August 2 2025

One day late isn’t so bad, is it?

July was beautiful. Last weekend some friends and I camped out in Eastern Oregon, where the skies are dark enough to see the milky way. There was a new moon, three overlapping meteor showers, and a vicious lightning storm churning away on the horizon. When I saw my first shooting star I wept tears of joy, which surprised everyone and especially me.

The weeks before I set out to write some fiction and instead ended up with a very theraputic bit of autobiography, which was a nasty surprise but more funny than anything else. That is not getting published any time soon. I’m not that brave. I’m starting to suspect that I’ll never make the sort of story I want unless I make an outline first, an idea I’m rebelling against fiercely but might just sit down and try the next time that writing itch hits me.

For now I’m back in my comfort zone. My partner and I finished the grand house redecorating at long last. The cherry on top was this wall of display shelves which I had the great pleasure of organizing.

It’s a fairly even blend of finished art projects and collections and keepsakes. It makes me smile every time I walk past.

It was also the final push I needed to start work on a new sculpture. That orange zone is too sparse. It needs a dragon.

First step is the design. I have months and months worth of dragon thoughts, as I’ve circled around this idea, but it was time to narrow them down a bit.

I cut the wings out of a post-it note so that I could move them about on the body, try to find a position I like. I decided on anchoring them up near the shoulders but connecting them down the whole length of the back, like the way a bat’s wings stretch down to their ankles. Those will be an interesting challenge when it comes to actually constructing them in felt.

I draw the design out life size on some scrap paper from a couple angles. I’ve done this before with just the side profile, but I wanted to make sure the final result was nice and chunky with good shoulders. Having a front view helps for this. Then I take some wire and trace out the creature’s skeleton.

At this stage I couldn’t find my normal wire, so I took some of my partner’s bonsai wire. It works great for this. It’s allumnum so it’s light weight and super easy to bend, and because it’s so soft it’s less likely to snap from repeated readjustments. Then this gets connected together with some much thinner wire to make a 3d stick figure,

then wrapped again in pipe cleaners to give the wool something to grab onto.

The pipe cleaner is a new technique. Usually I just go straight to wool and try to felt around the wire, but that’s annoying and tedious breaks a lot of needles before it’s tight enough to stop slipping around. I’m hoping the pipe cleaner will help lock everything in place a bit faster. The wings I’m leaving more bare because I have only a vague idea of how I’m going to tackle them and I don’t want them too bulked up ahead of time.

I’ve done plenty of sculptures without any wire at all, building them up with chunky shapes. The wire helps a lot though when it comes to maintaining proportions, something that is incredibly tricky in a medium like felt where density can be so variable.

Next the whole thing gets wrapped in wool, ideally the coarsest cheapest wool in your stash.

Coarse because that will felt down a bit quicker, cheap because it takes a lot more than you’d expect to build up the mass we need. More expensive wool, with better colors and textures, will be useful once the shape is set and I’m making the outermost visible layers. At this stage we just want to slap on some material.

I also padded out the chest and belly with some wet-felt balls I’d made for some project or another and abandoned, cut in half so they’d fit nicely against the spine.

Wet felting is faster and often denser than needle felting, but horribly hard to control the final shape of. I find that mixing the two is a nice way to rough out the shape of something without destroying my hands. Wet felting is also much better for making thin sheets of felt, and will probably be how I make the wings? Though I’m not entirely sure how that process will go yet.

He’s looking pretty good, if a bit thin. There’s a lot more wool to add before I can start on the colors, especially if I’m going to get him dense enough to support a smooth surface texture. A loosely packed core makes it near impossible to avoid fly away fuzzies on the surface. Thankfully, with the solid sketches I made at the start, I’m unlikely to get bored and stop bulking him up early. It’s just too easy to see how far off my goal is.

I also managed to fill a couple sketchbook pages, with a few tidbits worth pulling out.

Nothing too extravegant, but I am pleased with that fish.

Oh, and I’ve dyed my hair bright blue again. After three weeks of playing at blonde I decided I absolutely hated it and had to go back. That cloudy white hair look was interesting but it felt deeply wrong around my face, while the blue makes me grin like a fool every time I see myself. So that’s fun. Sometimes an experiment like that is nice, just to really know that your comfort zone is where you want to be.

Okay. That’s all I have for July, and all the writing and re-writing I can justify with this already a day late. Thank you, as always, for reading <3