Category: February Make-a-thing-a-day

I have hens in the back yard who keep laying, snow and all – and hubby and I are on a low carb diet, so I am making pickled eggs to pack in lunches. I never use the same recipe — cider vinegar, pickling spice, mustard seeds, hot peppers, a couple of beets, some onions,…

One of my independent study students is making work based on Dave the Slave, face jugs and early American jugs. I demoed this jug thrown in three parts and now he’s off and running. I didn’t make this all at once but I finished and signed it today so I’m calling it my “make” for…

At the Holland studio this morning we made dozens and dozens of these seed bombs, with seeds donated by Toledo Grows. We’ll have them in a basket at the Seed Swap this coming weekend!

I made fruit leather and cut it into hearts for the kids… ditto for gelatin fruit juice “jigglers”… tucked in raspberries, almonds and chocolates, bright slices of starfruit, candy hearts with words on them. I made the kids sandwiches by cookie-cuttering hearts from bread, salami, provolone, sliced turkey… stuffed them with sprouts and poked them shut…

     I get so much done when I am busy avoiding getting other stuff done. Here’s my new sprouting station, in the faux window over my kitchen sink, lit by flourescent spots. Jars contain a new batch of mung beans, alfalfa sprouts (in the big jar, as M loves them) and clover sprouts. Broccoli…

This closed-form throwing demo became a teapot after the class went home. My “make a thing a day for february” blog is done, but I have almost 11 months left in the year…

This was the weekend we had scheduled our long-planned girl scout version of the BSA Camp Alaska weekend.  The rules were: no tents, just tarps… 24 hours outdoors… pack in your gear to the site.  After a couple of planning meetings and some packing and grocery lists, we headed out Saturday with 2 troop leaders,…

It’s a dicey photo but oh well. We bought clementines and they were pithy, so I stabbed a couple of them full of cloves and let them dry. They will probably go  in the steamer trunk in the bathroom once I am sure they will dessicate and not rot. They look creepy and smell marvelous. To…

Lettuce, too. Sprouted in a warm place and now moved to a cooler space to grow slowly…

This was was a big deep slide-out box drawer that is perfect for tall bottles like shampoo and lotions. The shelf above it is for folded towels. I’ll take a pic of the whole thing when we get the support finished.

My whole bathroom is turning into a found object project. A junk auction steamer trunk, a scrap-box upholstery fabric sample book and some brass tacks have kind of tied this whole project together. I took down the medicine cabinet and took it apart, decoupaged the inside with 1940s herbalist catalogs and random vintage printings, put my…

My make for yesterday was my overdue column for Clay Times magazine. Apologies to my editor.. but it’s a good one.  Sorry no photo. Nothing to see here.

I assigned my Art Appreciation students to do an Andy Goldsworthy inspired project over the weekend, take a picture, and email it to me.  I decided to do one myself.  It’s warm today, cold tomorrow, freezing rain and then snow on the way, so if it evolves I’ll take more pix. So far the leaves…

You want one. Don’t lie.

Using the stack of sawed-off 2 liter bottle bottoms (leftover from an ongoing greenhouse make) I am continuing to plant seeds for the coming season’s garden. This row, stacked on a makeshift shelf between the toaster and a hasty shoplight-mounted-under-the-counter, contains three kinds of lettuce, bok choy and catnip. More this weekend — I have a headache…

Because all seeds are magic.  Today I need reminding that things lying dormant are still alive, that big plans have humble beginnings, and that spring will finally arrive. Seeds remind me to have faith in the future and the unseen. Seeds remind me that a small act of foresight and planning can reward us in…

Years ago, annoyed that there was no laundry chute in the kids/company bathroom, I tore out a heat duct in the floor and made one. Clothes slide down a tall narrow office trash can with the bottom cut out, into a laundry bin in the basement where the washer and dryer live. I built a simple box…

Three of my troop’s girl scouts did a fundraiser for literacy by hosting an “Edible Book” feast.  People who entered created something edible based on a favorite book.  Mine was based on Calvin and Hobbes and the book  Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.  The guy above buried his friend… This one is…

Today I demoed the extruded casserole project for my ceramics class at Owens College. Same idea, bigger form. Bad cell phone pic. Wait until you see TOMORROW’s make… I’m entering an edible book contest. I’ll photograph  my entry when it’s done!

This is made from an extruded wall (I cut the die with a rim and gallery) — textured with a wooden block from a jenga game. A slab floor is added, then a slab slumped inside the rim as a lid (later turned over and trimmed to fit.) I really did make this on the…

I took a wet felting class a few weeks ago and made a big fish, so today I decided to try needle felting and make a little one.   Molly has done a few really cute needle felting critters so I thought I would try it. My plan is to make a couple of little feltie guys, buy a baby…

This is an odd shaped one that will lean outward from a hinge at the bottom.

I made a drawer pull for the second steamer trunk drawer. The top pull I ordered in the mail from an artisan — bluebayer.com — and the second one I made out of a couple of lamp keys, a typewriter key, knob hardware leftover from making my mother-in-law some cupboard knobs, and epoxy.  I like how it…

My cousin Pamela brought a toy called a “cricut” to the superbowl gathering at my mom’s.  Molly was making cards and I took the leftover punchout bits and made a design of my own. I glued on a few seed beads just ’cause what-the-hell. This was a busy day — painted bathroom trim, worked on the steamer…

Last summer I canned applesauce, and peaches in apple juice, and made cases of juice sweetened jam. In winter, I blender up fruit leather. It needs to be mostly applesauce, because that makes good stretchy, rollable leather.  This batch has one with apricots, two with peaches, one with strawberry jam, one with cinnamon spiced apples, and…

It’s time to move ahead with the bathroom steampunk project. I got the walls painted during the snowpocalypse, so tonight after dinner I gave stencilling a shot/ I had been reading about victorian wall covering approaches, and Jeff and I modified a stencil we found at a home store.  It’s really fun and pretty easy. It’s fairly forgiving (unlike tile)…

Molly wanted a simple henna design. I had ten minutes before I had to go teach, so I did a quick and simple one. I made a plate and a platter as demos at the guild tonight, but they weren’t all that amazing and I didn’t bring a camera… so this will do.

This is a picture of the Dadant family. They have been in the beekeeping business for seven generations now, selling Langstroth hive boxes and bee supplies to beekeepers like me:  printed beeswax comb foundation, screened boxes full of bees, wood and nails to build lightweight frames. I’ve been worrying over bees lately, so I made this little homage in…

Tonight I finished the second drawer for my steamer trunk. Like the first drawer, the  inside and out, bottom and sides are mod-podged with old herbalist catalog pages, and I used a disassembled upholstery sample book for the fabric fronts on the drawers.  Today before the snow came, I bought brass upholstery tacks. They were way…

Today I lined the pressboard drawers from my steamer trunk project with the pages of a 1940s herbalist magazine. It has all kinds of testimonials and recipes for herbal remedies. I used modpodge, which is my favorite stuff.  Since the drawers are going to hold lotions and toiletries and potentially leaky stuff, I didn’t want fabric linings.…

I have a 30 foot wide garden in the back of my yard and another behind my studio. When it’s time to think about planting, I have to consider lots of details: Where were the squash, tomatoes & other nightshades, cole crops last year? Rotating crops keeps pests under control, and finds plants soil that…

This is the ” before”  picture. We went to a junk-and-poultry farm auction in Dundee one Saturday, looking for gears and dials for the steampunk-our-bathroom project, and I ended up hauling home an enormous, dilapidated steamer trunk because it was only five bucks.  It was mildewed and musty and full of broken wooden drawers which apparently…

Another outlet cover for the bathroom steampunk project. I used an antique dictionary whose pages are coming unbound.

Today’s “make” is a fobot. I have lucked into an art group and we met again today in a big sunny artspace to make stuff together. I finished this little guy and started a second, but ran out of time and parts. What a great bunch of womens! Maybe I need to host the next gathering here…

  The fam has decided that we need to do something interesting with out bathroom. When the kids were younger I had wallpapered it with big maps from some old National Geographic mags, but it has been kind of ordinary for the last few makeovers.  After some discussion and some web surfing, we decided to go…

There was an ugly, yellowed, heavy plastic tape dispenser in a box of junk I bought at an auction. By the magic of art I have transformed it into an ugly RED tape dispenser, lol. Let’s call this one a learning experience, shall we? What I learned: 1.) less is more. This looked best with…

This is a classic bad photo — loud, busy background and bla bla — but it’s late and I’m tired and I’m not a photographer. There are three demo pots I made for my evening guild class tonight — made the middle one, trimmed the other two. It’s not midnight so it’s still today! Two days in…

The doorbell rang tonight after dinner, and it was my package from Amazon: Noah Scalin’s creativity journal, with the challenge to make something every day for a year. I have been reading MAKE magazine, following links like this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XofUu6hv8U&feature=player_embedded   and just generally thinking about challenges.   I had tried to take on the Art House sketchbook project,…