Pen Pal Box

Life is so surreal right now-- my baby sister was born this Monday, and I just moved into my dorm room! I am officially a college student now!!!

My little sister and I are really close, and she was very worried about me being gone. She doesn't know how she'll be living in our room by herself! :)

I decided to ask her to be my penpal, and I made her a pen-pal box as a goodbye gift. It's a cheap wooden box from the clearance aisle at Michaels, and I simply decoupaged it with scrapbook paper, pages from destroyable books, and a really pretty Washi tape from JoAnn's. 

I meant to get her stamps and address labels, but forgot to do it in time. Oh, well! My mom can do that, right? :) I can't wait to start writing to her, and hopefully writing me letters will help her to become a more confident writer. She's getting a lot better at spelling and I'm trying to convince her to write letters on her own without any help.

Life is just so surreal... Are any of you lovely readers off to college this year? Are you as excited as I am? It's going to be an epic year!

Sketchbook Cover with Fabric + Mod Podge

Lately I've taken to shoving this little Strathmore sketchbook into every purse, backpack, or lunch bag that I happen to be carrying. I used to bring around a big 9x12 affair, but I've learned the importance of tiny sketchbooks. They are so easy to carry around, and now I find myself doing quick no-pressure sketches when I am out and about.

You can tell I don't create any little masterpieces in here, though, because I don't exactly treat it nicely. The paper cover is bent and wrinkled. It is also SUPER boring.

I decided to cover the front and back covers with fabric to make it prettier and sturdier. :) I found this darling, blue, swirly, brocade-y fabric at JoAnns on super sale and just had to pick some up. Since our sewing machine is broken, what is better than a quick no-sew project when you have delicious fabric just sitting around?

How to Make a No-Sew Fabric Sketchbook Cover

It's really super simple. :) You'll need:

A sketchbook or notebook to cover
Mod Podge
A paintbrush
Fabric
(optional) cardstock

Progress photos courtesy of my little sister!

To begin, cut a piece of fabric close to the size of the cover. Make the length and width of the fabric around 1/2 inch longer than the length and width of the sketchbook.

Next, coat the cover with Mod Podge. They do sell special fabric mod podge, but I found that my regular stuff works just fine.

Like so!

Set the fabric ontop of the Mod Podge glue and press it firmly-- you don't want any air bubbles!

Open the sketchbook cover, fold the excess fabric over, and glue (or tape) the fabric onto the backside of the cover.

Next, cut out a piece of fabric (or cardstock, as I chose) to the exact dimensions of the sketchbook cover and glue it onto the inside of the cover.

Ta-da! It's a quick and simple project, but it jazzed up my sketchbook quite nicely. :)

The backside of the fabric is lovely, too, so I used that side on the back cover. You can see that some of the wet glue bled through the fabric-- unfortunately that spot shows even when the glue dried. Beware of bleed-through glue!

I've decorated sketchbooks with doodles, collages, and stickers in the past, and I even made a pretty stamped-paper cover for my 30 Day Drawing Challenge book, but this is the first that I've used fabric on!

Also, check out my epic new Noodler's flex fountain pen. I love it. :) I'm starting to become addicted to writing tools, and at $20 this is my single most expensive pen. It's worth it for me, though, because it writes so beautifully and lets me do some unique calligraphy styles. (Ignore the poor calligraphy in this drawing! It's just what I did late at night after decorating my sketchbook with fabric).

What's the most unique thing you've ever done to decorate a notebook or sketchbook?

P.S. I'm starting to pack for college already! I'm overwhelmed in a wonderful way, and I'm so excited for my classes. :) My little sister is going to be born in just a couple of weeks, too, and I'm just bouncing up and down with excitement! Here's to life being crazy but good. :)

The Tale of a Frabjous Present

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
He chortled in his joy.



I made this sculpture, designed by George Hart, for my brother's birthday. He wants to study mechanical engineering when he goes to college, but he's always said that his favorite hobbies will be theoretical physics and building fun contraptions in the garage.

In my family we kids don't usually spend money on birthday or Christmas presents for one another. I'm the only one of us with a source of income, and when there are six-soon-to-be-seven kids, none of us have the money! Gifts are always something cheap and handmade.

This particular brother is hard to make gifts for. He makes or already has most of the little things he wants, like 3D tic-tac-toe boards, levitating tops, or science-y desk toys. He even stole my M.C. Escher poster (I had only taken it down for the afternoon to move it to a new part of my wall!!!) so I couldn't give him that. He doesn't use crocheted hats or keychains or cute little painted cards. What to make?

We're all huge fans of Vi Hart, a youtuber who makes ridiculously geeky, mathematical, funny, and epic videos. One day I was re-watching her videos and stumbled upon her father George Hart's channel, and from there his website of sculptures. He's got a template for making the Frabjous sculpture, a geometric art piece which is totally up my brother's alley, so I set to work getting all my other siblings to help me out.

We traced the templates onto the stiff, thin cardboard that comes on the backs of sketchpads and legal pads. (I now have a lot of loose drawings in a folder instead of all attached in their pad, but whatever!)

While the rest of us slaved away, my five year old brother tried to make Sierpinski triangles! Isn't it sweet? Those fractal triangles turned into another distraction, and you can see my second-youngest brother's Sierpinski triangles on his Instagram here.    

And THAT lead to making hexaflexagons. Hexaflexagons are quickly taking over the house.

That cardboard was incredibly difficult to cut, but we finally managed it with box cutters. We spray painted everything black and let it dry overnight.

George Hart's PDF didn't have much in the way of instructions, but I naively assumed that I would be able to assemble the sculpture with ease. I mean, I'm one of those people who leave instruction booklets at the bottom of the box and just figures out how to put things together. Easy peasey, right? Hah.

This thing was hard to put together. I took a solid two hours puzzling the S-curves into the cool star-vortex pattern.

My aha-moment was realizing that the final shape is basically a dodecahedron and that the S-curves go diagonally to different vertices of the dodecahedron.

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought I stood, the Frabjous, with lots of tape, came whiffling to it's final form, and looked awesome as it came.

It looked strange and alien as I put it together (doesn't that first photo look a lot like the Tripods of doom from the Tripods Attack book?).

Next I glued all the vertices to one another using a ton of glue and painted any leftover cardboard spots. Hot glue probably would have worked better.

It's far from perfect (the one on the website was made from laser-cut wood and all the pieces are actually identical), but still looks pretty fun. My brother was so excited and he's hung it on his ceiling.

It looks a bit floppy in this picture... argh!

And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

Allons-y! It's my first Doctor Who jewelry set!

A couple days ago I purchased a metal stamping kit to create jewelry with awesome quotes and sayings. I've always admired this kind of jewelry, but it does take some investment to get the required tools! I finally broke down and now I'm having fun with a rustic metal look that I've never really incorporated into my jewelry pieces before.

It's probably not a surprise to you all that I am a Doctor Who fan. I have my online friend Elenatintil to blame for introducing me to the show, and several irl friends to blame for getting me completely addicted!

For those of you not familiar with Doctor Who... it's complete bonkers to explain. You always wind up sounding like an idiot, but believe me when I say the show's eccentricities make it epic. Basically it is a BBC show about an alien known only as the Doctor who goes around in a 1960's blue Police Box (which is actually a spaceship called the TARDIS) with various companions (typically a modern day London girl), traveling throughout all of time and space and having wacky, deep, usually-quite-intelligent, and hard-to-explain adventures. Oh, and the Doctor is played by several different actors.

This was an image which greatly inspired this jewelry set:

I don't know who made the compilation graphic with the quote on it, but the artwork featured in this picture was made by Alicexz on DeviantArt.

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,

but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint -

it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

I love that "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" quote. It's handy to flourish when your brother is asking you to think about light cones and fourth dimensions. :) "It's all just wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff!"

One of my favorite things about Doctor Who is the pure wonder that the Doctor has bubbled up inside of him and how much beauty he sees in everything from the construction of a man-eating robot to a distant star to a single leaf on planet Earth.

This line, which he says when inviting a friend to join him on his adventures, is short and beautiful:

All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was... Where do you want to start?

I handstamped the letters onto aluminum, cut out the metal and sanded the edges, punched in holes for the TARDIS blue eyelets, and strung everything onto darkened steel chain sprinkled with blue glass cats-eye beads.

If you are interested, the necklace and two bracelets are for sale as a set on my Shoppe.

Also, I LOVE my camera and its lenses. They were a graduation present and I've been having SO MUCH FUN playing with the settings. :)

Fellow Whovians... what is your favorite Doctor Who quote? And your favorite episode and companion and Doctor? Personally I love Don't Blink, Amy, Martha, and Clara (don't make me pick!) and my bug-eyed Doctor (lol-- it's a joke in my family-- I mean the talented David Tennant of course!).

As a bonus, here is the very first piece that I made with my stamping kit! "Inconceivable!" is, of course, from The Princess Bride, one of the most quotable movies of all time. This one has chainmaille details.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Namárië

I finished this calligraphy piece several months ago but forgot to blog it-- it's J.R.R. Tolkien's beautiful poem Namárië from The Lord of the Rings. It is written in Quenya (the High Elvish language). On the left, the poem is written in our alphabet, and on the write, it is written in the Tengwar (Elvish) script.

The poem is a beautiful piece which the Lady Galadriel sings to Frodo when the Fellowship leaves Lothlorien to destroy the Ring. 

I didn't have space to fit the entire poem on my little sheet of paper board, so I just used the first stanza and stuck the final two lines (about farewells and finding Valinor) on at the end. 

The border was done entirely freehand using india ink and watercolors. I am pretty proud of it-- this was my first time making an Art Nouveau border, and I'm getting better at making celtic knots with decorative tips.

The heraldic device at the top is the symbol for Feanor, as designed by Tolkien himself. I thought this device would be fitting because not only is Feanor Galadriel's anscestor (if I have my genealogy straight), but it was mostly because of his family that the Elves were banished from Valinor-- and this poem is all about Galadriel's longing for Valinor when she thought she could not return, but nonetheless wished that Frodo may make it there one day. (Valinor is sort of like an Elvish heaven-- sort of, not really, but it's the best description I can come up with off the top of my head).

Here's the English version of the poem:

Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind,
long years numberless as the wings of trees!
The years have passed like swift draughts
of the sweet mead in lofty halls beyond the West,
beneath the blue vaults of Varda
wherein the stars tremble in the song of her voice, holy and queenly.

Who now shall refill the cup for me?

For now the Kindler, Varda, the Queen of the Stars,
from Mount Everwhite has uplifted her hands like clouds,
and all paths are drowned deep in shadow;
and out of a grey country darkness lies on the foaming waves between us,
and mist covers the jewels of Calacirya for ever.
Now lost, lost to those from the East is Valimar!
Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar.
Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!

______________
For those of you complete Tolkienites, the title of this blog post ("Farewell") is not about me saying farewell to blogging or anything. I have one more crazy busy week of school left, and after that I will be taking a couple of days to just do nothing and not feel guilty about it (in other words, I will curl up on the hammock for two days and do nothing but devour some novels and drink lots of iced tea and catch up on TV shows before bed). After that, however, I will be working on some of the hundreds of creative projects that have been clanking around in my brain. :) 

It's so incredibly strange to think that I am almost done with high school. It's been a beautiful four years and I've learned and grown so much! For all of you still in school, when does your summer vacation begin?