Sculpting Polymer Clay Buddhas #2

Just Buddha's Head.


In the interest of keeping my self-imposed sculpting lessons simple, I scrunched up a ball of foil and rolled out some clay to cover it for a head. (I learned the hard way not to bake any polymer clay thicker than about 1/4 inch; it takes forever, you're never quite sure if it's baked all the way through and it smells if it gets scorched.)

I stuck a quilter's straight pin into a cork for something to hold onto. I scrunched the foil head down over the pin with a dollop of hot glue. With a small ball of clay, I pressed out a disk to cover the foil and form a head, making it slightly oval in shape.


I marked the lines for eye, nose, lips and chin, and made about 24 little pieces for these additions.


Polymer clay is so forgiving. After its warmed up (conditioned) it stay supple for a long time an can be worked over and over again before it is baked.

These eye sockets turned out to be a bit much. The instructions called for little clay eyeballs, but I toned them down with Tibetan slits for eyes.

The facial features on my first Buddha turned out a little exaggerated; next time I'll make my tiny body part pieces tinier.

Not bad for a rank beginner.

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Tibetan Temple #3

I rediscovered polymer clay after a 20 year hiatus. Back in the early 90s, I made beads and pins and jewelry items.

This time around, I had in mind the tiny lumberyard and all my little itty bitty constructions. For the Zendo, I formed a little platter, a bowl and a vase. In the midst of the experiments, I fell in love again with this versatile medium. There are a bunch of useless polymer items around my studio right now,  a giant red flower, some art deco pillars, on the way to making tiny creations for the Tibetan Temple:

Here is the tiny tile floor, made from a large sheet of polymer clay, conditioned and rolled out to accommodate my 7x7 inch plan. After baking, I cut out the corner tiles to make room for the 1x1 inch pillars.

The wood base for the temple is three sheets of basswood glued together and framed in around the tiles.

I was attracted to Buddhist teachings because of the three essentials: (a) ethical conduct, (b) mental discipline and (c) wisdom. Along the way, I learned about making malas (another post) and painting as a meditation.

While studying Thangka painting, mental discipline was necessary, as was patience with myself and for the slow emergence of anything resembling a Buddha.

This little tile floor will be painted blue, the base stained with red.

The miter box lessons from my son, Michael, come in handy with my tiny tools. I am pretty happy with my corners.

Tulku Jamyang and his wife, Chigme, invited me often to share their Tibetan dinners. It was all very mysterious to me, big bowls of chopped meat, tureens of thick soup, flat breads and sweet pastes and sticky rices. We ate heartily with fat spoons as well as our fingers and drank copious amounts of rich dark tea with coconut butter (no yaks for miles and miles).

When I work out my Tibetan Temple, I remember Tuklu Jamyang's teachings, and translate the sacred geometry into my constructions.

I have become more patient over the years through meditations of all kinds, other art forms, knitting, of course, but the memory of Mondays with Tulku Jamyang, his quiet teachings, his generous spirit, hover around me like a sprite.

As I teach myself to sculpt with polymer clay, I'll make a teacher, a student and a Buddha.

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Tibetan Temple #2

From The Once and Future King by TH White:

“It is God who keeps the price secret, Uther. Not I.”

“God? God? What god? I have heard you speak of so many gods. If you mean Mithras...”

Says Merlin, “Mithras. Apollo. Arthur. Christ. Call him what you will. What does it matter what men call the light? It is the same light, and men must live by it or die. I only know that God is the source of all the light which has lit the world and that his purpose runs through the world and passes each one of us like a great river and we cannot check or turn it but can only drink from it while living and commit our bodies to it when we die.”

God is in the details. Of everything. And the Light.

The Shrines to the Divine project began in early 2018. I have cataloged here in the blog the process of the first little tea house and the final Japanese Shrine, the Zendo, both built in 2018.

Along the way of my life, I have had the privilege to study with, cook for and generally be around some lovely teachers, in the name of art, or food, or spiritual advice. I have sat at the feet of gurus, pranced around the fire as a deer with a Huichol shaman on Mt. Shasta, meditated on Paramahansa Yogananda's houseboat with Steven Seagal, studied with and fed Deepak Chopra and myriad other pop culture stars, looked at Tibetan Buddhism through the eyes of the Thangka painting monk, and cooked for large groups at a retreat center while spending my nights in a 400 square foot tipi. Alison Stillwell Cameron lived next door to my mother and sparked my interest in Chinese Sumi painting, my bookbinding instructors shared Japanese print making, Shibori fabric design, marbled papers and so much more.

I feel closest to the source of all the light when I am being creative.

The top image above floated across my Facebook timeline, posted by a friend. It is an art deco painting by Vittorio Zecchin who died in 1947. Look him up. He blows my mind. The Dominican nuns never showed us his paintings in Art Appreciation class.

When I saw this painting, not just the goddesses themselves but the intensity of the colors hit me like a whack in the chest. The moment pushed me into the long talked about Tibetan temple, because I had to get involved with those colors.

As a dedicated DIY nut job, I set out to make some fabric for the backdrop to the buddha's throne. Although I used red and gold on black in my first draft of the fabric pattern, the colors of the shrine with mimic those above in Zecchin's: orange and purple and violet ...with some red.

I took a photo of the finished 12 x 12 canvas and shrunk the design to the size of a postage stamp, repeated the pattern to fill an 8.5x11 sheet of paper-backed silk for printing, and voila!












A tiny silk curtain of my own design.

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Making an Afghan, #2

 The next color. I pulled out 20 rows of this color after seeing a dropped stitch on the edge.

I keep repeating my Hobby Mantra, "No Hurry."

Note the two boxes of tools and parts for needle work. The peackock box is filled with threads for tiny weaving and the long art box has knitting needles and other knitter's paraphernalia.

Have you read back through this blog? If you, you've seen my Studio in a Basket posts. Studio in a Basket (in my living room) was a joke on me. I filled up that basket with yarn and projects in a few days. Now it's a studio in a basket and a big Laurel Birch bag and two boxes. Not to mention the tiny shrine series, filling up space in the real studio.

How do I have time for this and writing and editing and building shrines? What else should I be doing?

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The First Shrine #6

It's amazing, when those inspired moments happen and you just know you have the right tools, ingredients and materials for a particular project.

The first funky teahouse, built with single walls out of popcicle sticks and cut with scissors and an Xacto knife, looks exactly that funky. It's so funky, David made me take one of the pictures down.

Thanks to better tools (the tiny Xacto miter box and three tiny saws), better materials (tiny Basswood and Balsawood lumber), not to mention a higher skill level (the artist having discovered double wall construction in small scale building), my Zen Shrine has stability.

I discovered that tracing paper makes a good substitute for rice paper and I can print bamboo on it with my Canon printer. This was a magical moment - when I realized I did not have to dig out my Sumi-e painting tools and grind some ink in order to get the bamboo effect on those shoji screens. I also printed tiny silk banners on Dharma Trading Co.
printable, paper-backed Haboti silk. More about that in the next post.

There is a lot of trim still to do, a see-through roof (perhaps with a glass skylight for better interior viewing) and a little tiny paint job on that platter and the lantern.

Overall, I am happy with the tiny Zen Shrine, so far.

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First Shrine #5

 I originally planned to have sliding shoji screen doors, like in the Japanese Teahouse, but decided to fix the walls and to keep the visibility to the inside open - once the roof goes on, the inside will be much leas visible.

In building this structure, I keep in mind Tassajara Zen Center, where I first studied Zen meditation in 1972 and bought one of the first spiritual books of my collection, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by the founder of the Zen Center, Shunryu Suzuki, which I am reading again now.

At Tassajara, the rooms and meditation hall are simple, clean and free is distractions.

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Making Stuff - Planning a Shaman's Tipi

 These plans for a Plains Indian tipi are printed across twelve 8.5x11 sheets of paper to make the tipi below at 1/24 scale. The interior is about 10 inches in diameter and the cone top is at about 15 inches. Notice how the front slopes, which is part of the elegant design to keep the smoke (emanating from the fire pit in the middle) moving up and out of the smoke holes at the top.

The opportunities for making tiny things for a weenie tipi are endless, so endless, it kept me awake last night until I surrendered, turned on the light and scribbled all this down.

Here my list of items to make for the Shaman's Tipi:

cover
liner
threading pins
arrows
stack of wood
fire pit
rug - woven or felt
bed - fur (fake)
beaded bag
talking stick
pillows
blanket (woven or knitted)
back rests
walking stick
baskets
clay bowls
pots/hanging kettle
rattle
drum
pipe
smudge fan
sage wand
canoe

Of course, a canoe. Any self-respecting shaman would have his own canoe.

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Tiny Double Wall Construction #3

 When cutting the siding for this little model, I overlapped the edge about 1/4 inch to make the siding meet at the edges of the box. The windows are trimmed inside and out. I added a tidy and stabilizing trim to each corner. The trim boards are 1/4 inch taller than the walls in order to hold the roof, which will eventually be made when I figure out just what it is I've built here.

Is it a Japanese Temple? Is is a Presbyterian Church in Tokyo? Is is a tower in an English woods?

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Making Stuff - Japanese Teahouse #5

 I found these tools while assembling my "Temples, Shrines & Teahouses" Kit. My husband David's father was a golf course architect, therefore collected these sets of marvelous tools. I don't even know what to do with most of the Xacto blades, still very sharp, but I love the set and the little blue box. And the carving tools on the right are overkill for Basswood and Balsa, but I love to look at them.

A regular Xacto blade will work for a carving tool when your medium is craft or popsicle sticks and Balsa wood so soft you could sculpt it with your fingernails.

Today I carved the pieces for the roof line. Each one has to be an absolute exact duplicate of the other or the roof will not fit squarely together. (The very accomplished artist's YouTube Tutorial I have watched about fifty times showed glueing the whole thing together with coffee stir sticks, but tiny trim board is more reliably straight.)

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Making Stuff - Japanese Tea House, Part 3

 I made these shoji screen doors entirely out of coffee stir sticks which cut easily with scissors. Instead of rice paper I covered the doors in muslin fabric.

Today I received a tiny Xacto miter box in the mail, as if by magic (thank you, David). While I await the tiny Xacto saw, expected on my doorstep Monday evening, I ponder and compare this experience to building Faerie Junction with my pals last spring.

First of all, my pals aren't here.

Secondly, our faerie scale was, "Whatever - just tiny. It's faeries."

Here, the measurements are a bit more precise. I want those corners perfect! I want those shoji screens to slide! Before I make my next cut (abashedly I admit to currently cutting with scissors and Xacto knives) I will have that little saw in my hand.

Next, I'll be making the sliders and  the roof. I want to put a tiny ceramic pot over a tea light for essentials oils. We'll see if the concept works. Stay tuned.

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Making Stuff - A Miniature Japanese Teahouse, or two...

Every now and then I get a creative bee in my bonnet. It buzzes around in my hair telling me it's time to make something. Really, to build something. I'm always making something (knitting, cards, dinner) but this urge to build is different. It's a feeling in the solar plexis that will not relax until I see the buzzing idea through, or firmly make the decision not to do the project at all.

These Japanese Teahouses have been in my hair now for months, ever since I was given a few remnants of Japanese cotton with tiny designs.

I instantly saw teeny little curtains and a miniscule zafu pillow in a teahouse. From that moment, every time I saw the fabrics, they pulled me into their colors, bring me down into that tiny world, reminding me of Faerie Junction, that wonderful time and space my friends Lea and Jois and I spent in our collective minds while building the faerie village for Hanley Farm in April 2017.

A few days ago, those tiny fabrics practically yelled at me, like, "Dude! Let's do this!"

So I surrendered. I have assembled all the parts for several teahouses (of course - you thought I might just build ONE?). The first will actually be a lantern, with three simple sides and an opening for a tea light. Then, as I advance in my building skills, I'll attempt a  teahouse with an actual interior. If it works out, it will be an essential oil burner, with a tiny ceramic "caldron" in the middle.

Along the right side here are the various parts, in order:

-the fabric and a susi roller I thought might work as a tatami mat
-crafts sticks in the process of being trimmed with scissors
-a 1/24 scale graph
-a little store-bought platform
-skewers, tiny stones wrapped in wire and an umbrella
-the creation of the first platform
-cut craft stick tips (they curled up in the cutting -
they might make good roof shingles)
-and the laid out platform waiting to be glued.

This is all very well and good, but anyone who has followed this blog will ask, "What? I thought you put all your three dimensional projects away in honor of knitting and Studio in a Basket!" So, right. This post is to say, "I surrender."

It's danged uncomfortable to stuff one's creativity down. Don't do it. The spirit of creativity has a way of getting under the skin. In my case, it's a muse I sometimes call Patricia, who dances down the hall and drags me to see moonshine, shadows, light. She sent pictures of teahouses through Facebook, brought into my fingers old books of Japanese designs collecting dust on shelves.

Before I knew it, all this paraphernalia was assembled on my workbench (I only spent $36) and I had three sets of Japanese teahouse plans in a folder on my desktop.

Stay tuned for the next installment of "Making Stuff - A Miniature Japanese Teahouse.

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Afghan Stitch Sampler

A book called Pick Your Stitch, Build a Blanket by Doreen L.Marquart inspired me to make this lap robe above. The photo on the left is of the 36 squares stacked and ready to be sewn. The book has 80 different stitch patterns designed to make the same size squares. Very handy. Excellent instructions.

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A Simple Scarf Project

This scarf is a great project for a beginner. It is done with a garter stitch all the way (knit, knit, knit forever) except for a little bit of checkerboard (knit four, purl four) until the right length. Just add on whatever colors you like. I used Merino Extra Superfine washable wool with size 7 needles. I  cast on thirty stitches and made it just long enough to lay comfortably across the chest, by request. It’s a soft, cozy beauty.

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