"They Live" DIY Mask Making!

It's no real secret that I like dressing up, especially if it means I get to make elaborate costumes :) (Mermaid, sock monkey, Legolas, Leia etc... ) We are going to our second annual May the Fourth party next weekend so we had to come up with a new costume idea. Somehow we hit on "They Live", a movie I'd never even heard of until A mentioned it last week. After watching it at the weekend, I was sold! I google searched for a tutorial to make masks and came across two here (MAKE) and here (Instructables), and have hybridized the two with a few of my own changes based on materials at hand. We are about half way though making our masks, and this is how we've done it so far.

Step 1: The base mask
Both tutorials recommend buying two masks (a plain blank white one and a skull one) and then gluing them together. Instead we went with one papier-mâché skull each, purchased for $12 a pop. This seemed pretty reasonable to me since the alien faces are basically exposed skulls so by using a molded mask underneath we could get away with less modeling clay later on.

The mask didn't fit my lady sized face very well, so I had to soak the nose region and push the indented area out which is why it looks a little bit busted here. I've covered this up on the outside at a later step, and I'm going to pad the inside of the mask so it sits more comfortably on my nose.

Step 2: Apply the muscle tissue
The first tutorial recommends using instant papier-mâché to make the muscle-like tissue of the alien faces. But I'm a quilter and I have a lot of tiny scraps of batting around so I decided to try using that.

Adam tore thin strips of batting which I then soaked in watered-down Elmer's Glue (maybe 70% glue) and applied to the mask with liberal squishing and scrunching to make something approximating tissue.

I roughly followed the layout of the MAKE tutorial as to where I put the batting, mostly on the forehead and around the cheekbones/jowls. I put a very smooth layer over my mask's busted nose hole too. To finish, I added a thin layer of glue-water to smooth down an flyaway fibers. They we blow-dried a little to set the surface...

... and left them alone for two days to dry. Why two days? Because Tuesday night is trivia night ;)

Step 3: Sculpting the facial features
For this part we took advice from the Instructable tutorial and used Crayola Model Magic, except that we decided that since the finished product needed to be blue, why not just use blue clay to begin with!

The clay was super easy to work with, but needed a bit of persuading to smooth out joins. Mostly I just rubbed lightly until the worst cracks went away. There seemed to be no problem with the clay adhering to the mask's painted surface but it clung a little too much to the batting to allow for repositioning.

We each sculpted our own masks, leading to two pretty distinctively different faces. I'll let you guess which one was mine, with a hint that I might have watched all seasons of Bones... twice. One 4oz package was enough to do two masks, but you might need more if you didn't use a mask that was already skull shaped.

We're going to let these dry for a couple of days (why? Because tonight we're going to see a Grease and Grease 2 themed burlesque show!) then will start painting!

Tutorial Part 2

Finished Geisha Quilt

The solid blue binding for my geisha quilt arrived very quickly from fabric.com, but then I got distracted by the spontaneous assembly of yet another recycled fabric quilt top and didn't get around to binding her until last weekend. I am in love.

I chose the quilt the top with straight lines to mirror the stark geometry, but then switched to concentric arcs in the face and eye sections to soften the more human aspects of the image. I didn't quilt over the appliqued pieces, choosing instead to quilt in the ditch until I reached the next section of straight lines.

The quilting is obvious from the back, where I used a small blue (elder?)berry print gifted to me by my sister. You can also see that I added an integrated hanging loop (stitched into the binding) because out of all the quilts I've made this is the most likely, in my opinion to work equally as well as a decorative and functional item.

Since my original post about this quilt I've decided that it doesn't feel quite right to refer to this quilt as inspired by Ikko Tanaka, since I essentially unmodified his design during the translation from poster to fabric with the exception of using a slightly smaller circle (because my plate/template was that size), a solid pink rather than a gradient and in changing the regularity of the grid through the inclusion of curved quilting. But then again, I'm not sure how else to refer to the source except as my inspiration.

I've been thinking a lot recently about copyright as it pertains to modifying someone else's original work and transforming it into a quilt (for another example see my recent fox quilt) and even after reading up on the subject I'm still not entirely clear about the legality of who would actually own the rights to the image on, and therefore images of, this quilt. I am pretty certain that I couldn't sell a pattern based on another person's original design, not without a minimum of credit for the original design or better yet permission from the original designer or their estate, but could I display in a quilt show, or sell the quilt, as a one-of-a-kind creation by me? What are your thoughts?

A Quilt Bee Backlog

The last time I blogged about my quilt Bee was back in September, and there has quite predictably been a bit more sewing since then!

October was my month, and I asked people to improv-piece two words - a favourite nice and naughty word  to call a person. I got 10 out of 12 blocks back which was slightly disheartening, it's not the first time my block instructions have been sent out into the ether never to return, but! The blocks I did get were awesome! And the lack of a few contributors meant I got to flex my vocabulary a little bit more. I haven't started to work on a final layout for the quilt, but I did buy a few more yards of each color solid so when I get to feeling like it I'll have all the supplies on hand.

In November I paper pieced some teeny Amish blocks for Judy....

Then we were asked to improvisationally piece around a trapezoid shape for Jody, with instructions to use some of the green batik she included and to add a warm colour. I went with tiny HSTs and a court house steps construction.

My timeline gets a little blurry at this point - multiple packets arrived late or early and all at the same time, so in order of completion:

6.5" x 12.5" strip pieced blocks for Mandy...

A divided fat quarter for Emily. I had the hardest time envisioning what this was supposed to look like! The tiny pictures in the instructions just didn't compute with the large piece of fabric and wide strips in front of me so I did my best and well, my best looks like the 80s.

Margaret asked for blocks to be made from upholstery fabric samples in a modified flying goose. This fabric was horrible to work with but I tried my best! The finished quilt will be sent to France for the International Festival of Extra Ordinary Textiles in Clermont-Ferrand, and then will be auctioned off to raise money for Doctors Without Borders.

And finally, not really Bee blocks but close enough, I sewed polka dot nine patches for a quilt block lotto at my last guild meeting. Every block got you a raffle ticket and in the end two piles of blocks were handed out to two lucky winner. I didn't win, but it was fun to take part. I was surprised how few polka dots (or even loose definitions) I had in my scrap and fat quarter stash and could only squeak out two blocks.

I think this means I all caught up as far as bee sewing goes. I'm looking forward to the next packet in the mail!

Fox Faced

Inspired by a knitting chart I found on Flickr and a stack of orange napkins I picked up at my last visit to Housing Works' Buy the Bag thrift store, I whipped up this cute little baby quilt last week and them pinned him to my fig tree.

I was super tickled by how it turned out, especially because every single fabric used in this quilt was reclaimed or recycled! Besides the napkins, I included pieces of a linen shirt (free on the street), the lining of a cotton skirt (brown) and a pillow case (green) from Housing Works BtB, a bed sheet from Etsy for the backing (previously used here), and strips of leftovers from my last quilt back (also from Housing Works BtB!) for the binding.

I've talked before on this blog about why I've restricted myself to shopping primarily from thrift stores for my own clothing, and more recently I've been trying to apply that reasoning to my crafting. Over-consumption of supplies is something I've fallen prey to many times (7 foot yarn storage closet?!), and with quilting it's almost a requirement to have many different fabrics on hand with which to create. I know I work best when I can pull stacks of fabrics out to audition for backgrounds and bindings etc. but I have a lot of fabric. Not as much as some but I'd like to be more conscientious in using what I have and reusing wherever possible. For example, queen sized bed sheets make for excellent backs because by their nature they are wider than quilting cotton. Now I need to stop buying all the cool bedsheets I see at thrift stores. Ha. I'm not perfect, but at least this is a start!

The quilt is constructed around a 4.5" (unfinished) square representing each stitch in the original knitting chart. My napkins were approximately 16.5"-17.5" square so I decided to merge the original blocks into strips to minimize seaming. I planned everything out on graph paper beforehand, calculating the sizes of squares and rectangles I needed to cut and how many of each I needed from each fabric.

I then used that diagram to plan out the order of assembly (the red lines above), breaking the quilt down into manageable chunks with the final long seam occurring under the fox's eyes. Because of the restricted size of my starting materials I ended up with one seam more than might strictly be necessary, but it's centered so I don't mind so much. I'm the kind of person who will straighten pictures in stranger's houses and rearrange things of shelves to be symmetrical so believe me, if it wasn't centered it would have driven me crazy. The finished quilt is 44" square.

I am loving the rhythm of straight line quilting right now, particularly using right angled stitches of a set length to space my rows (in this case I had my stitch length set to 10st/inch). For some reason whipping the quilt around on my tiny machine just feels so satisfying! I quilted the face quite densely, every half inch, and the background more loosely at every inch with the stitching in these two areas occurring at right angles. I really like the way this gives the fox face a little more depth.

 

I think there may be more 8-bit animal quilts in my future (I already have one more planned out in full), but in the meantime I've been working on turning the rest of the cotton skirt the dark brown fabric came from into something completely stylistically different. Hopefully by the time I finish that quilt my yard will have started to show some signs of life. I swear spring has sprung back there but somehow I managed to miss all of this in these photographs!

Ikko Tanaka inspired quilt

A couple weeks ago I watched a few seconds of an NPR video about the living space of a Brooklyn composer. I only needed a few seconds to immediately lose interest in the musician and instead fixate on the poster he had behind his right shoulder. It was a bold, geometric print of a geisha that immediately read as a quilt to my eyes. A screen shot and quick reverse image search on Google lead me down a rabbit hole of Japanese graphic design, specifically to the work of Ikko Tanaka.

I immediately sketched out the design, did some very simple math (this is based on 12.5" square blocks) and pulled a stack of fabric from my shelves. A few cuts and about an hour sewing and I had made my cotton replica. 

I used lightweight, double-sided fusible interfacing for the circular elements, and appliqued them to the top with a zig-zag stitch before quilting. I also fixed that annoying unmatched seam over on the right - the only white fabric I had was a remnant of something with an annoying amount of  one dimensional stretch which buggered up some of the seaming.

I had a lot of fun quilting this, playing with the addition of concentric arches in complementary colors to offset the stark geometry. It took a fair amount of time, and an annoyingly large amount of ripping (damn you, bobbin tension!) but the top is now fully quilted and waiting to be bound. I decided to go with a petrol blue in a shade somewhere between the turquoise and navy, and of course had none. So despite my best efforts to use only what I had at hand, I ordered some solid blue Kona (and some white and red, because, um... free shipping?) which finally arrived last night. I was hoping to take this quilt with me for show and tell at the next NYC Metro Mod Quilt Guild meeting but I'm not sure I'm going to get time to make and attach the binding before Saturday. But never fear! There's a whole other quilt I started and finished over the past two weeks I can take instead!