her some resin pieces at the Craft Fair. Not sure when it will be aired yet, but will keep ya posted!

Craft Fair Success and Tooly Goodness!

2009-04-26T20:39:00.003+08:00

Yup I did alright at the Ol Hi to the Dry Craft Fair. $490 Australian pesos in the pocket. I was most pleased. I actually then sold a bunch more when I took my stuff to school to show a colleague and she proceeded to sell half my stock to the English Dept. Thanks ladies!

So this has enabled me to purchase my new tooly-ness, with the assistance of the noble Lori! One Ryobi drill press and one Ryobi bandsaw (with a laser as the BF cooed). Not exactly De Walt or some speccy brand but it'll do this humble amateur.

Been having a little play already and trying out some new stuff, which I'll post soonish. Yay!

Housework love!

2009-04-26T20:30:00.003+08:00

I knew I probably loved my boyfriend when he saw me mopping the floor, dead on my feet and feeling very tense and anxious ( I was going through a bit of a bad patch with the ol depression and anxiety) and he walked up and took the mop from me, even though he was also very tired, and finished cleaning the floor from me.

Despite the fact that I make jewellery and toys, I'm not really a diamond ring, or fluffy bunny kinda girl. I do like flowers though, sunflowers or irises if anyone's in the mood. And pretty smelling roses, not artifical hot house non smell blooms. Yech!

But to me, a person who will help you out when you're obviously at the end of your tether, someone who gets in and puts their shoulder to the same wheel you're trying to shove up hill...this to me, dear friends, is true love.

The BF and I are pretty constantly running around trying to tidy up the mess two dogs and a phalanx of cats leaves, as well as make jewellery, make art, renovate the house, write books, sleep, relax, meditate, practice mindfulness, spend time on the internet looking at geekery (BF..not me!) and sometime at some point, spend time with each other. I spent a whole afternoon this week backyard blitzing our veranda in preparation of the arrival of new power tools (more about that soon!) to the BF's amazement. So, when he takes the time to do things like this I have to stop, have a look, be reminded how much i love him...and then burst out laughing!

He could have mowed over it afterwards though! It's still all long and tufty, right in the middle of the grass!

Hi to the Dry! Craft Fair on the 19th of April

2009-04-12T14:56:00.003+08:00

Anyone who lives locally and would like to pick up some hand crafted awesomeness should toddle over the the Territory Craft site at Bullocky Point (just next to the Museum and Art Gallery) next Sunday between 10 and 3 methinks. I will be there, as will be my buddy Marita Albers (it is her wonderful stuff in the pic above) and the fabulous Jo Dodd of Viva La Soap fame. There's going to be displays, Ingrid Gersmanis, craft diva and Jacksons manager extraordinaire will be displaying her mosaic skills, as will many other local artists. I will be making a cake apparently to be sold in the refreshments area, so there will be much to look at, see and buy. I've hand labelled about a 100 odd resin rings...yay!

Musings on desire and creative process

2009-02-10T17:11:00.006+09:00

Gratuitous cute pic of my dog Max and my Cat Marky. I always get more hits from my images or whatever when the little furry bastards are in something

I was scurrying around in the dark cave that is my house on the weekend. I'd had some ideas for some new pieces (pics soon!) during the week and had scribbled some ideas down. I'd also managed to find a couple of small sand dollars! Something I've been looking for, for awhile now. So creatively, there was much to do.
I'd also had the flu for much of last week. The darling boyfriend is a very capable domestic technician and does a lot of the cleaning around the house, but when I'm sick, not sure how, we both seem to fall down on domestic duties. Or the animals run around and throw more of their fur about in the joy of having me in a snivelly pile at home. Not sure, but the house looked like a giant cat had thrown up fur (and dirty dishes? How did that get there?) around the house with gay abandon. BF also couldn't find his birth certificate. Bookshelves had gone from having a patina of dust and dog hair to a shag carpet.
Something had to be done
So before I would allow myself any chance to get to my artwork, I needed to clean. This is a strategy I developed, as I can get a little side tracked by my work. If you've read my other posts, you may be aware of my all consuming, be distracted by nothing else desire to make. So, to make sure I didn't live in completely festy conditions, I activated my inner parent and set down the rules.
"No artwork until you've cleaned your room/house/done the dishes for the first time this week"
This used to work. I'd get stuck in early Saturday morning, get everything shiny and pretty and sit down with a sense of satisfaction to make some stuff and be filled with that unique kind of self satisfaction that seems to come with cleaning (what else could you get from it. Minute I make my millions from plush/jewellery/whoring out the BF for ten bucks I'm getting a cleaner!)
Of course, something had to go wrong...
I don't believe in astrology. I think it a lot of bollocky bollocks that helps sell newspapers and brain wash the masses. Of course, the devout say that as a Taurus (yeah, no surprises there right?) I would say that but they can y'know...go fuck themselves. But in the case of my mother I will make an exception. if there was ever a card carrying picture perfect example of a Virgo, she'd be there, perfectly clean house and a white glove on her hand.
How does this relate you may ask? Well, like all people, I'm pretty good at tuning in to the Hits of the 80s: Distorted Memories of your Parents channel of internal radio, and so a little cleaning and order becomes I Want My House to be Perfectly Clean Right NOW!
I clean the bathroom sink and shower, and notice that the inside of the drawers are dirty. I clean the toilet and notice the very back at the S bend where we have a leak is collecting dust. I haven't cleaned all of the kitchen cupboards for awhile. When are we going to put up that pergola? Haven't been able to leaf blow because it's been raining. And on and on and on.
I have only the basic understanding of Buddhism and the concept of Mindfulness. I have been using a lot of Mindful Cognitive Behaviour Therapy stuff whilst being on stress leave last year. It's been something I've found really useful, probably more than anything else I've tried, and I've seen me some shrinks over the years, and from my understanding Mindfulness is this.
Being in the moment, not planning what to do and not thinking about what's happened but just right now. So for instance, I'm sitting in my office, looking out the green cotton curtains I washed a week or so ago where the cat fur formed little pellety balls rather than be removed, out onto my front garden, the hum of afternoon traffic apparent as we live on a main road. My left shoulder blade itches, the place where the edge of my laminated desk has come away a little is cutting into my left arm.
The opposite to mindfulness, and the preoccupation of human beings is desire. We talk a lot quite guiltily in Western society about our excessive levels of desire. How we have to have a wall length plasma flat screen TV when we had a perfectly serviceable old one. How we have two, three, four cars in a petrol starved world. How kids get given everything and value nothing. We are a culture of consumers, and we love to consume, almost endlessly, from TV shows that seem to be catering for a lower and lower common denominator to new products which always seem smaller, or bigger and therefor better than the last one. Who buys something now because the last one wore out or broke? We want, desire, the new one, way before the old one we desired has expired.
I personally don't have a lot of possessions in that respect. We are a no car family, we both live within walking distance to our works and major shopping centres. I have an old TV, a new Playstation 3 (the 2 makes the most disturbing whirring sound and takes about 10 minutes to load a game) and a newish Olympus camera. Apart from that, it's all furniture, animals and fur and resin and art.
I find consumer fetishism weird. I don't really value my own work that much. Once it's made, the glow is gone, I sell it, give it away, get rid of it. I don't collect very well. All the artwork I have have been swaps with friends, i chew through my materials so quickly I don't get a chance to be fond of them.
So, as a result, I tend to mistakenly think that I am low on the desiring front. I don't want a bigger and better house/BF/car. I'm okay with what we have.
But this is the trickiness of desire. Not falling for the shiny new toy ploy....ahhh...time to play a different game. Let's get her where she lives..
I want that cool rush you get when you have an idea and start making it and it just...works. No struggle, no revise, rework, improve. You might do better ones later, but right now, this is perfectly like what I had in my head
I want that in all the colours I have and more. New colours can completely transform a piece. I've pulled pieces from moulds, particularly late in the afternoon and just had them...flare in my hand. Resin is good at sucking all available light into it and reflecting it back with this sulky look closer and I'll show you how pretty I am glow
I want to make new prototypes. I want to feel like a runner must feel, stretching myself, working at full capacity, just surrendering yourself to the process of generating and testing ideas
I want to spend time with the BF. He's lovely and supportive, and even if it was just because he deserves it, I want to do it
I want to walk outside and see the slate tiles are leaf free and clear. I don't know why but i feel better when I do
I want to comb the dogs. They're huskies and they're shedding
I want
I want
I want

This is how I came to be at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon, collapsing into bed for a nap, completely exhausted and having done no artwork and a slightly cleaner house. I think the Buddhist point about desire is it jerks you from here to there, completely at the whim of a transient state which is never satisfied (I think I have Deleuze and Guattari's desiring machines sorted out now...) and never stops. The fact I was still ill, had depleted resources, had been through a couple of years of low energy and resilience is ignored in the face of it. That I'm thirsty or hungry. That my feet are hurting, my back is hurting. All put to one side for desire...
I ended up writing down everything I wanted to achieve, as the ideas and wants and plans and desires got so many that it was making me quite agitated. In black and white, i realised I was never going to get it all done. Not even if they declared a "Serena gets a week off to do her shit" holiday at my school would I have got it all done, and even if i had, I'd just have more things I wanted to do.
I feel like I should be leaving some kinda profound message here, but really, I was just amused by the fact that desiring something that seems good (to be creative, to make art, to have a clean and organised house) can be equally destructive to your piece of mind as lusting after the neighbour's wife/husband or addictive substances. Friends of mine, especially ones with kids, I can see getting ground down by the even bigger 'shoulds/wants' of being a good parent and what that means, and trying vainly to fit some 'me' time. I guess, I'm curious, what is it that you want so much that you're prepared to drive yourself nuts to try and get it?

Contemporary Wearables 09

2009-02-10T17:06:00.002+09:00

Toowoomba Regional Gallery in sunny Queensland (that's Australia for you non Oz residents) has a jewellery show bienially and is currently seeking applicants.
"Entries from Australian and New Zealand Jewellery Artists are currently being sought for the “Contemporary Wearables ‘09” Jewellery Award and Exhibition, curated by the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery and sponsored by Toowoomba Gallery Society Inc.Available to venues in Australia in 2010, as a Touring Exhibition.1st Prize: $5,0002nd Prize: $3,000Acquisitions up to $7,000Conditions of entry and application forms can be obtained from the Gallery.Entries of digital image files on CD-ROM and entry fees must be received by: 8 May 2009Toowoomba Regional Art GalleryP.O. Box 2352, TOOWOOMBA, QLD 4350Ph: 07 4688 6652, Fax: 07 4688 6895Email: Art@toowoombarc.qld.gov.au531 Ruthven Street, Toowoomba"

Send em an email and you'll get the details and application form. Am thinking of putting something in perhaps.....

The Devil Wears Etsy...

2009-02-07T10:50:00.003+09:00

The lovely Capitola Girl featured my glass cab rings over on the Devil Wears Etsy. Very kind of her! I need all the plugs I can get :) Go over and check out the nice little mention they made of my stuff, as well as checking out the multitude of other talented people who have been selected for feature. Personally I'm just glad that Meryl Streep wasn't there, busting my arse and beating me over the head with a wet fish for crimes against fashion...

Plus sized jewellery commitment

2009-01-29T20:23:00.003+09:00

It is often bemoaned the lack of cool funky wear for the plus sized. I know, not being a slim slyph meself! But what often amuses me is weird stuff, like jewellery and shoes. Okay, fash designers need to keep fatties away from cool clothes so as to not diminsh the oddly rabid consumer fetishistic relationship we have with fashion, trends and clothing. Don't want people seeing their own fab item of satorial superiority on the rounder form of some size 26-er, it just ruins that whole secret fashion Nazi club

But shoes? Jewellery? Okay diamond gold solitaire boringness can be left for slimmer ladies, it's so yawn worthy I don't want it! And Manolo Blahnik's or whatever passes for a leather formed faux vagina shoe these days can be restricted only to sive six and below. But are we so freaked as a culture by the rotund (which I think I am part of the majority, not the minority now) that we must run around barefeet and bling-less?

Here at the House of Kuhl (yeah, I'm working on it. Paris, Milan, London, Darwin????) there is a commitment to the creaton of bigger bling. I have a size 10 ring finger, so from sheer selfishness, i want to wear my creations. There are plenty of smaller sizes in my pieces as well, but if you're like me and have drag queens standing next to you because you make their hands look smaller, I'm your girl.

All the big bathplug/UFO rings are size 10. I recently got some cabochon ring blanks that are size 8-10.5 adjustable and have some pretty glass cabs glued on them already. There will be 3.5 and 4 inch bangles aplenty as soon as the silicone comes in and a bigger than Ben Hur sea urchin bangle as well. The sea urchin I bought is 13cm across, so that's a whole lotta room to make bangles.

So, plus sized resin craziness something your hankering for? Check out my Etsy or contact me directly in the comments. I can hook you up!

Layering resin fun

2009-01-29T19:55:00.004+09:00

The posts will probably slow down now. I'm back at school. This is a good thing. I've been in front of kids for the first time in awhile today, and it was good. They're remarkable creatures, children. Everyday I am amazed at their perceptiveness and good humour. Some are little monsters (and some not even that small :) but the vast majority of children are pretty amazing. It's funny, the 80s gave us the stereotype of the wild eyed teenager, rebelling on the edge of destruction. People think I stand in front of classrooms with a whip and a chair getting emotionally and physically brutalised every day. It's really quite far from the truth.

Anyway, back to me. And that's reeeeaaallly important. All you childcare workers, teachers, mums and dads will know of the seductiveness of throwing yourself and your own needs under a bus for kids. They seem like such a wise investment of your time and energy. They're still beginning, still fresh and new-ish and if you invest too much of your energy into them, well at least you've helped give them a leg up in life.

So when I drag myself away from the radiant smiling little wonders, I still potter on my verandah making resin jewellery. I have run out of my hideously expensive silicone, so all my plasticene models are hidden in a cupboard at the moment, waiting for more to come. Instead, I need to play at different ways to cast the same moulds I have, to keep things fresh.

R.Sobral is like a god to me. I love his and Jackie Brazil's collections of multicoloured layered resin jewellery. I posted a pic of my first stab at trying this technique and people ooohed and ahhed over my excellent bracelet (it wasn't mine, it was Sobral's! Something I thought I had made clear!) And if anyone wants to buy me one of these for the thousands it's no doubt worth, go right ahead! But I have been tinkering with the basic premise of the layering of colours in moulds and come up with this!

Bow down before it's majesty, most beautiful of all rings! Okay, not really, but it's pretty special for me. I keep making this stuff I really like and not wanting to part with it! I'll need to wear a different ring on each finger every day of the week at this rate! This ring was made with layers of every colour in the rainbow slowly added over time

This one is a sea urchin ring that I reshaped with the Drememl. It can be a little spiky (though not really, which is suprising) wearing sea urchin rings, so this is a nice solution, also revealing the stripes of colour.

This bangle is for sale on my Etsy. The same batch of blue hued resin

So how do you do it? I personally now let every layer dry! I don't want another burny bubbly event. I make up a batch of one colour and then pour in multiple moulds, each a little yellow, green, blue etc, letting each set and cool between layers. once you've filled the mould, pull out and voila! Finished stripey resin jewellery. The thing I like a lot is the complete uncontrollable nature of it. You never know where the colour will go

All Darwin residents, looks like there's a possibility of me running a resin jewellery class in the second semester for adults, so keep an ear out if you're interested.

Also going to try out the Nightcliff Markets as a place to hawk, so I'll catch you in a couple of weeks if you're in town!

On Ebay!

2009-01-26T10:47:00.004+09:00

Usually I just use Flea Bay to sell old clothes and strangely obscure computer games I've collected, but thought I might try it out for as place for the resin. So there is but one, lonely lime green cell bangle out there, if you wanna take a look. My toe in the water, so to speak....

Lessons learnt from AC/DC

2009-01-21T19:41:00.002+09:00

My name is Serena Kuhl and I was a teenage bogan

(For non Australian readers, a bogan is kinda like Joe Dirt, but mullets were actually cut that way, not fused to our skulls...)

Yup I had several pairs of black Faberge stretch jeans, not like today's skinny legs jeans, half the kids who wear them at my school can actually fit their hands in their pockets, back in the day stretch jeans were tiiiigght. Recently K Mart has released a range of pre-distressed looking heavy metal t-shirts, looking all retro etc. I owned at least a couple of them in the original 1987 non distressed state. I had so many black band t-shirts I once worked out I could go without washing them for at least a fortnight and still have a clean one to wear to school everyday. It was sad, it was tragic, but thankfully, it is over.

But this legacy has allowed me the rare pleasure of enjoying the wide ranging phenomena of AC/DC cover bands.

I loooooooved AC/DC. I used to draw pictures of them from photos, draw the fly character from the Fly on the Wall album cover everywhere, write the bands name on my bag, my pencil case, my shoes... I had pretty much every album I could get hold of and knew exactly which ones I still had to buy. The somewhere around 88' I kinda just got over it all. And the Nirvana arrived with Smells like Teen Spirit and Kurt Cobain was so much prettier....

Anyway, for those who don't know, there is a lot of people putting out AC/DC covers.

There was of course Celine Dion's effort. (I hate you, please die in a fire now!)

But much more interestingly is the cross genre stuff. Hayseed Dixie do bluegrass renditions. AC/Dshe are an all female tribute band, cock rock without the...phallic symbols?

Nashville Pussy (wotta name! I admit to having several of their albums. anyone who writes a song suspiciously George Thorogood sounding called 'Gonna Hitchhike down to Cincinnati to Kick the Shit out of Your Drunk Daddy' is alright in my book!) seem to like to cover them in weird sleaze rock style

But it gets way weirder. If you have a look at "Highway to Hell" on Itunes you get sum interesting stuff...

"Church Lady plays Organ parodies of AC/DC"

"The Angry Samoans?"

"The Day Glo Abortions" sing 'The Jack' in a pretty bad garage punk band manner. They had an album called "Two Dogs Fucking."

Ex KMFDM (y'know, the drug against war) does "Who made Who?"

The Vitamin String Quartet: Back in Baroque

And Wing....

You don't know who that is? Think back to a South Park episode, where a falsetto voiced frail little Asian lady was put in the ring by the kids in Slyvester Stallone's boxing reality TV show and had the crap beat out of her. Yup, she sings Highway to Hell

This shit makes me happier than it should...really. I can face any day with any amount of shit with this little rendition buzzin in my head.

The Budda Lounge Assembly do meditation music versions of "Back in Black"

But these, these are my favourites. Antiq Corazon de Cuba. I don't know much about salsa music, but there's something huge, over the top and slightly fake sounding about this, as it was partly created by drum tracks or computer. Funnily enough, the kind of straight ahead, no bullshit or pretensions appeal AC/DC had back in the day (sorry kids, I think they're almost caricatures of themselves now. Rock is a young man's game) is actually epitomised by this track!

So today's message, as I haven't anything smart to say about art or stuff is, when you're feeling opressed, confined, embaressed or afraid, get your silk cheongsam on and rock out an AC/DC track in a wavering little old lady voice. Wing does it, to aclaim and fame. What are you doing?

Yup...I Etsy-ied

2009-01-20T21:11:00.004+09:00

Apologies friends, this post comes across more whiny than I intended....

Well I have put me first lot of resin stuff on Etsy. It's sitting there, in amongst the fifty billion creatively derived goods the world has to offer. It may just continue to sit there. Quiet, pale, resiny, used to be smelly and toxic but now small smooth and sculptural. It might become one of those little quiet places with small brooks and fields like you see in docos about Europe. It might became the internet equivalent of a secret idyll, only spoken of yet never actually visited. Maybe you might have picked this up, but I am deeply ambivalent about the Ets. Everytime I do Etsy, I think, is this a good idea?

The forum's are full of helpful litany's on how to get noticed and make sales. How if you make posts on the forums and heart other people's stuff and buy from other people and post your shop and goods on other sites who's sole purpose is to further promote Etsy goods and promise your first born child, you'll make sales. Some people seem to be Etsy queens, they've sold their soul to the devil or something and have managed to sell a billion crafted masterpieces. There seems to be almost a critical mass, once you achieve a certain level of sales you achieve Etsy zen, where people find your jewellery, even if they were looking for orange cordouroy pants, you're unavoidable, inevitable, drawing others to you with a gravitational pull rivalled only by Jupiter.

I can't even get jealous. I like Etsy. It has nice minimal grey on white layout. It's out there to help people who make their own gear sell stuff. What's not to like?

But in the greater scheme of things, it doesn't rate all that highly in the Kuhl masterplan. Exhibitions are exciting as work goes to different places and I have to think of new ideas and stuff to make to put in them. Selling in stores is cool, because people tend to buy my stuff more when they pick it up and play with it. And you have your designs sitting beside some of the designers you really respect and like, like it's supposed to be there, like it's equal. I know people love it and can see objectively how it might be so, but Etsy doesn't excite me that much. It's like fibre in food, I appreciate it being there and respect it's purpose and think it does a damned good job at doing what it does but apart from that.....

I think I'm ambivaletsy

So here's the Kuhl Masterplan for Areseing about on Etsy and Not Really Trying (Hey Any Sales a Bonus when you're not Trying!)

1. Sporadically put up a whole lot of items, after leaving your shop empty for six months. It's tells people, I'm ambivaletsy. I might be here one day, I might not the next. You just never know. You become the craft equivalent of those guys who sell sheepskin car seat covers out of trucks by the side of the road. You better get in quick and get what I got....or just drive on by and ignore me.

2. Read a whole bunch of posts about what to do and how to market thyself in the forums and follow the instructions...sporadically. I've looked at heaps of pages (and actually come across a lot of artists stuff I like thanks!) and hearted things like a Hello Kitty on speed (I dunno, the Kitty always seems to have hearts and stuff....I'm sorry, bad analogy). I've checked out the 'competition' to see if my prices are pretty in line with theirs, made sure my spelling in my shop is right (hey someone said that this was a real turn off? Like you don't buy from fly-by-night illiterate crafters?) Then stop. You didn't really want to do this anyway. You like to help people out and comment on people's work and do tutorials and answer people's questions. You already do that, on Flickr and at work and at home and with friends and to the random emails that come in occasionally. That makes sense to you. It's more....genuine. Playing with the Etsy forum kids (who are lovely by the way) just for the sake of phantom sales that may or may not happen just seems insincere and contrived. You're a teacher, you do insincere and contrived at least a couple of times a day, do you really want to do that at home?

3. Start selling something completely different than what you usually sell. That shakes the few people who do follow your shop up. So...thought you were gonna see toys did ya? Well here's a fistful of resin rings! How bout that!

4. Spend much much more time making and teaching other how to make rather than promoting. You are Australian, and let's face it, self-promotion is for those other people in that place that starts with A and ends with merica. You don't want to be a stinky, show off, big head up yourself cow now do you?

5. Forget to even do the most basic of self promotion: mention it on your blog. Yup, usually it takes me months to remember to post about what I'm doing...

6. Have your shop's banner reference your soft toy designs when you're selling resin!

So there! That's how NOT to succeed at Etsy! If you wish to dither about, participating in things whilst not being completely sure this is what you want to do, follow my golden rules! I'll keep you posted, this might be a part of a whole new online selling revolution. Down-selling rather than up selling. the path of least selling resistance.... I'd go a write a post about it on the Etsy forum but y'know....

More resin attempts and a little bit of hypomania

2009-01-19T18:20:00.003+09:00

This has all the little dots of resin on my workbench embedded in it

Just to clarify, I'm not bi-polar. I know, because it was discussed as a possibility this year with my shrink. Why did it come up? Because I have a tendency to get a little teeny bit over excited at times....

I love creating stuff. It is my drug of choice. I had one of the those crushing moments when I was 17 when I realised I was going to have to do "other stuff" to make my living other than creating. I should have been well prepared, my mum staged quite a few preparatory crushing moments well before this time. I think she was telling me there was no way I was going to art school when I was still in primary school, and isn't writing fun, you could be a journalist....

I realise now that going to work and having to attend to a schedule other than the one I set for myself when making is probably a good thing, as I tend to get a little involved in my work...

Ideas are heady heady things. That... "whoah! I could...." moment is a rush that only depictions of drug addicts on tv seems to approximate. I used to love 70s drug poems for that reason. No Virginia, despite the psychedelic coloured furs and insane imagery, the Kuhl machine is run on a strictly no illicit substance regime. My brain is more than capable of producing thoughts and delusions scary enough when straight without adding psychoactive substances along with it. But that careening, thrilling, everything dropping away and only your crazy little mind powering away for all it's worth feeling seemed to be discussed ad nauseum by poets who all seemed to die very young (or get straight) when experimenting with various chemicals.

I've been up since before 5am this morning, playing with resin. I have no plans to kick Dinosaur Designs from their pedestal or conquer the world of resin jewellery in an extremely stinky wave of translucent and opaque colours. Whilst I'm gonna stick some stuff up on Etsy once it's add sanded and finished properly, that'd probably be the extent of my plans for the resin, that an a couple of local craft fairs. So why, might you ask, on my holidays, the week before I go back to school, coming off stress leave, why would I be driven to sand and pour and mix and cast and dremel until my arms ache and I've gone through three changes of clothes?

Dunno. I just wanna. I always wanna. When something's on my mind, I just connect with the idea and everything else seems to not matter. I had horrible eye strain for three days (sounds like nothing but suprisingly painful) because i was so transfixed by the whole GIMP and Flexify thing as something fun for the kids at school to do I spent hoooooouuuuurrrrss looking at it, hours past the point when my eyes were dry aching husks in my sockets. My physio tells me off for not taking breaks from whatever it is I'm doing and straining stuff. It's crazy.

But i suspect I'm not alone.

This post is not so much an indication of my own madness and more a call to arms. I think you're out there, little art geeks obsessing over some material, process, image or idea, ignoring the calls of your friends, families and bodies in pursuit of some unidentified goal. People always assume 1. that I have some huuuge money making scheme plannned for all this. Why else would I be making such an effort? 2. I'm obsessed and somehow making this stuff is assuaging some deep down problem. it's odd, that the pursuit of something, for itself, no big fame, fortune or goal in mind, just 'cos is seen to be pathological.

Matt's hands....to scale

Anyway, the fun that's been had of late, is to try to layer colours inside a mould. Seems to work with simple things, not so much with complex shapes as you will see in the pic of the sea anenome ring. I made a big green bangle from scratch. I have to as I had monster lobster claw hands (seriously, I'm 5'10 and my boyfriend's 6' and my hands are bigger than his. Though he does have freakish Cabbage Patch fingers....). All the pretty bangles I've made so far don't fit me. So...if you also are plagued by large hands in a catering for child's sized paws world, never fear, larger bangles (3" diameter and bigger) will be at hand...in my Etsy shop as soon as I get my shit together. So the pic of the bangle below is kind boring, but I made it completely from scratch, plasticene around a plastic bottle, cast, reshaped, sanded....and I'm not finished yet :(

I also have new pretty colours! Fluoro yellow, orange and green (the colour of the bangle) and some Pearlex coming. SO despite trying to phase gently back into going back to school, there could be a few more 5am mania days of production ahead....sigh...

Ahhh, Mike Dransfield. Lookin all dark and Jim Morrison-y like that on the front cover. If you'd given him a flannie, ridiculously tight jeans, and a Holden Statesman, I'd have so gone for him!

"alerted by some signal from the golden drug tapeworm that eats your flesh and drinks your peace; you reach for the needle and busy yourself preparing the utopia substance in a blackened spoon held in candle flame " Michael Dransfield, he died 7 days before I was born in 1973. I was completely set up by his and others like his work. I imagined stoners to be these elegant effete characters who spouted beautiful words of obscure wisdom whilst their pupils dilated exponentially. That was never going to happen in Darwin.

By the 80s, everyone I knew who took drugs were like me, working class. So it was more black Faberge stretch jeans and Metallica t-shirts than musings about esoterica. It was kicking someone's puppy to death because it ripped up someone's dope plant and watching someone's Dad vomit on the table and not move because he was so wasted. People who shot up weren't quite so full of lassitude. Even if you're too fucked up to get up, there was always still that nasty, furtive anger that just seemed to bubble away. It's weird, it's like Kath and Kim getting fucked up, just as noicely banal and surburban but never quite so funny.... And just in case you want proof, here's a lovely pic of 17 year old Serena with streaked AND permed hair. Dear god.....

More resin attempts

2009-01-17T20:34:00.002+09:00

My most recent exploration has been explosive...to say the least! I have been enamoured of the work of Brazilian artist R.Sobral since I stumbled upon his work (I think he's a he?) on Ebay. Apparently the darling of Parisian fashion, the multilayered pieces utilise resin that is a byproduct of some industrial process in Brazil? (Yup, I'm woefully ignorant). The resin is then built up in layers of beautiful colour and then turned into gorgeous jewellery as you can see in the photo of the bangle above.

So, whilst I didn't really think I'd be getting to Sobral's level of proficiency right off the bat, I thought I could do something with layers of resin as well and see how it went.

So, I'm always a little cavalier about how much catalyst I put in my resin. Which is probably a bit scary as I live in the tropics and it is HOT right now. You are supposed to use less catalyst in hotter weather but hey... all in the spirit of Australian bodginess right?

So I set myself up a whole lot of little pots of resin with the different colours and dyes I have around the house and then got started. Mix the catalyst into the first colour, pour into ice cream container, wait until it gels, then add next layer. All good in theory.

I got a little gungho with the catalyst, added the next layer a little early (only part of it had gelled) and then added probably too thick a layer. In moulds, as the pieces are so small, it doesn't seem to matter so much. Heat might be absorbed by the silicone, or not generated as much in such small pieces....

This time, the resin started SMOKING! Belatedly I remembered a mate from art school telling me about a boyfriend who set his resin on fire by over using catalyst when repairing a surfboard... The resin popped and smoked and I got out of the way (burning styrene fumes...mmmmm) and then waited for it to cool. tried another layer which also bubbled furiously and then CRACKED before giving up on this particular batch!

The next lot I used a lot less catalyst, much thinner layers and a smaller container so less heat was generated all round. It worked! I have a nice pancake of red brown, deep blue, light blue, light pink, green and khaki resin now on my work bench. I chopped a piece off using a tiny cutting disk and the dremel and then shaped the ring above. Beloved boyfriend drilled the pilot hole for me for the centre, I ground the rest out using a garnet bit for the dremel and a sanding wheel and then sat down and polished it up with two more grades of finer sandpaper. And voila! It doesn't even come close to the wonder of Sobral I know, but not bad for a first attempt (minus smoke...) methinks!

Resin Tutorial

2009-01-16T08:51:00.004+09:00

1. Making your prototype.
I don't make my ring or bangle bases from scratch. I tried and didn't have a lot of success. the Plasticene I'm using is very soft and doesn't make rigid forms like rings etc very well. So I shortcut by buying cheap acrylic rings and bangles. You can get bulk rings on Ebay very cheaply, or pick up some of the wonderful 80s inspired plastic jewellery that seems to have sprung up everywhere again, like brightly colour pustules on the butt of fashion.
So either way, make your ring, or use an existing one, now your going to add the design elements. I use plasticene to make my jewellery prototypes as it doesn't dry out and doesn't shrink like clay, and isn't expensive like Sculpey and Fimo.
An important point! If you are going to make your mould from RTV silicone, as I do, then you have to make sure that the clay you are using does not contain sulphur. Sulphur stops silicone from curing, and you'll end up with a goopy mess rather than a mould. And silicone is pretty expensive! I bought 4 kg from Adelaide Moulding and Casting Supplies for $25 bucks, and that's enough for a looooooot of jewellery. If you're not sure if your clay has sulphur in it, do a small test with your silicone before casting your prototypes. (kinda gross that cheap kids modelling clays can have sulphur in it as a filler material!)
2. Made something your happy with? Check out this video from Aldax. It's an excellent tutorial that shows you how to use RTV silicones to make flexible moulds (important if you wish to make reusable resin moulds).

You can make moulds from a lot of different materials. Plaster is difficult as it is rigid, you'll need to coat the mould with a mould release and then chip it away a lot of the times (there are methods where you don't need to, but that's kinda complex, so a book on mould making for you if you wish to go down this path). You can also use latex, which is a brush on liquid. Kinda laborious process and stinky! Also you need to know what kind of resin you are putting into a latex mould as polyester resin (which I use) tends to degrade latex over time.

I like silicone as it's easy to use over and over, gives great reproduction (I have finger prints reproduced all over my jewellery!) and is relatively no fuss. But it's expensive. I get my silicone from Solid Solutions and a huge 20kg bucket (you can get much smaller quantities!) it's about $200 bucks cheaper than most other Australian sellers, so I'm happy.

What you don't see in the video is that if you are using plasticene, you'll then need to scoop it out of the mould. It's pretty easy, sometimes you can simply flex the mould and bits will pop out quite easy, but, if you need to dig plasticene out, like I often do, get yourself a wire tool

The ones with the little loops on the end are the best for getting clay out.

Now, it your mould is free of plasticene and the original ring (should just pop out, like the video) then you're ready to cast!

3. Which resin? I use polyester, because it's cheap and readily available where I am. Epoxy, another commonly used one, is about three times as expensive where I am, but there are some cheaper craft Epoxy's I think on the market, especially in the US. Each resin has it's pros and cons. The big thing with polyester resin is it's catalyst (very corrosive and dangerous to get in eyes and on skin!) and the styrene fumes that polyester gives off. Styrene is a weird chemical, I think I was reading something about it mimicking, or affecting different endocrinal processes?

Wikipedia has this to say:

"The US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) states that human exposure to high levels of styrene (more than 1000 times higher than levels normally found in the natural environment) may induce adverse nervous system effects. These health effects include changes in color vision, tiredness, feeling drunk, slowed reaction time, concentration problems, or balance problems [4].
Styrene is classified as a possible human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).[5] The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have a cancer classification for styrene, but is evaluating its potential carcinogenicity. The EPA has described styrene as "a suspected carcinogen" and "a suspected toxin to the gastrointestinal, kidney, and respiratory systems, among others."[6][7]"

So it was very bad of me to follow in the footsteps of my ex partner, and do my first few casts mask free, no gloves, in the good ol Darwin tradition of ignoring all health risks and doing it anyway, standing in your thongs, cigarette in one hand and a flammable liquid in the other...

Yup, well I got some on my skin and it stang! Quickly washed it off and used some acetone to get it all off (acetone removes polyester). for the rest of the day my skin crawled with the kind of weird allergic reactions I get to things. the next time, when I wore gloves, I still got all crawly and itcy from the smell! So I now use a respirator with a P2 filter, and whilst some people think these are next to useless, I definitely no longer smell the stinky styrene smell. I also got some LSE resin (Low Styrene Emitting) which also helps. I use latex gloves, (tried big corrosive resistant ones but were too bulky to use), I use another respirator when sanding and safety glasses, wash all my clothes once I'm finished mucking about with resin, seperately and try to be a better OHS bunny from now on. No more crawly skin or allergy.

Must be extremely careful when using the catalyst and the resin. This is probably not a process to do around children. I do all my casting outside, at the back of my house, with safety gear and no kids. It apparently takes huge amounts of air to dissipate Styrene fumes, so not so good for little lungs playing in the backyard as you make jewellery. Epoxy might be much better in this regards? Not sure, I don't know that much about the different resins at this point.

Make sure you recap catalyst bottles safely, keep all these chemicals out of reach of kids etc

I use fibreglass resin, I don't do a lot of embedding so I don't need the water clear effect polyester casting resin has. Fibreglass resin looks a lot like honey, is thick and yellowish and goopy and I colour it with polyester resin dyes, oxides, and resin paste colours. You don't need a lot of any of these to colour your resin quite deeply.

4. Okay. Mould on flat even surface, clean, dry and free of plasticene. Resin and catalyst, kitchen scales, disposable plastic cups or some other mixing vessel which you won't be able to reuse for anything else. Flat stirrer (paddlepop sticks, or tounge depressors are good). Dyes or stuff to embed (glitter, hundreds and thousands etc).

You can work out exactly how much resin to use by filling your mould up with water, then emptying it into a measuring cup (or a plastic cup and marking the level with a pen). I have so many moulds I measure out my resin per hundred grams and then fill as many as I can.

Measure out resin on the scales. The catalyst bottle will give you a ratio (often 3ml to 100ml on cooler days), so if you don't know the weight of your resin, you won't know how much catalyst to put in. Too much catalyst? Your piece can crack from the heat generated by the catalyst. Not enough? Your piece will be tacky and gooey. It's important to be fairly precise.

Don't add catalyst yet! Add any colour, dye, or additions now. Stir them through with your paddlepop stick until mixed through then add the catalyst.

Catalyst must be measured in a container not used for other things. Silicone catalyst and polyester catalyst apparently are hazardous if mixed. I got tiny little measuring cups from my local hardware store. Measure it carefully but be aware, one little splash of this on skin or eyes (or anywhere else for that matter!) is very hazardous, so keep your distance and be careful when measuring.

Add catalyst to resin, stir through thoroughly and then pour carefully into your mould.

Sculptural resin jewellery moulds often have problems with air bubbles than most. there was air, obviously, in your mould when you started and pouring the resin into it displaces that air. an open mould (one with smooth rounded shapes like the ring in the video) will have few problems, but ones with little protrusions like my stuff, air will tend to get trapped in these cavities in the mould. The resin is rushing in, but no where for the air to go in the small space.

There's a few solutions to this

1. agitate your mould. I usually use a paintbrush handle or something and try and wobble the mould to get all the airbubbles out

2. You can create a pressure chamber. Apparently people do this using paint pots (the kinds used in high pressure spray painting) and attach them to a compressor and get the psi up to about 20-25? I don't know much about this, it's beyond my technical capacity right now, but apparently this gets rid of a lot of air bubbles

3. Dust your mould with talc. Not sure how or why or if this works, but I've seen reference to it as a technique

I always slightly overfill my moulds. Polyester likes to 'creep' up the sides of moulds, and as it sets, seems to almost 'suck' back into the mould. if you have details right on the surface of the mould, you'll lose them as the resin 'sucks back'. By overfilling, you end up with a blob of resin on the end of your piece which you have to later remove, but you get all the detail.

Now let it set. The directions for your resin will give you approximate times as to how long this will take. Basically the moulds will get hotter, as the chemical process takes place, and then it will cool down and the resin will get steadily harder. Be careful about being too gungho and pulling your pieces out when still a bit soft. You can distort and mark the surface of your piece if you wrestle it from the mould too early

5. Remove pieces from moulds and then clean them up.

If you have resin blobs you want to get rid of, now's the time to pull out the trusty Dremel. I was trying to do this with hand tools initially (files and sandpaper) and it can be done, but it's time consuming! Just a note though, power tools will often turn resin white due to the heat generated by their use. I use a Dremel with a coarse sanding wheel to take off most of the blobs from my work, and then go back and sand them smooth by hand, removing the white marks.

You can get polyester to a very high shine...if you're patient. this means going through different grades of sand paper, getting finer and finer as you go, until you end up with a very smooth surface which can then be shined up. I like matte, it's easier and looks pretty!

Resin Jewellery

2009-01-16T07:42:00.006+09:00

So I'm having a little holiday from toymaking at the moment. It's getting incresingly harder to find shops willing to take on stock from someone who isn't represented, or a name. I've been aware for awhile that I need to make the move to do more self promotion, like...make a website or something! But it just hasn't happened yet.

For those not in the know, I've been on stress leave for a month or two this year. I'm a senior school art teacher and burnout has well and truly kicked my butt. Making is a pretty important part of my existence, the kick of generating ideas and struggling to see them made 3-D is my drug of choice. But all this icky schmoozin, networking, self promotey bollocks leaves me cold. Even though I know every indiustry in the world thrives on it. And that it's virtually impossible to get your stuff seen if you don't. And you may as well just lock yourself in a box with your little fabric effigies and beat yourself with a stick if you don't bother. Did I ever mention I'm kinda stubborn? I need to do a lot more to promote my work if I want to keep making it but ain't got the juice to do it.

So how do I solve this dilemma? By playing around with something new! I've always loved resin jewellery since the early 90s Dinosaur Designs explosion. Even though I did many years of sculpture at art school, we never did cover resins, probably as they're a bit dangerous and whiffy and y'know, bad to breathe in

This is Dinosaur Designs latest stuff, not mine!

So in the spirit of getting back to the fun stuff in making, I've had a stab at making resin jewellery.

It's nice to get back to I guess what I was trained to do, modelling. I actually started making soft sculpture as a reaction against modelling (by this I mean taking a substance and shaping it into a sculpture as apposed to the construction method: welding, wood, carving etc). Modelling was always something I found relatively easy and sewing was a whole new challenge: how to get forms by constructing fabric into shapes.

So it's been a long time since I've squished some plasticene into shape! Jewellery poses an obvious challenge in that everything is so tiny. One of my lecturers used to talk disdainfully about making sculpture with dentist tools: in other words, tiny little tools which you wield with the kind of care toy prototypers do. This obviously didn't fit in with his idea of the heroism of large scale sculpture!

The colour of resin is just amazing. the transparent stuff just seems to suck in light. I pulled a bunch of kelly green pieces from moulds the other day and they just flared with radiant light as I got them out. I'm casting ridiculous amounts of resin right now, just to try out all the different colour combos I can make! Anyway, tutorial following this post...

Pictoplasma Residency!

2009-01-16T07:41:00.000+09:00

Exciting news kids! Pictoplasma, gods of intellectual burrowings into what a character is, are offering a lucky punter a chance at a residency, as part of the famous Character Walk which they hold each time they have a conference. Not much of a lead time (proposals in by the 26th of Jan) and works to be there by March but a seriously awesome opportunity

"Pictoplasma and DISK/club transmediale offer young and upcoming artists the opportunity to present their character driven work to a wide, international and interested audience.
As part of the official Character Walk, running from the 17th to the 21st of March 2009 and opening the world’s largest festival of contemporary character design and art, the renown project space General Public in the center of Berlin will serve as the perfect stage for the winning proposal.
The awarded artist will receive up to 10 days of accommodation in Berlin from the 11th to the 21st of March 2009, a grant of 500,- Euros to help realize the submitted proposal, all our support to set up the exhibition in the “General Public”, as well as free entry to all of the Pictoplasma Festival and Conference events.
We are open to your wildest, most daring, stylistically sure-footed character exhibition proposals, not limited to any media or style, ranging from video work, photography, performance, installation, painting, print, drawings or sculpture.
We expect to receive a detailed, written exhibition concept, some sketches as a first reference, a selection of the entrants previous work, an artist biography and all contact information via email until the 26th of January 2009. All material should be sent to
pictopia (at) pictoplasma (dot) com
A jury panel composed by former speakers of the Pictoplasma Conference, club transmediale and Pictoplasma will select the winning proposal and inform the future resident no later than the 5th of February. Should any questions need to be clarified, entrants are requested to be reachable via email AND phone during the first week of February.
In 2009, The Character Walk will once more guide numerous international festival attendees, producers and fans through over twenty selected locations in Berlin-Mitte, showcasing different positions of artists working in the genre of reduced figuration.
Artists exhibiting at previous Character Walks include:
Tim Biskup, Rinzen, Nanospore, Moki, Shoboshobo, Juju’s Delivery, Nathan Jurevicius, Gary Baseman, David Shrigley, Derrick Hodgson, Doma, Rob Reger, Jiacong Jay Yan, Genevieve Gauckler, Ian Stevenson, Steak Zombies, Friends With You and many more…
Miro Delija

Plush Making Process: Sewing Part 2!

2008-12-01T10:28:00.007+09:00

So you've got your body drawn, designed, sewn up and ready to finish. Now we get to the knitty gritty's. Bodies with pulled seams and puckers, unsightly bulges etc are going to detract from your work, so getting a good base form sorted is important. But, it is the next part of the plush that usually makes a difference when it comes to plush.

You're going to add the parts of the piece which make up the character: the eyes, nose, mouth, tail, horns, prehensile teeth, antenna, prolapsed colon...whatever. You've worked this out on paper already, and are confident that your character is fabulous....so now's the time to see if you were actually correct.

Jill Penney's Fimo models of her pieces for Plush It

The translation from 2-d to 3-d is a tricky one. Interestingly, plush maestro Jill Penney created some small Fimo models of her Plush It Designs before making the finished product, which is a labour intensive process, but makes a lot of sense. 2-D and 3-D sometimes seem like completely different visual languages, what is very successful in one form, doesn't always work out that well in the other. Which is why my illustrations suck and some people have the most beautiful tags, websites and promo material for their plush, but the actual object is a little meh.

Firstly: materials

Eyes: Eyes can be made from buttons (I use buttons which I embellish with dimensional paint). They can be shank buttons (on the underside of the button is a little loop of plastic with which you sew it to the piece. Benefit: you don't see button holes on the final piece. Drawback, on smooth fabrics like cotton they can flop around a bit as they don't sit flush to the fabric, or buttons with holes in them (dunno what the proper name is). Each needs to be secured pretty tightly to the piece, as this is often the thing that will come off, in transit to the gallery, in the customers hand when they buy it! I tend to use double thread and just try to sew it as strongly and as tightly as possible....and still have eyes that come loose and fall off, so I'm not the greatest advisor when it comes to this.

My piece, Floral Ecstacy. As you can see, you can find some interesting buttons which make for some out of the box kind of eyes!

Beautifully embroidered sugar skull plush by the multi-talented Geek Freeks

You can embroider your eyes on. This means using stitches to create the illusions of eyes. If you're very proficient at embroidery, you can embroider shapes and colours, much as if you were drawing on the fabric, or, more simply, you can use an embroidery stitch on the outside of some fabric which you've cut in the shape of your eyes

Nerderella's lovely piece for Plush It. If drawing's your thing, using felt can be a useful way to translate your drawing of eyes etc more truly, as it remains flat and 2-D like your sketch

You can cut out felt shapes and stick them on, or use neoprene. Use a pretty strong glue, stuff like hot glue guns and aquadhere can actually loose their bond in hot climates like mine (I live in the tropics...sigh). Araldite is often pretty tough.

Shawnimals Pocket Pork with safety eyes (I think!)

Ugly Doll OX

You can use safety eyes. A must if making plush for small children. All of the above strategies, except for the embroidered one are possible choking risks for small children. Buttons, definitely, everything else, not so much. Safety eyes are a plastic domed eye which has a long shank on the back which you feed through a small hole in your plush. they are attached very securely by a washer which you push on the shank from the inside of the turned out plush. Best to do this before putting the stuffing in. they are much more difficult for little fingers to remove and then put in their mouths, so keep this in mind when thinking of your prospective audience. Shawnimals and Ugly Dolls really have cross market appeal, they are beloved by the very small and the not so small, so Shawnimals tends to use safety eyes in his pieces (I think from looking at them) and Ugly Dolls tends to embroider theirs on.

John Knox's piece for Plush It

You can also use materials like t-shirt transfer paper which is how I think John Know of Hello Brute does his. This way, if you want your plush to ressemble very closely your digital designs, you can actually print out your faces with an inkjet printer and heat seal them to your fabric. Be careful about doing this with synthetic and stretch material. His My Pal Sooky La-La show was incredibly successful plush wise and the pieces were fairly simple, but coupled with his incredible faces which he created for each one, made a range of plush pieces that had a lot of the clean graphic and endearing qualities of his other designs.

This was a collaborative piece that Marita Albers and I did. Being a painter, she painted up some beautiful faces on canvas and then I stitched them to the body I'd made. It works best if you use some pretty felxible painting surface (canvas was maybe a little stiff) and sew the pieces (often an over stitch, a stitch you can see on the outside of the piece, before they are stuffed)

So here's a variety of approaches that are fairly do-able for most people. You can get buttons, safety eyes, felt and canvas from most craft shops and inkjet transfer paper can be bought from most printing consumable outlets. There's some interesting stuff out there as well, the imitates the complex process of dye sublimation (ink is impreganted into a synthetic fabric surface) that's even better than inkjet transfer paper, but I haven't been able to get hold of any. Next we'll look at some other more complex ways of putting together a character

Making your own plush part 3: Sewing!

2008-11-25T06:20:00.007+09:00

The Plush It Template. You cut on the dotted lines and sew on the solid lines. If you make your own templates using Adobe Illustrator, you can easily create an instant seam allowance line using the Object/Offset path command. I used Round and 20pt as my settings

Sewing can be as simple or as complex a procedure as you like. A really basic kind of plush is what's called a pillow doll. Much the same way as the pillow you sleep on was created, you get two pieces of fabric (in the case of a pillow, two rectangles) the same size and shape. You then pin those two pieces of fabric together so they are facing in.

This is Frocoli's design when it was sketched out on two pieces of fake fur. Note that the two pieces of fur have the furry sides facing inside and the woven backing of the fur is on the outside. This is a more advanced form of starting your design, in that he's sketched his design freehand on the fabric.

What does that mean?

This means that fabric usually has a right side and a backing. Fake furs the easiest example to use. The furry side is the right side, the side that should be facing in. So once you've cut out your two pieces of fake fur in the same shape, you put the two furry sides together so they are touching and then pin around the outside. this is because once you are finished sewing your piece, you are going to turn out the piece. In other words, turn it inside out. this will mean that the stitches you used to create the piece will be on the inside of the piece, and the viewer won't be able to see them.

Hopefully you can see here that my pins for Decomposing Dave are a few centimetres in from the edge. That's where I sewed my seam. That's a seam allowance of fabric

Seam allowance. When I, and most of the artists were sewing their pieces for the Plush It Show, we cut out two of the template shapes. As we intend to sew along the outline of the template, we leave what's called a seam allowance around the edge of our shapes when cutting it out. what this means is that you can either draw about a 1cm (or more) larger outline of the template onto the fabric and cut along this larger shape, or you cut out your shape leaving a gap between where you cut and the outline. You DO NOT cut on the outline. You need a gap or seam allowance between where you're going to sew (seam) and the edge of the fabric.

So now what? Well now you sew. There's lots of different ways to do this. The simplest way is to do it by hand, with a needle and a thread and just do a straight stitch. The reasons why this can be a useful place to start is you don't need any technology (sewing machines etc) so there's low outlay of funds for you. I also personally find that my hand stitched creations are much 'truer' to the template or drawing I created (they turn out looking much closer to the original shape). Unless you're skilled at using sewing machines, it's much harder to make all the tiny little compensations and changes you do as you hand sew with a sewing machine. But for sheer time saving and efficiency, you can't beat a sewing machine, especially when you find out just how much time you're going to need sewing a piece and how little money plush is sold for!

If you have never sewn before and need help, sewing.org seems to be a good place to look for basic instructions. It's usually something that someone in your family will know how to do, so try them! I use a very basic straight stitch, which is simply the kind of 'over and under' stitch kids are often taught when very young. Using double thread (you thread your cotton through the needle and bring both ends together and knot them = a doubling up of your thread) tends to make your pieces stronger, as does making smaller stitches. You only have to look at the tiny stitches made in commercial plush to see the more stitches equals stronger construction.

Now you have two choices, to sew completely around the whole shape, or to leave a gap. I personally like to sew around the whole piece. I find again, that the shape stays truer. the problem you will note, if you actually do this, is that you now have a shape that is sewn up completely, wrong side out, and now way to turn it inside out.

At this point I usually cut a slit in one side of the piece. This is usually where the mouth will be, or some other kind of detail. In my Gimp Bunnies, it's actually in the back of the piece, there's a little bunny tail sticking out the back of all that vinyl. That was you get a seamless finish to the piece, there's no obvious closing seams.

If you leave a gap in your seam (you stop before sewing the complete outline of the piece) then you can easily turn it inside out, you have a nice handy hole in your seam to do that. But once you've turned the piece inside out and filled it with stuffing of some sort, you'll have to close this.

The decision as to which way to go is really an aesthetic thing. Shawnimals uses his closing seams as a focus in his work

You can see the little stitches down the bottom of this little Pocket Dollop? If you use a blanket stitch to close your piece up (more about that in a minute) then you declare to all and everyone that this piece is handmade, that the artist( himself in this case), made these stitches and completed this piece. It's all part of that handmade aesthetic. To be blunt, few plush makers can rival the sophistication of what's being produced commerically, so why try? There is a charm and appeal that handmade has, that no commerical product can rival, so by using a stitch like this, you're out and proud about your handmade-ness.

Or, if you make more complicated pieces and don't want to 'clutter' the piece with an obvious seam, use a blind stitch. Off to sewing.org again if you don't know what one of those is!

So, stuffing!

Stuffing is simply the materials you use to fill your plush. Plush is in a lot of ways like a 'stuffed drawing'. You start out with flat surfaces, you attach them to each other, but it's not until you begin stuffing the piece, does it become 3-D. This can be part of the difficulties of making plush. Unlike vinyl, where you can start with wax, clay, or some other modelling material, and you're able to see the form as it develops, sewing is a little less easy to control. each time you turn a piece inside out and stuff it, you get to see if it all actually worked! Sometimes even shapes that look like they should work and are not too different from things that you've made before successfully just look bad when they're stuffed. Isn't that fun!

The types of materials you can use are varied. Poly fill, a spun polyester (i think?) filament that looks a lot like clumps of wool and can be found in most craft shops is often used. Eco fill is being touted a lot in the community, it's not available where I am, so I'm pretty ignorant about it. it you want that beanie type fill, like Beanie Babies have, you can buy small plastic beads that are used to fill toys from bear making suppliers. Some people use strips of old fabric, cotton wool. Basically it's something softish to be stuffed inside your toy.

The way you stuff toys is either a simple of difficult task, depending on your own personal prejudices. I have seen a lot of bear artists who have quite specific ways of stuffing toys, to get more subtleties out of their forms. There are even tools to help you stuff. My advice is this, stuff the piece, don't use scissors to help as they tend to pierce the fabric and play around with the fill. little fine parts of a piece, like fingers for instance, often have to be stuffed first, they will be too difficult to stuff once you've got most of the body sorted. rolling up small balls of poly fill and setting them into the fingers or whatever will often make sure they are stuffed properly. You have to also be a little careful about overstuffing a piece. lumpy toys with uneven surfaces because they have had stuffing shoved into them until bursting point isn't pretty. but you can use this technique to create form if you like. the template at the beginning of this post comes out pretty flat, the usual softly rounded surface you get with most pillow dolls. If you wad up some fill and slide it to the center of the face of the template and then stuff it quite hard, you can create a pointy nose type form in the face. Experiment, see what works for you.

Stuffing don'ts.

Don't stuff til straining point and split your seams

No lumpy toys ( I hate that!)

Don't under stuff. Floppy limbs are good if they are part of a design, but not because you didn't stuff it properly

Watch your stuffing around any sharp angles in the design. If you have arms that come out of the body on say a 45 degree angle, you'll often get some creasing in your toy around this joint. stuffing fairly hard around here will give your piece a more smooth Designer Vinyl look to it

Stuffing Advice

Some fabrics have a bit of stretch in them and are much better for making plush. they stretch with the fill and make your piece look a lot smoother and more appealing. Shawnimals and Ugly Dolls tend to use fabrics like polar fleece. It's soft, it's knitted (knits tend to take forms a lot better than woven fabrics) and has a little stretch to it. Fake fur has a bit of stretch, as do lycras, stretch vinyl etc. Too much stretch (polyester lycra is often too stretchy for plush) can totally distort and ruin your form.

Finishing off your form

As I said beforehand, you either make an obvious closing seam, like the Pocket Dollops, using a blanket stitch or an overhand stitch or you use a blind stitch to close the seam so it looks like there was no closing seam there. Or you hide your closing seams like I do, behind the mouths or whatever else you sew on top of your piece!

Well, that's the basics. But right now, you'll only have a blank shape, much like a blank Munny or Qee. What do you do now with it? Well, next post will be about how to create the character you designed on the piece using a range of strategies...

Making your own plush: the process Part 2

2008-11-18T09:19:00.009+09:00

So what exactly are you going to draw? Well I guess the overarching title of this industry is what you're looking for: Character Design. You are trying to create character. Loosely defined as one of the three elements of what makes us up as people (character, temperament and personality), character is really important obviously in Designer Plush. You're not usually making toys for small children, most people who buy Designer Plush are adults/teens. So what makes then pick your piece up rather than the multitude of others out there? Things like textures and materials can obviously help, things that feel nice will often seduce people, as will pleasing colours (one of the reasons I always find my plush sells better via bricks and mortar rather than online) but character is primary.

If someone relates to the character, it pushes down on their 'cute' nerve and makes them respond to it, if the piece and buyer are able to strike up some kind of chord, then sales and success are more likely to happen. Interestingly character seems to be conveyed loosely in two different ways

Minimalism

The Japanese are masters of character design. They have companies like Sanrio and San-X who specialise purely in character design. A little different than the traditional character design process for products in the West, where graphic designer for say, Kellogs, design a character like Tony the Tiger and Kellogs retain the right to that character. In Japan many characters, like Hello Kitty obviously, are licensed to a variety of producers of goods to be placed on their products. So Sanrio isn't in the business of making the toilet paper, condoms, toasters, or vibrators that sport Kitty's image (though they do produce some goods I think), they supplement this with licencing Kitty's image to these producers to include on their products to make them more appealing and sell more. Takashi Murakami, god of Superflat Art estimated that 85% of Japanese people owned some sort of character branded goods, so it's obviously a strategy that works.

Minimalism in character design

"Hello Kitty, as well as her family and friends, is generally depicted without a mouth, especially in merchandise. Her current designer says that she should have one because without, she lacks emotion. The official position of Sanrio is that she speaks from the heart, having no need of any particular language [citation needed]. Hello Kitty was depicted as having a mouth in a segment in the series Sanrio World of Animation. However, it has been said that Hello Kitty does have a mouth, but it is not drawn, as the creators wanted Hello Kitty's emotions to be interpreted by the viewer."

Ugly Dolls, the incredibly successful Designer Plush from the US have a similar strategy. Not quite as minimal as Hello Kitty, they still keep the facial expressions in their plush to a minimum (though not so much in other character designs)

What are the Ugly Dolls expressions? Are the sad, happy, angry, wistful, melancholy, indecisive? Whilst some have tongues hanging out, perhaps giving you some sort of clue as to what they're thinking :) it's actually up to you to decide. Sanrio has discussed how the 'blankness' of some characters can be an advantage, it gives you a kind of mental sewing needle, where your brain can stitch on the expression appropriate to your current mood onto the toy and instantly feel it is in tune with what you are thinking and feeling.

Maximalism!

Okay this isn't really the right word for it, but when you make it very clear what the expression of the piece is, let's go with Overt Characterisation for the moment. This is where you deliberately try to convey to the viewer what the character is feeling.

This is Bunny Poo by the fabulous Nerderella. The piece is called Screaming Bunny, just in case you didn't get that by looking at him! I admit this is the kind of character design I prefer. I frequently feel like a Screaming Bunny, so i instantly feel approval for this design. If I only was as cute as that when I was stressed! So if this is the kind of design you choose to make, then you will be either hitting or missing with your viewer. If they don't respond to cute screaming little bunnies, then your design will be disregarded. But it's a pretty safe risk to take, with the prevalence of sado-cute media like South Park, Drawn Together etc, we, as a society, are pretty drawn to the wonderful ambivalence of the cutely insane.

So? How do you achieve either kind of characterisation in your work?

It's a little like any kind of artform, you have to get into the language of character. This beautiful exercise by the wonderful Greg Abbot is a great one to look purely at characterisation. I get kids in my Cartooning class to do stuff similar. The most minimal of shapes and just trying different faces and ways to convey expression. As a beginning exercise, this is great way to discover your style and type of character (if you don't already know)

Researching other people's work is always one way of going about it as well. Artists over the centuries have always talked about how their work came about from being influenced by those before them. Even Picasso, icon of Modernist "originality" and Artist as Hero admitted that Cezanne (and African mask making) was a huge influence on his work. Some people like and some people hate this idea. It depends how hung up on the whole "my work is a completely original and unique display of my inherent wonderfulness" thing you are. Me personally, there's nothing new under the sun, we're all just trying to recombine and mutate things as best we can.

But if you're okay with it, look at other artists work. Flickr, Mojizu, Pictoplasma are all excellent sources of character design from across the globe. Who do you like/dislike and why? How does the person who you do like create his characters? Can you reverse engineer one? This is legitimate practice for the development of style, but not a legitimate means of making characters and selling them. There seems to be a disturbing amount of plush on Etsy and Deviant Art that are direct knockoffs of Ugly Dolls, Shawnimals etc work. These people aren't making millions (yet) and it's not fair to rip off other people's work. It's also illegal, so y'know, play nice.

The important thing though is to distinguish yourself. There's a hell of a lot of plush and character design creators out there. if your stuff is derivative or an outright copy, why will people look at your stuff rather than anyone else's? The sad thing is there are so many Wee Ninja knockoffs out there, as everyone has had the bright idea to rip off someone else's design, that your rip off is out there in a sea of counterfeits. Go for your own ideas and put them out there and see if they are able to succeed in getting noticed.

So you've researched, developed a language of character design that you like, now what? Well Virginia, it's now time to sew....

Making your own plush: the process Part 1

2008-11-18T08:43:00.002+09:00

Drawing!

A weird place to start perhaps, but most sculptors, plush makers, 3-D object creators, at some point in their development of their skills, start with a drawing. Beautiful full realised sketches like Henry Moore's (famous UK sculptor if you don't know) or just a quick scribble, it's usually a means to get the basics down on paper, to be sure what you're going to make has the right proportions, shape, composition etc.

I've included here a selection of the drawings from the Plush It Show.

This is a drawing by Geek Freeks. It's the kind of drawing I tend to do (though a lot nicer drawn here!). It's worked out what's going where. Proportions (how big is the heart, the nose, the eyes etc) are all sorted out here in the sketch, so in theory, if you follow these proportions when making the plush, all will be good. Importantly though, plush/3-D is not the same as a drawing, and sometimes the translation, even if scrupulously followed from the original sketch, is just not right. That means, of course, going back to the drawing board!

Cuddly Rigor Mortis's sketch for her Plush It piece. You can see that she's suggested materials to herself to use, colours etc. The trial of a few ideas is a great one, and one I use a lot myself, you can see quickly, what's going to work and what's not, without having to make each and every idea.

Robyn Fabsits completed design for her piece for Plush It. This can be useful as you see pretty much exactly what it's going to look like and evaluate it before you make it. I never do this of course, because I'm too impatient!

So these are my drawings. I did page after page of different proposals initially, just to get the ideas going, see what would come out of the ol creative faculties. Then I decided on one for Decomposing Dave. As always, the final product differed a bit from the drawing. Worms coming out the side of the head was great in the drawing, not so good on the final product

Writing instructions for yourself when making complex plush. Violet Pie had a very complex piece. It included dyeing the piece using Kool Aid, needle felting the face, using taxidermy eyes, so it's important then to give yourself some instructions to follow. It can be great when the ideas are flowing, you can see the piece and how it will look perfectly in your head, but when you come to make it, sometimes it gets a little more confusing dammit!

Design by Frocoli

Using different coloured pens can also help, draw your attention to parts of the design, or go over some of your initial lines which you've decided to change.

Michal Wright-Ward's process was interesting. She was working from the template which we all worked from, but used tissue paper/drafting film to draw her design over the design, so that she could both look at her design, free of the template to evaluate it, or put it back over the piece to match it to the template

And Jill Penney. Largely considered to be some kind of maestro in plush, here's her process below. If you find it a little difficult to read the text says

"The spiders started as little tiny sketches in the corner of my sketchbook. I messed around with them a little on paper and then added colour"

Dia de los plush

2008-10-04T08:56:00.000+08:00

A few of the artists involved in Plush It are also putting their work into a couple of other shows. One is the Dia de los Plush show at Red Hot Robot in Phoenix, Arizona. My flatmate and comrade, Marita Albers and I knocked up some pieces of it very quickly (we left it all a bit late) and they will be in the company of some other excellent artworks.

Jared Deal

Me and Marita's stuff

Geek Freeks

My Paper Crane

John Knox from Hello Brute fame

Monster Art Rally

2008-10-04T08:55:00.001+08:00

Again, several Plush It peoples (can't bring myself to say peeps, I'm too uncool) are in the Monster Art Rally show at Gallery 1988 in San Fran

Jayson Thiessen's work

Monsters were created by... 12Punt3, 2Cents, Adrian Pina, Anna Chambers, Beastlies, Brandt Peters, Buff Monster, Bytedust, Cameron Tiede, Chet Zar, Chocolate Log Industries, Crump, Crystal Bedford, Dan Goodsell, DGPH, Doktor A, Dr. Bao-NVC Crew, El Maz & Lina Britton, Eyebone, Forestprints, Heidi Kenney, Jake Henzler, Jamous, Jayson Thiessen, Jeff McMillan, Jellibat, Jen Rarey, Jesse Hernandez, Jon Schiller, Jumble Bugs, Kano, Kathie Olivas, Koadzn, Lana Crooks, Laura Granlund, Leecifer, Little Dear, Lost Monster, Mad L, Maoma, Mister Funky, Monster Factory, Morninglori, Motor Bot, Mycryptonauts, Rebelwookiee, Serena Kuhl, Sewing Stars, Sok-O, Spasmodica, Steff Bomb, Suicide Kittens, Tapetentiere and Tim Tsui.

Polters off to Gallery 1988

2008-09-02T20:20:00.004+08:00

So I've finally (pretty much) finished the pieces for the Monster show in October at Gallery 1988 in San Francisco. They are all Poltergoosts. I had been trialling a bunch of other ideas but they no workee. So instead we have the following

A Poltergoost in a 1993ish IMac (couldn't find an Bondi Blue vinyl) complete with keyboard and hockey puck mouse. You can't really see it from this pic, but the screen has a Matrix like pattern of numbers and words on it. Kinda binary-like?

There's the game table. Kind of the piece de resistance really. I followed very closely the game layout of PacMan and used old skool Australian/Japanese gametables as a model for it. I'm kinda proud of this one

An IGhost, a poltergoost stuck in a dead Ipod (you know that horrible sight, when your Ipod has a sad face....)

And a Polter Cartridge, supposed to look a little like an SNES but hasn't quite worked.

Hopefully Steve Jobs won't kick my arse and sue for the little I have!

Working with ze fur

2008-08-26T05:20:00.000+08:00

I dunno why, but giving advice about making plush has me tapping into my German ancestors (who were related to Colonel Klink it appears....) Anyway.... lots of people cite working with the most tasteful of all plush making materials, fake fur as a messy and difficult process. And it is! The wonder of spinning all that acrylic fibre into thin fur like filaments and binding it to a woven back seems to come with a price and that is fur mess. But never fear dear plush newbies, there are some tips you can use to alleviate the shitstorm that is making plush with fur.

Admittedly I come from a place that is tolerant of fur, I have two Huskies and two cats, so fur is just part of the decor in our place (hmmm.. I really like the Tex Mex motif you've got going here with the fur tumbleweeds, it is tres chic!). But one tip from the fab-o Mendels Far Out Fabrics in Haight Ashbury (why do I imagine everyone in there dancing and singing about the wonder of fabric?) suggests cutting your fur pieces out from the back of the fabric with an Exacto knife. This way you avoid a lot of the fur shedding-ness. You are only really cutting the backing, not the fur, so a lot less fibres are released and spread with due abandon around your house and self.

Now being a bit of a rough and ready plush maker, such cautious measures are all a bit much for me. So if you're not prepared to commit to fur cutting Exacto zen, perhaps you can try the trick I use when using long fancy furs.

If you cut the shapes out with the only the tips of the scissor blades (need to be sharp obviously), rather than the whole blade, which tends to slice through fur, backing and everything else willy-nilly and a fur explosion of epic proportions is in the making. Using the tip allows you to slide the blades through the fur, parting the pile so as to cut less of it and focus your cut on the backing itself. It works quite well, though there is always a bit of fur pile escape. When you cut fur you tend to unravel at least a little of the woven back and let a few fibres go free.

Whilst at the amazing Bartfeld Textiles in Melbourne Australia (if I am very good in this life I will die and ascend to this store for my happy fur afterlife) I saw the guys rip the fur into lengths, like you would a cotton and was completely amazed. I wouldn't have thought it possible but apparently it is! If you are trying to cut a length of fur into smaller lengths, this might be viable to try.

Fake fur, it's tasteless and tacky and comes in all the colours vomit does, you know you want to try it......

Ze making of ze plush

2008-08-07T04:57:00.000+08:00

I see posts all the time from people asking for instructions how to make plush. There are a lot of mainstream books out there, in your local library which will show you how to make a bear, or a doll, and those basic principles will stand you in good stead, even if you want to make a plush brain eating zombie, it's all one in plush zen. What I will be posting irregularly here are the little secrets that people just don't tell you about.....

And here's one! This is from a tutorial I made up for the wonderful Plush You book, put out by super-gal Kristen Rask of Schmancy fame. It talks about how to apply blood to your toys and other bodily fluids...

Dimensional paint is a great product that is used for a variety of craft purposes. Not to be confused with the ever fun puff paint, it’s a thick acrylic paint that does not lose “body” or its three-dimensionality when it dries. If you ever painted using impasto and been disappointed when it dries at how much texture is lost, dimensional paint will make you very happy.
Dimensional paint can be found in most craft stores, or in the craft aisles of major stores. There’s quite a few different manufacturers producing it and it comes in shiny, glitter and pearl. I personally use shiny, it helps make the blood look more real and fresh!
Different manufacturers produce dimensional paint in different consistencies. I’ve had problems with some that is very thick and tends to come out of the bottle’s nozzle in a very thin wriggly line and also runny stuff that comes out too freely from the bottle and makes for very fat shapeless runnels of blood. Following the Goldilocks rule, paint that’s neither too thick or too runny is just right. Paint is quite cheap, so it can be worth sampling a few different types and finding what works for you.

The bottles of paint are usually around 1 fl. Oz in size and should come with a fine nozzle and a cap. It’s important to cap the bottle after use as it dries easily. You need to prepare the bottle before use, whether it’s a bottle you’ve used before or a new one. A phenomenon I like to call ‘Dimensional Paint Flatulence” can occur if you don’t shake the bottle’s content towards the tip. You don’t shake it like a cocktail, more like a couple of good downward motions and you should feel the paint settle in the top of the bottle. Otherwise air bubbles in the bottle will interrupt the flow of paint when you apply it. You apply the paint by squeezing the bottle and touching the paint to the fabric like you would using an icing bag on a cake. If there are air bubbles you’ll get a case of DPF, and instead of a nice fluid line of paint you get a small explosion of air and fine bits of paint splattered all over your surface. I haven’t been able to find a way to get paint, wet or dry, off fabric, so it pays to be careful. A good rule of thumb, every time you go to apply paint, is to try it out on a piece of paper first

Applying the paint

Step 1: Here we have a poor little bunny whose throats been cut. To give him a bit of dimensional paint goriness I usually start with a straight line of paint along the cut site. Don’t be too picky about this, as you can see, dimensional paint tends to come out in blobby lines, rather than nice smooth neat ones.

Starting a droplet
Step 2: I create the illusion of blood on my work by creating a series of running drops from wherever I’ve faked a cut on the piece. I start a little below the line of paint I created in Step 1 and start by creating a blob of paint. If you just squeeze a bit of paint out and touch it to the fabric you’ll create a little pointy blob that looks a little like a chocolate drop (see fig ). If you create one of these and hold the bottle there, not breaking contact with the paint and keep increasing the pressure you’ll keep adding more paint to our otherwise pointy blob and it will swell out to a nice round shape. This is one of the main precepts of my technique. It makes whatever you’re creating, blood, drool whatever, look like gravity is at work and fluids are pooling at the end of the drip. In other words, it looks more real. Now without breaking contact, move away from the blob and draw your paint up until it rejoins the line you created before. You have created your first drip.

Step 3: Essentially all you need to do now is create a series of blobs and lines back to the cut line you created in Step 1. I usually curve my lines back to the top as it makes it look more real to me. I will usually start with a blob, then move up in a line to the top and then create another line from the cut site and move down to a blob. I tend to apply the blood drips in one continual motion, not stopping to do each one individually, but I don’t think it will matter if you do them separately.

Step 4: Finished! Your blood is now applied and can be set aside to dry. It cannot be touched, usually for about eight hours , but as I live in the tropics it might dry differently in different climates. Do not be tempted to touch it until it dries, it ruins the shine of your blood and can blot your paint all over your fabric. So this means you need to leave your piece somewhere away from pets, children and your own sleeves sometimes to dry.

Now on to other bodily fluids

The same principal can be used to make other bodily fluids. If you’ve always wanted to make plush that’s drooling with boredom, nauseous and vomiting, or likes to pick its nose then you can do all of this with dimensional paint. Reverting back to your inner 5 year old has never been so visceral!
Drool
Drool is basically one blob and a very thin line of paint back to the corner or the mouth.

Vomit
Vomit can be harder, I personally find the look of big areas of dimensional paint unappealing so it’s more like creating a thin stream of bile. You can wiggle your line down from the mouth of your creature, so as to indicate the journey this unpleasantness has taken down the front of the creature. A small tasteful splash says so much more than Vomit-a-palooza… Add bits of carrot at your discretion.

Snot
Much like the splash in the vomit picture, anything lime green, blob-like and near a creature’s nose will read as snot. It you want to go overboard (like I do) you can actually apply two different colours of green together for extra gross out-ness. Essentially making a splash is much like blood drips, except now the blobs and lines meet in the centre of the splash shape, rather than follow a cut line. To make good snot, try and make more free form splash shapes, it looks more natural.
Tip: if you find this difficult doing it freehand, draw your shapes on a piece of paper and practice by tracing over them

Tears
The most benign is left for last. To create a rueful toy, place small blobs near the toys eyes and finish off the blobs with a short line. If you pull the bottle away from the end of the tear quite quickly it will make the line taper off nicely like a real tear shape.

Toy Design tips
Sometimes it’s hard to know whether any of these techniques would be ‘too much’ for the design of your toy, or even to work out where to place your blood or other bodily fluid. You can actually apply your paint to a very smooth plastic surface, like an ice cream container lid, and peel them off when they dry. You can then try out the shapes on your toy without permanently altering it. You can move your paint around until you come up with something that looks good, then apply the actual paint in the same way to the toy.

Another interview....and a giveaway!

2008-08-04T09:39:00.003+08:00

Kristen Rask, great goddess of Schmancy and Plush You fame, deigned to interview little ol me for the Plush You blog. You can read it here. You also might win a lovely Cannibal Bunny if you leave a comment. So go nuts!

Monster Invasion!

2008-08-04T09:18:00.007+08:00

Check it out if you are in Sydney Town. The artwork is done by Paul Shih I believe. I just love that a monster has developed the skills to both capture the girl and remove her bra one handed!

These are my pieces for the show. The little guy with the beanie has a paddle like tail as well, he's kinda beaver like. I was going to make him some small spray cans to go with but...yeah..ran out of time. The yeti is my trial of a new fabric. I had some lovely stuff I was using for my Betty the yeti which of course I didn't get enough of, so this is some new almost badly bleached hair looking fur that seems to work for the new Ice Yeti! He's riding a crazed yak and having fun it appears!

Wanna read an interview

2008-06-28T20:13:00.002+08:00

Yeah it's with me... I did this awhile back and forgot to post a link. The very nice Stoopid Preacher over at Dark Obsessions was kind enough to take time and ask me stuff. My verbose replies can be found here. I crap on, so ye have been warned...

Monster Art Rally in San Francisco

2008-06-28T20:06:00.002+08:00

The new branch of the awesome Gallery 1988 (responsible for such things like Plush Week) in San Francisco is having a monster themed show in October. At the moment I'm working on a Classical themed monster quintet of plush, based on Greek mythology. I'm playing around with ideas like a little Medusa girl, a drunk faun kid etc etc. Been having a super fun time with the prototypes so we'll see if it changes as I proceed!

Monster Invasion

2008-06-28T20:04:00.002+08:00

If anyone happens to be in Sydney in August, Ruban Rat Gallery is having a fun little show called Monster Invasion. I've got a new Yeti piece to go in it, who happens to be riding an insane mountain goat. I've got a cute little bomber monster character with a huge beanie on it and some of the new Poltergoosts going in. I'll post pics soon.

Poltergoost expansion

2008-06-28T19:48:00.003+08:00

Poltergoosts have definitely been one of my more popular pieces. Intially I created the 'goost to fit in with my favourite plush, Kit the green haired dolly thingie that started this blog. I wanted her to have a variety of crazy pals and some of the pieces I've created in the last year have been about that. The Poltergoost is striking out on his own now though. he's too much a ghost to play second fiddle to any girl and is moving like some kind of cute virus through technology old and new.

Here's an image of a black and white tv that's on it's way to Gallery 696 in Melbourne. It's my first attempt and I intend to make one of those old 50s style wooden cased TV's using the same fabric.

I've also started to make an arcade game Poltergoost, the PolterArcade. For some reason the bloody camera wouldn't take a full size shot of the image, so there's only a close up. Perhaps the camera is haunted as well!

If I get my hands on dye sublimation technology I'm going to redesign the screen to make it more detailed and better. This was me using some fabric I was able to find online.

And we have a Poltermac or an iGhost as my darling boyfriend suggested. It's based on a certain well designed computer from the late 90s that was available in some lovely colours. am making a keyboard and mouse to go with it.

Intending to make a PolterPSP, a PolterSNES, a Polter Mp3 player and a Polterphone. Will obviously have to redesign so as to not comprimise the exisiting copyrights for the things but will see how I go. Try not to be disturbed by the fact that the PolterArcade is playing with his own joystick!

More packages!

2008-03-09T20:15:00.003+09:00

Just sent a huge box of Bad Bunnies off to Uncle Festers in Victoria. They're a cute horror themed shop three quarter of an hour's drive out of Melbourne ( I wonder how that goes down with the Sunday drivers out looking for Devonshire Teas). They also have these cute little guys, the Boneyard Bears. Zombie looking bears with nooses around their necks get kudos from me. They're made by Victorian artist Daisy D'eath (cool name). If you're interested in twisted plush of any kind, you can get them online or in person of you happen to be driving by Woodend Vic.

Another bunch of stuff is going to Kismet Gallery in New York. It's interesting how the same pieces work differently in different galleries. I think Kismet is just getting into the whole toy thing, they had a big toy show at Christmas. They have quite an interesting "art activist" philosophy. Anyway they seem to be selling my stuff at a steady pace, so if you're in Troy in New York, drop on by and have a look

Plush It

2008-02-09T09:11:00.000+09:00

This is a new show Rachel Coleman and myself are organising and curating. Like many of the vinyl custom shows, we will be sending out templates to the participants to customise and make their own for a plush toy exhibition.

Details are below if you are interested

Looking for plush artists, toy designers and those wishing to wet their toes in the stormy seas of plushiness

Ruban Rat, an exciting newcomer in the Designer Toy scene in Sydney, Australia, along with plush designer Serena Kuhl are holding a custom plush show, November 12th, 2008. The show will be a collection of international plush artist’s interpretation of a template provided by the organisers, with an emphasis on ingenuity and creativity in the interpretation of the template’s basic shape. A documentation of the process will be recorded on the Plush It blog leading up to the show, giving a bit of an insight into plush artist’s creative process.

Think you’re interested? Please send no more than three small jpegs to plush.it@hotmail.com and a link to your site/Flickr page/blog/showcase of your work along with an email address you would like the template sent to as a file. Once artist’s have been selected we will contact you and provide you with a copy of the template below so you can start work!
Blog: http://plush-it.blogspot.com
Applications end by April 1st and hopefully we should have made decisions about who’s in by the 24th

Evolution of the Poltergoost

2007-10-13T06:29:00.000+08:00

The Poltergoost was the kind of piece I really love. It cracks me up, it was based on an aspect of popular culture (..The Ring still freaks me out...) and people seem to like it! My relationship with the outside world with my work is a little odd. I made a little gingerbread man for the Stuffed art show at Munky King. He's cute and looks like a typical gingerbread man. He has the signature "Kuhl" eyes but other than that, nothing to distinguish him from all the other gingerbread plush out there. Yet when I post him on Flickr I get bazillions (more like five...) of responses to him. This always confuses me as surely we have been desensitised to the ordinary cute by the sea of kawaii imagery...but I digress.

So Poltie is great for the opposite reason. Whilst I am willing to bet there are other plush Poltergoosts out there, in TVs on different parts of the world, there aren't many and it is a kinda left of centre kind of idea. Creativity kids, I guess is what I'm talking about. Not great gobs of paint, drinking in bars in New York Artists as Hero kinda wank, I am a PoMo gal meself. No one would even be able to recognise what the plush was without the original idea coming from the inventors of Poltergeist and The Ring. Nope it's more that weird pleasure you get out of making your brain stretch in directions other than where you usually go. Anyway here is the original Poltergeist in all his zigzaggy glory

This was Poltergoost, original series. A few people got one in his present form. Then the faric ran out. I don't know if you can see it, but this fabric is an insane woven lycra from Italy that has a mix of lime green, purple, dark blue and yellow running through it, it's amazing. I got it back in '97 when I was doing postgrad and have subsequently found out it's alllll gone. Shop closed, stock sold, no more. This has led to the evolution of the Poltergoost

The next stage was altering the form a bit, I like how the original looked but soon lost the pattern that makes up the little guy in the centre of the TV. Not to worry says I, I'll make another. I made about five and none looked the same and I wasn't happy how the one's I made looked. Hmmmm..time to go back to the drawing board.

This is when Poltergoost evolved into Poltergrab. The little hands with the tiny fingers work in any fabric I use. He looks a little more "gonna getcha". So overall, happier with him. but still, got no new fabric. (This particular plush is at Plush you in Seattle right now)

So here's a lycra I picked up of Flea Bay. It's a print made for Speedo I think. It's kinda swirly and inter-dimensional looking. Yeah... I don't like it much either...

My next trial was to try a different colour swirl (there was a comment about green fabric being kinda dark) and with grabby hands to see if it worked. I like it better, but still...This one's going to Rivet Gallery for their Stuff This! show

Which brings me to the current piece. Poltergoost: the Next Generation. He is zigzaggy (didn't reaslise how much that made a difference until I used a zigzag fabric again), wish it was a little crazier colour wise but still.. He has grabby hands and a wide shit eating grin, which was supposed to be part of the original design. I wanted him to be the ghost of a Guy Smiley type of character. I think it works...and hopefully you do too. This little guy is making his debut at the MF Gallery Toy Show in New York

tinyshop

2007-10-08T17:42:00.000+08:00

Yep the lack of capitals is deliberate. Antoinette Celes is putting on a showcase of very very small works at Double Punch in San Fransisco on the 17th of November called tinyshop. I was faced with the challenge of making plush no more then 3" high. It was a lot of teeny, teeny sewing and using the littlest buttons I could possibly find for eyes. I actually like shows that have a set theme, I find riffing off the themes posed can be a great opportunity to develop new ideas and force a bit of creativity out of the ol noggin. Well, lo and behold me hearties and see the majesty that is Tiny Bunny (I like capitals..)

Is he not cute? Do you not want to rub your nose on his cute little face that in sum total is probably smaller than your nose. He's cute as a button, and the same size as many buttons.

Tiny will be in strictly limited release at tinyshop (there's one) but if you can't get to San Fran for a little baby bunny action, check out my Etsy store, I'm makin them to order over there. Tiny...you know you want some

MF Gallery Toy Show

2007-10-06T17:11:00.000+08:00

Yeah there's a bit of toy-showness happening around my place at the moment. MF (Martina and Frank) Gallery has a toy show in New York around this time each year I think. Apart from being toy makers themselves, they allow the rest of us plebian toy makers to put our stuff on their walls. I'll be sending in a green haired Kit (see below post) a Poltergoost and a Siamese Bunny.

Siamese Bunny has a weird history. He is a part of the Bad Bunnies series and was really just a prototype that i didn't like much. here's a pic of the original on the left. The new Siamese came about as he was really really popular at the show I had at Happy Yess. So in the face of popular opinion I have resurrected the little guy with a few changes and here he is! Check him out if you're in New York around November 10th.

Stuff This!

2007-10-06T16:46:00.000+08:00

No, not a response to all Year 12s requests for help even though i have told them all year to get their work done early (I keep waiting for them to fear my wrath..they kinda laugh instead), Stuff This is a plush show happening at the fairly newish Rivet Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. I am a bit time poor at the moment, and the request was for one of a kind pieces if possible. I did the Claytons version of a one of a kind piece, I produced a new colourway of an exisiting piece! Yeah, lame, I know... Anyway here's magenta haired Kit!

In comparison to the green haired original that started this blog!
There will be a Mariot cactus and a Poltergoost in one of the fabrics I'm trialling, so again, new colourway, old design. Does it help that these are designs I really really like and think are my better ones. Jeez, excuses, I'm just like the kids

Stuffed: Food Plush at Munky King!

2007-10-06T16:20:00.000+08:00

The lovely Sarah Jo of DKE Toys accepted some of my onions and other food related plush even though I was very late in getting in contact for a show called "Stuffed: a plush food extravaganza" at the very cool Munky King on Melrose Ave, LA, USA. The brief is as suggested in the title, to collect together a whole lot of plush food creations together and create the lowest calorie buffet anyone could ask for this close to Christmas (I wonder what the calorific content of fake fur is anyway?) Anyway as i'm just about to go back to teaching for the worst four weeks of the whole year (Year 12 students getting ready for handing in the work I have nagged them all year for...grrr!) I haven't had an opportunity to make anything new, so I have revampred and redesigned one of my first creations: Rotten Egga

At the top we have renewed and reinvented Rotten Egga, with growly expression and a teeny safety pin in his nose and below we have old Egga. He may actually be the same one that's in this pic! Anyway I tried to make him look a little more punk as Egga's story is a sad one

Anyway, if you'd like to see some plushy food and perhaps pick up a new and improved Rotten Egga, check out Munky King on the 1st of November!

Piece for the Mega Gwin Show

2007-09-07T19:04:00.000+08:00

The very nice people over at October Toys asked me to be part of their Mega Gwin Show in October. This entails customising a 11 inch vinyl Gwin, or in my case making an 11 inch plush Gwin.

Did I ever mention that I had difficulties following instructions? When I was a highschoolie and wanting to pursue a career in the arts (silly, silly girl...) I refused to do anything design based, as at the time at my school it was all about doing what the client wanted. Me, the raging egotist, wanted only to pursue the unique and wonderful vision I knew I possessed inside me. I got a very bad tattoo at a dodgy tattoo parlour to commemorate this certainty.

Well now that I am old, I thought I could get past this. I no longer believe that all art of quality in the world will be made by these two hands. I recognise my place in the world, I've gotten over myself, I can now, freed of teenage arrogance, make something based on someone else's work.

Yeaaaah. About that. See below my interpretation of a Gwin

Sooooo, where's the penguin you might ask? This bears no resemblance to the Linux mascot you say? How in anyway does this relate to the Gwin project you might point out. Hmmm, it appears my inner 17 year old is alive and well and not wanting to do as she's told (she never did.) I tried Dear Reader, I could post you some very very ugly prototypes that were sincerely based on the Gwin vinyl figure. In the end the deadline came, I didn't want to pull out of the project and I had to make something. And the stupid thing is, I like it! If you've seen Takashi Murakami's work

You'll see where I get my inspiration from. Oh well.... not what I was asked to do but cool yes?

Etsyness

2007-09-02T19:37:00.000+08:00

I am now armed and ready with info about the way of the Etsy. Having only sold my stuff through other people's stores I had no idea how it worked. I tend to just chuck stuff on these sites and forget them! If you are thinking of joining the Etsy Revolution, the Forums have a lot of very useful "how to's". Anyway I promise to be much better and care for my little store more. So here's a preview of how it looks right now. Heaps of stuff to follow soon, I promise!

Wanna check out me talking about the show when I was sick?

2007-09-02T19:34:00.000+08:00

Here's a link to the Audio file from Triple J Radio's The Program. I then got the flu for the next week, feeling like my head would burst open, so I sound a little flat!

I lost my ABC virginity!

2007-08-07T16:35:00.000+08:00

Hey it sounds more interesting than it is! The ABC, for people outside Australia, is the national broadcaster and has a very supportive of local talent, arm in Darwin. I got called up for two radio interviews on the day of setting up, which was very funny as I was getting the flu at the time and am not sure what I was saying. One was live (hurray!) on the local ABC radio station and a very nice man asked me why one would make weird stuffed toys and did that make me weird as well? How did he know just by looking at me! Hmm, what insights does the ABC teach its journalists now... Also the Triple J Arts crew person in the NT interviewed me here, which was great cos it was not live and she can edit the hell out it. Yay! And as much of my work has been made listening to Triple J for many years it was way cool to get an interview. Oh and a former student from my very first forays into teaching was the interviewer (I remember you now Bec!) so that's that weird circle turning again..

Pics of the Show

2007-08-05T02:42:00.000+08:00

Well if you went to the show and want to see how unattractive you can be made to look by my darling partner Matt, or just like to have a look at the stuff on the walls, you can catch a frame by frame account of what went down on the 2nd of August. A lot of stuff sold, but many still wait to be rehomed, so if you see somthing you like, let me know. Also Marita's work is available as well. Yay!

Bad Bunnies and other Monsterous Creatures!

2007-07-24T14:43:00.001+08:00

Dunno why i keep forgetting to blog this, but my buddy, Marita Albers and I are having a little show at darwin's premiere live music and art venue, the Happy Yess. It will be an extremely bright evening, on August 2nd, as Marita and I are oddly fond of the fluoro and the eyesplitting when it comes to colour. Marita has many of her beautiful paintings to be bought for your delection. She's off travelling for awhile, to perhaps share the painterly love with the rest of the world, so no one local will have much of a chance to buy some Marita magic for awhile. I've made about 10 pieces especially for the show, but there's a whole lotta stuff I'm looking to offload. one of a kind prototypes and the like, and most are priced around $25, so a bargain really! If you happen to be Darwin bound around August, drop in and have a look. The Yess is on Bennet St in Darwin City and the show runs for 5 weeks. Yay!

Plush You...Again!

2007-07-24T14:33:00.000+08:00

Lucky me got accepted into Plush You again! My furry weirdness will be showing off at the wonderful Schmancy, seattle's finest toy establishment. I made up a little custom Poltergoost for the occasion, he's got little fingers and that now. Also a Kit doll is on her way and perhaps a werewolf brother that I am currently working on. These are all new toys, not in any other stores. The Poltergoost is one a kind in this colourway, as the fabric is all gone! Anyway, if you happen to be in Seattle 'round October, check it out! And buy some plushy wonderfulness

Oh yeah, my etsy shop address

2007-07-15T21:23:00.000+08:00

Whoops, I forgot to put the address for my Etsy shop! Great advertising on my part. Not much there, I've been working on a show a buddy and I are working on for August in Dear Old Darwin. More soon.....

The World of Snot

2007-07-15T21:11:00.000+08:00

If you are at all familar with my work, you'll know that bodily fluids make a big showing in my pieces. It's infantile and it makes me laugh, there's is no great conceptual premise unfortunately. Anyway, a newish character, Booga Man is making his way over to Ft Lauderdale, in the US to be part of the Pink Ghost itinerary. I love Pink Ghost so you should too!

Also I'm trying to resolve the rest of the series. His arch nemesis, the Nosepicker, was sent to the Medical Experiments show in Asheville. He's disturbing, I love him so much, and he is never going to sell commercially unless people are as sick as me. The last part of the series is Snot Dog, his little buddy. I've made 3 Snot Dogs so far and am unsure which to go with. If you have a preference, please say so in the comments! Market research (the free kind) is invaluable.

Cheers!

Swapping!

2007-06-10T21:32:00.000+08:00

Occasionally I have the opportunity to swap with talented artists like the following. The wonderful Crochet Samurai. Her etsy shop is here. She made me a fabulous crochet zombie. Sorry guys, but I ain't a true crafty girl. I don't really get a lot of the more traditional crafted plush. No criticisms here, its more a language I don't understand. But the idea of using crochet to make something so insane! That fits very nicely into my personal plush making philosophy! I keep it on my desk at school. The kids love to pick it up and have a look, and when I've had a day full of pointless meetings and all the other crap that seems to be more of the role of the teacher, not teaching kids, it cheers me up. So go buy one!

Etsy....take two

2007-06-10T21:16:00.001+08:00

I had a go at the craft community sensation that is Etsy.com a while ago. A half hearted go really, I just put a couple of pieces up, didn't look after the shop etc. I was just curious to try it as an alternative means to sell the little guys.

Well I'm having another go. I've recently had some uber trouble with some of my sellers. Consignment sucks balls essentially. I appreciate why its a difficult process, the whole Designer Toy gig is such a little niche industry, there's some big players. but for the most its just little designers and toy stores trying to make it work. The shop that is likely to sell my non-Ugly Dolls stuff is likely to sell a whole lot of other designers and the process by which you keep a tally on whose stuff selling when seems to be very hard. But for me, who makes nooooothing on my little guys, it really crushes me when people rip me off, intentionally or unintentionally. Stuff gets lost, consignment fees not paid etc. I've really had to rethink what the hell I'm doing. Coming out about even is fine, losing money is harder to cover.

So I'm trying to Etsy again, to try and get a little more control over my sales. I've made several sales just from people sending me messages on stinky myspace, so who knows. So, if you've ever had a desire to have a Kuhl original, leave a comment here, or buy something on Etsy! I'll be adding stuff progressively as I get around to it

Kit and Friends evolution

2007-04-07T20:48:00.000+08:00

I started this blog recording the process of developing a line based around the green haired girl in the pic, Kit, and her friends. I've had a few dead ends, but recently have come up with another character, Cyril the Serial Killing Cat. He's kept permanently restrained due to his crimes against the mouse community. He's kinda a remake of an earlier piece, Nutf*cker Bunny, one of the Bad Bunnies. Basically because I've never been able to create a nutso bunny as good as the original. I'd happily not make them anymore, but love the idea of a crazed animal in a straightjacket (they say all artists are making self-portraits, but this one really is..) so am remaking it in a more successful form. Just got one more to go...

Update on Monster Show in Rome

2007-04-07T20:44:00.000+08:00

The lovely Gio sent me a pic of Gimp Bunny surrounded by notes from Italian children. Wish I could read Italian, hopefully it's not requests for me to pay for their therapy when older, for exposing them to the concept of animals belonging to the B/D community!

So you want to make bloody plush (or snotty, spewy or droolly)

2007-02-18T20:21:00.000+09:00

I've been asked to create a tutorial for the upcoming Plush You Two book. I decided to show how to apply blood and other bodily fluids to toys using dimensional paint, rather than put patterns of my work in it. So if you've ever wanted to gross out your plush and make it drool, pick it's nose, or cry you'll have to catch the book when it comes out. Should be Novemberish I think, and that's as long as it actually is accepted to be a part of the book

Toybreak!!!

2007-02-18T20:09:00.000+09:00

I've watched the first three episodes of Toybreak religiously. Its funny and the only show I've found about toys and stuff. The toy rants are crazy, there's a wide array of types of toys in it, not just Urban Vinyl etc, but more conventional action figures and film tie in stuff as well. They've had some "How to" stuff about making vinyl figures which is very comprehensive. I've come across stuff, like the truly awesome Steven the Bat series "Black Metal is my God". Well I sent them a little Gimp Bunny (luckily it was lime green, one of the reviewers discussed how much he liked lime green in a previous episode) and they reviewed it. They were kind and even showed some of my other work. As I am STILL trying to get my website shit together any PR is super great. So download it now!

Design by Bwana Spoons

Monster Show in Rome...ooops

2007-02-18T19:57:00.000+09:00

Recently got an invite to put some works in a Monster Show in Rome. It was very short notice and I diligently got four pieces together overnight (yay!). I sent photos of the pieces and a little blurb explaining about each piece. They were an Egga, an Abombinable Snow Bunny, a Squirrelcat and .....a Gimp Bunny. I sent them off super fast and then...investigated a bit about the place. It's called the La Casina Di Raffaello A Villa Borghese and when I researched it its a specialist area for kids of 3-13. ooops. the other pieces were okay but would you want to explain to your 3 year old what a gimp is? Here's hoping there's no Italian translation....

Medical Experiments Plush Toy Show

2007-01-05T06:09:00.000+09:00

If you're into gross plush or are a plush creator with a flair for the disgusting, check this out. It's a show being organised by the people who took sock soft sculpture to a whole new level, the writers of "Stupid Sock Creatures" . Apparently its going to burst like a pustule over North Carolina, March 14th. I am now trying to think of something suitably grotty to send over

(Image belongs to Stupid Sock Creature people!)

Gimp news

2007-01-05T06:02:00.000+09:00

Here's a pic of a shipment of Gimps winging their way across the pond to the UK. Nasty Vinyl has chosen to expan their Gimp range to include metallic yellow, lime green, orange, red, purple, black and the dreaded Bleeding Heart Gimp of Doooooom. Biggest shipment of Gimps created yet, feel like my fingers have been flagellated in a self-inflicted bout of sewing sadomasochism (isn't all plush creating sadomasochistic?).

Also a lime Gimp has been sent to a mystery toy related podcast thingie, which if they view it favourably, may get reviewed. Crossing fingers and then sewing them together so they stay like that.

Neglected Ned!

2006-11-21T16:56:00.000+08:00

This killer little piece of plush wittiness comes from Sappymoosetree's Flickr page. It is sooooo funneeee! So much plush is cute or weird but rarely funny. Here at the Kuhlness funniness gets more votes than anything else. I'm in touch with my inner child, but that kid used to laugh like a drain over the knights arm getting chopped off in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

I love this because it invokes all the awwww.. feelings that I feel when i see little dead rodents, but I don't know why, when its plush its funny. I am the biggest sooky la-la when it comes to animals, dead ones usually make me cry, even mice and rats, but mutilated plush animals totally crack me up. Go figure.. Hmm.. maybe there's a thesis here, post-modern dislocation from the real in synthetic fabric effigies.. I can see it now!

Monster and Marvels at Monkeyhouse Toys

2006-11-21T16:29:00.000+08:00

Monkeyhouse Toys are having a show on the 2nd of December titled "Monsters and Marvels" of handmade dolls and plush it appears. Not sure of the lineup yet, I was madly making my pieces for it last night in an attempt to get it there in time! Luckily I wrassled down a stray Beastie that happened to be scuttling around my studio and managed to piece together an orange reanimated Abombinable Snow Bunny. They were boxed up and sent on their way to sunny Los Angeles. So if you happen to be in the area and are a lover of the plush, check it out!

Plush goes to the UK

2006-11-21T16:20:00.000+08:00

Strangely enough lots of shops have shown an interest in the Kuhl plush of late. Up until now, none of my stuff had inflitrated Ol Blighty (England to the rest of you..) but the nice people at Nasty Vinyl have picked up some of my gear after stumbling across each other on myspace. So if you would like your very own Gimp Bunny, Poltergoost, Bunbun or Squirrelcat, send them an email or visit them in London Town.

Pink Ghost....yay!!!

2006-11-21T16:13:00.000+08:00

The lovely Paola from the I Love Designer Toys toy community page has opened an online shop, with a "bricks and mortar" establishment in Ft Lauderdale to follow. As she is such a nice person, she asked me to contribute some of my gear to her catalog. So if you live in this part of the States, or are looking for an alternative to your usual online toy purveyor check out Pink Ghost for lots of toy loving goodness. It must be good, because Almost Headless Bunny was the most viewed plush last time I checked!!

What's in the Character Enclyclopaedia

2006-09-29T09:20:00.001+08:00

Well, just to give you a preview, these are my figures in the Character Encyclopaedia. They are
Afro Dude, Beatnik, Betty the Yeti, Bunbun and Pocti Grown. Yay!!

Pictoplasma - the Character Encyclopaedia

2006-09-25T06:13:00.000+08:00

I've had a copy of Pictoplasma 2 which I use religiously in the classroom. The breadth of character design covered in the book usually means kids can find at least something that interests them. Well, imagine my happiness when it appears my little guys have made it into the third publication The Character Encyclopaedia! Its supposed to be out soon and you will be able to get it from Amazon, but can see previews here on the offical site. Yay!

Poltergoost

2006-08-13T16:33:00.000+08:00

Part 3 of this series is the Poltergoost. He's a friendly Poltergeist who lives in Kit's TV and comes out sometimes like in horror movies. That's been kinda the point with this series, to take all the cool things about magic and witchcraft and horror movies and make them into a plush series. I really like how the Bleeding Edge guys took goth culture and made toys from it. Mine are nowhere near as slick however! Anyway, I like the basic form of this at the moment, the aerial needs to be fixed, and the face of the "goost", he's supposed to be more cheesy, like a 50s game show host. But there seems to be some good responses so far, my Flickr page has been getting a lot of hits for it so I'm pleasantly suprised.

Mandrake finished (sorta)

2006-08-12T12:40:00.000+08:00

The mandrake figure I posted a drawing of is finished, sort of. Not sure about his mouth, I have been informed by the House Critics (flatmates) that the face "makes him look like a Minda". Originally he was supposed to be this suave character, but the floppy leaf hair makes him look more like arrogantly stupid WW2 Flying Ace than sophisticated root about town. Anyway, his body needs a little refining, but this is the basic model. He is a friend to Kit, pulled up at midnight whilst out walking with the Nameless Zombie Chicken. He screams (as Mandrakes are traditionally supposed to) until she calms him, then they become friends, or this is the theory so far...

Dot Dot Dash

2006-08-12T06:08:00.000+08:00

Just found out some of my gear got into the book "Dot Dot Dash", created by some of the people responsible for the wonderful Pictoplasma. The book can be found at Die Gestalten. Its 296 pages full of hundreds of toy artists work (from what I can see), vinyl and plush. It can be bought in Europe in October and the rest of the world to follow...so go pre-order it!

plushyou

2006-08-02T18:02:00.000+08:00

A Gimp Bunny, Cannibal Bunny and a Yeti will all be on show at the wonderful Plush You II show at Schmancy Toys, Seattle in October. If you want to check out the other artists and the progress of the show, here's the plushyou blog!

mandrake in development

2006-08-02T12:34:00.000+08:00

The next part of the series is a Mandrake. Mandrakes are actual plants with oddly human looking roots . Apparently people used to believe they were used by witches. A really nasty instruction on how to find them to use is as follows (from the friendly people over at Wikpedia)
"A furrow must be dug around the root until its lower part is exposed, then a dog is tied to it, after which the person tying the dog must get away. The dog then endeavours to follow him, and so easily pulls up the root, but dies suddenly instead of his master. After this the root can be handled without fear."
Nice! You kill your dog so as to get a carrot with a face!
So one of Kit's friends will be a mandrake. Intially I saw him being a suave argyle sweater wearing kinda plant/man/person/thingie, but on making him he's got these floppy leaves like hair and a dopey grin, like Zaphod on the Hitchhiker's movie, so maybe not. This is the working drawing.

full body Kat (or Kit)

2006-08-01T11:31:00.000+08:00

This is what she looks like in full. Her pinafore is magical. It has a face and needs a name (any suggestions?) and will provide her with whatever she needs when she reaches into the pocket/mouth. I envisage there being problems with this, like giving her what she asks for literally, not what she means. Not sure if her hair will be pink, purple, red or green.

Kit (or Kat)

2006-08-01T06:27:00.000+08:00

I've been working for ages on this little girl design. She's based on all the little goth/punk/emo kids at my school. I always liked how contemporary takes on this subculture are much more humorous and self-deprecating than in the past. I can't imagine Avril Lavigne spewing on stage like Johnny Rotten, but how far can regurgitation get you. Anyway, this is my final of the design. For the first time in ages, I had to re-do the prototype at least three times! I am usually the queen of the first time knock off! Weirdly, I kinda think its a better design, just because I had to work at it. But there is always that old struggle with refinement versus spontenaity

first post

2006-07-31T13:27:00.000+08:00

Wellllll... havin a go at creating a bigger net presence, since I still haven't got a webpage for my toys sorted. Just a side note, my laptop often drops 'gs' and 'ns' from words, so I'm not that illiterate. Will post some photos of my newest creation very soon, a little punky goth girl called Kat. I struggled with her form for ages, made about three different prototypes before I was happy, but she came together last night. Picture me doing little happy dance when I finally got it done! There's nothing like that rush of getting something made in the manner you visualised it.