Animal Cameos and Winged Walnut Pendant

 I have been ruminating for a long while on how to use the copious amounts of acorn "lids" I've collected. I finally came up with a few ideas. My partner in craft, Maddy Roslow, and I were talking about new projects and the idea of animal cameos came up. First were two owls and a fox. Next I think maybe I'll make a raccoon, turtle, beaver, or cat. The owl has a golden/ copper painted acorn lid. The fox has a natural clear finish. The winged walnut pendant is inspired by a mixture of Native American eagle wing stylization and Egyptian scarab. (Side note- November is Native American heritage month. Thanks for giving us Thanksgiving and sorry for stealing and ruining your land and culture.) The walnut wing pendant will be painted black. All pieces shown have yet to be painted.

 
 
 

Here are the painted pieces.

Making New Earrings

I want to share what it takes to make my bark earrings. First a visit to the forest....

This shows how red pine bark fractures in faceted segments. No trees were harmed in making these earrings. I take a sustainable amount that would soon have fallen off anyway. 

I lay them all out to find pieces with similar color, size, and shape. They are cleaned up and finished with a clear protective coat. 

In pairs with possible feather combinations.

A few finished pairs!

New products!

I'm back from a weekend in Montreal and ready to get back to making. Almost my entire inventory was bought up last week by Shop One2, located at RIT in the new Global Village. It's a boutique gift shop featuring handmade products made by RIT students and faculty. It's really a wonderful thing they're doing so check it out and get some early Christmas gifts. They asked me to make some gloves and I whipped out these 3 pairs of fingerless mittens. The rust colored ones have velcro "buttons" to close the mitten. I'll be making more of these for my etsy but if anyone wants to custom order a pair, please visit my alchemy page on etsy: 

http://www.etsy.com/shop_alchemy.php?user_id=11075777. 

These come in S, M, L and have the option of mitten cover and/or lining. 

My earrings, necklaces, and rings on display at Shop One2.

walnut shell pendants

These are some recent necklaces. The antler necklace has already found a home with my friend Matt Roberts. The antlers are made of sculpy and the shell has a clear enamel finish. I think I want to keep making these type and try to make them more realistic looking. 

The white feather necklace reminds me of an old-timey badminton birdie. The interior and exterior are painted with white enamel and the face with clear enamel. The scale is a little distorted of the exterior photo. It looks a bit larger than it is. The shell is about 3 inches long and about an inch width wise. I'll be posting nicer photos of it on my etsy soon, which by the way, is up and running with select items right now. 

www.FawnRayDesigns.etsy.com   

Thanks for stopping by!

The last two Sundays were craft show days, Artist Row and Hearts and Crafts. Both were really awesome and I just wanted to thank everyone who stopped by, took an interest, or bought anything. And a big thank you to Laura who shared a table with me! My next show is Saturday November 6th for Mayday Underground Craft Show Luau at Village Gate! In the meantime I expect to be very busy making new products and replenishing my wares. 

sneak peek! Artist Row is tomorrow!

Artist Row at the Rochester Public Market ("America's Favorite Market") is tomorrow from 10-4! I've been incredibly busy but here is a sneak peek of some shutters I got to display my earrings. So excited!

hello studio!

I recently moved into a shared studio space in the Hungerford building. This past weekend was awesome because of it. I made a lot of stuff. Today I made the Alliance Table in real life. It's no longer just a computer rendering! Here it is with some of my stuff behind it.  And Brady already using it as a laptop table. It went together really easily. It took maybe 2 hours to cut it all out and sand it (and I got to use my new jigsaw). 

Sunday night we had a mask making party for an Alice in Wonderland Masquerade Ball that will be held Friday, October 29th by Writers & Books. I started to make a walrus (from The Walrus and the Carpenter fame). He still needs some whiskers, tusks, neckfat rolls, eyelashes, and maybe a monocle? Anyway he is going to be a slammin walrus when he's done. 

Also here's some other random new stuff. I made this huge weird necklace out of parts of egg cartons (see the earlier egg-carton-waves post) but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I like the ruffly skeletal vertebrae effect of it, just not sure what to do with it. And a new pair of earrings I made.

the mad fawn typeface and Droog

I've been really enjoying graphic design lately.  It started with drawing the mad fawn logo. I wanted really long skinny ascenders and descenders and a very tall condensed look. I made an alphabet to go with it. Then I made a poster for the Dutch design collective Droog, as a fun exercise with my new typeface. I really admire many of Droog's designers. It states part of their manifesto that I really like:  

"Droog stands for a luxury of content and experiences... that change perspective on daily life whether it's...  authenticity, slowness, humor, engagement, nature, the abundance of what is scarce is true luxury." 

My goal is for my products to do that as well- having an abundance of substance over typical "luxury". Droog has a very tongue in cheek approach to design that isn't found very much in the US. It borders on fine art in the way that the object's importance is the message it's sending, not necessarily its functionality. How lovely the thoughtfulness of the design is, even if it's a little esoteric or impractical for American consumer culture to really embrace like the Dutch do. It's maybe kind of a geeky ID thing to drool over but it's worth a look around their website. 

http://www.droog.com/aboutus/

use every part of the egg carton

So, I like eggs. A lot. And I like the new-ish turquoise pressed fiber egg cartons from Wegmans. I had this vision of a layered dimensional sea as a backdrop for some of my felties so I saved up cartons for a while (weeks? months? it's been a while).  Here's another version of squidopus on the sea that shows off the handcut waves a little better. The other version has this gritty feel that I liked too though. And squidopus has a great gleam in her eyes in the other version.

After making the sea, I had all these oblong curved scraps. I pressed them onto a piece of fabric tape and it made a cuff bracelet very nicely. Reuse, reuse, then reuse some more. Soon to come: an outrageously oversized necklace made from the waves in the back row of the squidopus photo.

dreamy little prints ft. the mad fawn products

Apologies for the lack of posts. Figuring out day job situations and studio arrangements.  That's right- I now have a studio with 5 other artists in the Hungerford Building, which also houses many an art studio other than ours. 


Other than that, my craft company with Maddy Roslow has evolved from the name Fawndeleine to the Mad Fawn. I've started making postcard sized prints featuring some of our objects. Our next show will be September 19th at the Rochester Public Market for Artist Row!

The first two are my felty mermaid and squidopus on an egg carton sea. The next is a bag Maddy made from vintage handkerchiefs. The last is my feltie musk ox on a felted kool-aid dyed background. 

YOU can make this

I was asked if I was interested in contributing to a book about DIY Plywood Furniture a few weeks ago. I've been putting aside a little time on this and rediscovering SolidWorks, which is great for relatively quick 3D sketch modeling. The author of the book is Philip Schmidt and it will be published by Storey Publishing (both of which specialize in DIY type books which are pretty cool).  Their links:

www.philipschmidt.net

www.storey.com

About the Book

The book will contain 101 clever, custom, modern home furnishings and accessories that you can build on a budget using basic hand and power tools. Many are easy to disassemble for storage or to take with you when you move (great for renters and those on the lam). All are made with standard materials available at lumberyards, home centers and online suppliers.

Also I've been on a material hunt lately, for these shells (walnut maybe) and good feathers. I had success finding each today! 

Small pleasures.