Bye, apricot pig!

The apricot pig got claimed on Friday, so I get to use my neato handmade stamp for the first time:

Bye, pig! Have fun!

Finished kea!

YES.

  

More photos and a quoll preview after the jump:

Birth of a kea, part 2

When we last saw our kea, he was a little blob with wings but no beak or legs. Let's move on then!

Some of the photos in this post are taken by my lovely assistant Stevan, and are therefore blurry and terrible, but well-intentioned!

Make and attach the tail in the same fashion as the wings; first I made a flat shape of the darkest color, then poked feather-shaped layers of different colors on top of it. Once it was constructed, I poked it onto the kea's body, adding a bit more of the dark-colored wool to the underside to better blend it.

Birth of a kea, part 1

HOW TO MAKE A KEA. In which I demonstrate my sew-free, sturdy and stable method of attaching non-wool beaks and legs to wool creturs!

First: make the body, out of core wool or batting (it is faster than roving, I think).

Photo-heavy post!

TA-DAH! My best alebrije ever!

And to take full advantage of the loveliness of today's light (and the camera I borrowed from my friend Catherine), I re-photographed everybody else as well. Here's some photos of my two most sadly unloved creturs, whom I love enough to compensate for the public's apathy, I guess.

Bradford! You sexy heartbreaker.

Muscle pig! You hideously deformed bundle of love!

More previews, on two different fronts

The alebrije is done! Huzzah! But tomorrow, if weather.com is not lying, will be a much better day to take pictures. So for now I'll just show you the most exciting part:

The teeth are made of these great irregular beads I found. I love the way they look.

While I wait for tomorrow's clouds, I've not been idle. I know I am way behind on the keas. I'm sorry! I've been dyeing wool all day trying to get accurate kea colors and kicking myself for not choosing a solid-colored animal instead. But I'll make it work somehow!

Dyeing notes. Note the stray alebrije sketch and the hoatzin/springhaas drawings showing through from previous pages.

Of these tests drying outside, I can really only use the fourth one for the kea, maybe some of the third. Not that the other two will go unused!

Hyena alebrije preview

Ah, poor little alebrije. If I didn't have two jobs, you'd be done by now.

A preview: