S is for September and Spherepig

Spherepigs! They are great! It is their month!

What does this mean? It means you can get your very own one-of-a-kind spherepig, that you can design yourself!

These are pigs I've made before:

You can design your own custom pig by going to my Etsy shop, clicking on the Custom Spherepig item, and choosing from the following options to build your pig:

Color - Midnight blue, turquoise, bright aqua, neon green, forest green, yellow, amber, apricot, bright orange, baby pink, neon pink, strawberry red, bright red, dark red, plum purple, chestnut, chocolate brown, black, silver gray.

Size - Anywhere between an inch and a half and 3 inches in circumference.

Eyes - Large or small, solid color or over white, whatever color you like from the ones listed above, whatever distance from each other.

Extras - Legs, wings, a tail, a mohawk, a curl of hair, whatever you can think of!

Here are some examples that I just drew, of what your pig could look like:

Preview of the chevrotain

This is what I've been working on, among other things:

Just needs some legs, ears, eyes, and a tail... maybe it'll be done by next week.

As for one of those other things I'm working on, I'll post something resembling a preview sometime later this week!

Mexican free-tailed bat. Yes, again! And goodbye to it!

Like the second hoatzin, this Bat II was commissioned and thus was fated to fly away as soon as the final needle stab fell upon its fuzzy abdomen.  Like the first hoatzin, I still had the first bat, because its owner has not yet picked it up.

Also like the second hoatzin, I improved upon the second bat a little:

More pictures under the fold.

I have a tablet!!

I used to have an Intuos tablet with a serial port, which I bought way back when I thought serial ports were The In Thing. This was a horribly long time ago. The last two (or three? two and a half?) computers I've owned had no serial ports at all, and apparently tablets don't like serial-to-usb converters. So imagine my joy when a friend of my husband's just gave me his old USB port tablet!

First thing I did was draw the next cretur I'll be working on: a greater chevrotain. It was just a quick "whee I have a tablet" exercise so you may notice I just kind of copied the photo in the Wikipedia article.

So consider this a cretur preview! Chevrotain! Look forward to it, and so on!

Back from NYC

I've been away for a week, enjoying as many New York City wonders as I could possibly cram into a week. I don't think I've ever walked so much in my life, and I kind of miss it already, though my feet sure don't. The only real free time I had was at the airport, waiting for the plane that would take us to NYC. I spent it needlefelting, thinking that surely this would not be the only downtime in the trip that I could use to be productive. BUT IT WAS.

I was listening to This American Life.

Most of our time was spent in museums, and getting to museums. We ate delicious food that we often found by going "oh man I am hungry, let's find someplace to eat" in the middle of a museum-bound trek.

The first museum we visited was the Museum of Natural History.

Look at those silly knees!

I took a few photos, some of them of creturs I intend to make in the future. Click on "read more" to see them, if you'd like.

Finished - needle felted Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis)

As usual, tried some new techniques... this time, aside from some experiments in the needling process, it was sewing, for the wings. I am terrible at it, generally, but I think it worked out pretty well in this case. What do you think?

More pictures:

Inching closer

We can rebuild him. We have the technology. Better, stronger, faster.

Next work in progress: Tadarida brasiliensis

A little mouse

Here is a little mouse that I made as part of a collaboration. A friend of mine will receive it soon, and make a chainmail armor for it. And then we will have a mouse with chainmail armor!

More pictures after the cut.

Starting up starting over

Hi everyone! Hi. Hey.

I'm really sorry for the sudden disappearance. Those of you that follow me on Twitter may have had a better idea of what happened, but it was still not the full story. I moved, but that wasn't all. I also had to put the store on hiatus, legally, because the visa I was under expired on May 31st, so I couldn't work until I got my greencard. I fully expected that to take until September at least, but I was very pleasantly surprised with the San Antonio INS crowd... I got it half a month ago!

So I should have like three new creturs already, right? Well... right, I should, but, see, things happened. Dogs happened. One dog happened in from the street, a sweet, mild 5-year-old pit mix. Then as we were walking that one, another dog happened. A little 8-week old puppy, possibly a lab-terrier mix, followed us home. We were powerless to prevent these dogs from happening to us. And those of you who have had puppies know what an amazing time-sucking ability puppies have.

The other problem there was that the dogs lived in the area that we had previously designated to be my studio. All over it. You see, that area has a concrete floor off of which the inevitable puppy mess is a lot easier to clean. But this made working in the (destruction-prone, poop-smelly) studio very unappetizing, so that took up some more time while we futilely tried to teach the puppy not to poop all over the place, not to destroy everything within reach, and other normal puppylike activities. So my husband and I made a rolling gate and divided the studio to give the dogs roughly a third of it to hang out in while we are at work, and I finally got to have a real studio. Yay!

1. Cretur boxes
2. Dog fence
3. Wool chest
4. Filing cabinet full of mostly yarn and works in progress
5. Wool-soaking tubs
6. Desk, and the blindingly bright outdoors

So there, I am starting up again at last. ONWARD