I added a background to the new oak tree with owls. Getting the blur effect around the moon was fun. I’m not entirely happy with the background trees but we were watching Bob Ross while I was thinking about them and it turns out that things he can do easily are going to take some time and thought for me.
#20/365
Just messing around with Inkscape again. There is a glass technique called “millefiori” that means “thousand flowers” and this is my (incomplete) attempt to recreate that look.
I showed it to my husband and he thinks I need to turn down the screen brightness.
#19/365
I lead a 4-H club that is mostly devoted to hiking, kayaking and general outdoorsy stuff, but we sometime dabble in some kid-size engineering projects. In the past we’ve built pop-pop boats and a pumpkin-hurling trebuchet. This week I built a prototype mousetrap car. The kids tested and critiqued the design and will have a month to build their own version and race them when we meet again.
I’ll get some video of the race next month. I was able to get the still shot on the right because my duct tape construction method was failing and so the boom arm was no longer exerting enough force to move the rear wheels.
Back in 2002 I was backing up my computer to CD – this seems like a good use for that stack of old backups.
#18/365
I made another tree with a more oak-tree shape than my first. The ferns are present, plus a few of the little ferns that grow on the trunks of trees in the rainforest. This oak had a large horizontal branch that needed some owls.
The first owls were based off a movie – but I wanted to draw my own version this time. As it turned out the cartoon owls looked the way they did for a good reason: this is just what owls look like. My own owls are very similar. If I change anything it will to make the eye edges more distinct from the white face and perhaps to make the feet more fuzzy.
#16-17/365
This one is heavily influenced by the little owls from “Secret of Kells” but I thought he’d look good with my tree.
#15/365
#14/365 It looks better small, but I also intend to use it as a small part of a larger project.
I found a use for the leaves. #13/365
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these yet, but I made some oak leaves in Inkscape. I also learned how to add my Flickr photos to WordPress. I am absolutely counting my progress on WordPress as ‘something creative’. #11-12/365
I made two new soaps this weekend. One was a new fragrance and a refinement of a previous recipe.
The new fragrance was “Dragon’s Blood”. I’m intrigued by the name and had a lot of fun making the label but having actual soap to go with it would be nice. I wanted to make a red soap, but the notes say that the fragrance has a high vanilla content and will discolor to a dark brown. My red might not show up, so I thought “ah… I will make a red diagonal stripe with a little copper sparkle in some unscented soap. It shouldn’t take too long.”
Speed was a factor because I know that this recipe moves quickly. Now, if I’d stopped thinking here, I believe all would have been well, but I went farther, “if I surround the red strip with white on either side, it will POP more”
The result:
It set up faster than I wanted so the colors were a bit gloppy and didn’t flow in smooth and evenly. The result is that I created soap that looks like it has a slice of bacon down the middle.
I’m going to need to reconsider my design for this fragrance!
To redeem myself I made a cedarwood-lime soap today. This one sets up very quickly so I had to unmold and cut all within a few hours and I didn’t have time to get my lights up, but here it is on my cutting table.
This one turned out quite nicely.
Ugly or not, they both count towards my 365, and I’m now at 10!
I’ve been making soap for about 10 years now, and selling in a local shop for close to one year. I’ve decided to step it up a little and next month I’d like to open an Etsy shop. Clearly this calls for new labels.
I’ve created 4 so far, two using the ginkgo pattern.
My original labels were all vertical like this. And my first ginkgo label was too. But I’ve since decided to go horizontal. The handmade soap tops can be uneven and by going horizontal I can still get a fairly crisp wrap around the soap edges.
Much better! And I don’t have to look at my ingredients upside down. But I’m still playing with Inkscape, what else can I do?
I can make star mandalas. I will talk more about these later because they were just fun to make and I want to make some in glorious rainbow colors just because I can.
And I’m going to make a Dragon’s Blood soap; this requires a special label. (No dragons will be harmed).
This one was fun. I took the dragons and text from the 19th C Japanese print by Utagawa Kunisada II.
