Greater Chevrotain - Tragulus napu

Finally finished! I'm tired and hungry so I'm just gonna dump these photos here and go have myself some shepherd's pie with grass-fed buffalo meat and watch Godfather II. OH YEAH.

 

Remember this guy?

 Yep, still working on it...

Out of town

I'm going to be away from home and away from the internet from today until Sunday. It is work-related, but I'm going to have a lot of free time to needlefelt. I'm packing a bag full of wool that will hopefully come back a bag with at least one finished cretur, maybe two, or three!

PS: Get some spherepigs, come on!

Bye, second axolotl!

So, based on my previous axolotl, I thought this would take me 3-5 days, and it did, but they were awfully hectic. No one should allow me to make time estimates ever again.

I did some improvements on the design, as usual, and I am so freaking happy with this little salamander that for the first time ever I'm actually a little sad to let him go.

Ambystoma mexicanum

Here's the watercolor card that goes with it:

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: