Moni's blog

New Paintings up on Etsy - birds and babes

2012-12-11T20:41:00.000-08:00

https://www.etsy.com/listing/117896391/cheeky-little-boy-portrait-original

And more at http://www.etsy.com/shop/eddieandmoni

Name Painting on Formica Tile Samples

2012-10-18T15:26:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on gesso on cardboard on formica tile samples, with ribbon hanging loop sandwiched between. 8cm x 4.5cm.

Bucket Hat and Felted Jersey for Toddler

2012-10-16T20:42:00.002-07:00

Have felt like sewing lately and discovered this fantastic free hat pattern:
Oliver + S Reversible Bucket Hat pattern
It was really clear and easy to follow. I didn't have interfacing so I lined the brim with 2 pieces of calico. I used some orange cotton fabric from my stash for the inside and cute farm fabric from A Bolt of Cloth I had bought as an off-cut in Christchurch last Christmas. Decided it wouldn't be reversible so added a strap from an old singlet top to stop it from blowing away.
Then I got really keen and felted an old Esprit jersey. It was only 80% wool, 20% acrylic so it didn't felt all that much but I used the wrong side as the outside to make a little jersey. That pattern was one I made myself from a large long sleeved tee-shirt. Had never drafted a pattern before, or made a hat, so surprised how easy, quick and fun these projects were. Also made a pair of fingerless gloves using the bottom of the sleeves from the jersey.
Keen to make more bits and pieces, especially using old clothes. It's fun felting the old jerseys. Wool felt is one of my favourite fabrics. Thinking of making a little jacket/coat next. Not so confident drafting some of those details, will see how it goes...

BTW - felting is so much fun! It's amazing how much you really have to abuse the wool to get it to start to shrink and 'full'. I tried lots of things including boiling the jersey in an old pot, but in the end I discovered that alternating between really hot water and really cold water plunge baths, a whole heap of dishwash detergent, and a lot of scrubbing with a dish brush worked the best.

Brodie Bear Mini Airedale Painting

2012-08-27T21:58:00.004-07:00

It's actually the painting that's mini, not the Airedale. A teacup airedale would be pretty cute though!

Brodie has had that fluffy yellow duck since he was a pup, the big softy.

A gift, painted in acrylic, on canvas made from formica tile sample.

8.5 x 4.7 cm

1.75" x 3.25"

Little Airedale Helping with the Gardening - Painting

2012-08-03T21:12:00.004-07:00

Working from a photo, I used Atelier Interactive acrylics, alternating them with layers of varnish.

Who is Tulip the Monkey?

2012-06-10T23:07:00.000-07:00

Tulip the Monkey is the co-driver featured in the Roaring River Rally picture book I made a few years back. More here

Paintings for Children's Rooms

2012-06-10T22:59:00.001-07:00

This one came about from a staff-room doodle. Originally the small dino was a little boy. The chicken looks so innocent. Thankfully these dinosaurs are vegetarians.

A birthday card on the same theme

Another dino painting with the same characters. I painted all of these paintings while pregnant. Someone has suggested that the string is symbolic - umbilical cord? Apron strings?

A Michael Leunig poem I took a fancy to.

Joan of Arc - portrait

2012-06-04T15:00:00.001-07:00

A few weeks back I attended a workshop at the DPAG with the wonderful Katya Gunn. She was generous in sharing her experience, ideas and even her tools and materials. Katya gave us a quick tour of the portraits in the gallery for some inspiration and then we had a couple of hours to experiment and play with different fabrics, stitches and beading techniques.
I started this portrait having no idea where it would end up, cutting the fabric freehand to get shapes for a mystery clothed figure. This week, stitching away, I was wondering why she looked so sad and then it struck me who she was. I had read Mark Twain's story of Joan of Arc last year and find her story fascinating. Although there are no doubt all kinds of historical inaccuracies in my portrait, I decided that's who this young lady must be. She certainly looks like she has all the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Wet Felted Wheaties

2012-05-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

Had fun on a sunny day outside wet felting these little guys.

To get the wheaten colour, I had dyed some white corriedale wool fibre from Ashford Handicrafts, using food a mixture of tea and coffee, and a white vinegar mordant. I used some grey alpaca fibre for the ends of the ears, beads and buttons for the face. They're quite small, biggest one is only 7cm.

Quite cute, but serve no practical purpose whatsoever and I have no idea what to do with them now...

Why Make Things by Hand Any More?

2012-05-30T20:36:00.001-07:00

The Warehouse is a depressing place. I always leave it feeling poorer, if not in pocket, then in spirit. Wall to wall with bargains, I inevitably stumble upon shelves of decorative ornaments, designed to look handmade. Most likely they are, by teams of workers in a factory in China. My first reaction is sometimes positive, “oh that’s cute,” but when confronted by the price (very low) and the quantity (very high), I am reminded of something my Auntie once said to me. Upon receiving my gift, she said, “Imagine that, a whole factory somewhere, just to make these things.” At the time the comment stung, as I had put a lot of time and thought into finding just the right plastic trinket for her. She likes Manx cats. Here’s a Manx cat handpicked for her, the colours even matching those of her stumpy tailed feline. That was pre-Warehouse. Now I understand what she meant.

Why make something by hand, when you can buy whatever you need, and plenty you don’t, for very little money? It costs less to buy a jersey, ready-made and ready to try on, than it does to buy the wool to knit your own. Don’t we live in New Zealand? Don’t we have a few sheep running around? Visitors to this country are likely surprised to discover that we don’t simply reach out to a passing ewe and clip some merino from her back – "great, just the thing to top off that crochet project”. Unfortunately, quality wool is expensive and better left to those who know what they’re doing or those obsessed few who work only to keep themselves in yarn. My own efforts at creating a jersey using pure New Zealand wool leaves me out of pocket and cold, unless willing to endure the ridicule from loved ones, which wearing my creation would certainly attract. My knitting skills aside, it still hurts when seeing products that for me to make would cost more in materials alone, before applying hours of effort.

Visiting The Warehouse leaves me with another feeling – redundancy. What’s the point? Why put in the hours of effort needed to craft something by hand, when you can just buy one? In an age of mass manufacture and cheap imports, creating something by hand is unnecessary, and worse, quaint. A branded Disney toy is cool. A handmade by Grandpa toy is not. As much as their parents might try to persuade them otherwise, Grandpa’s toy won’t rate with the kids. It will never carry any amount of playground currency. It’s not ‘real’.

“What do you mean by real, Monica?” Words of my Auntie resonate once again. This time, I had made the terrible mistake of complimenting her meringue by saying that it tasted ‘like a real one’. These days, we might say that a piece of home baking ‘tastes like a bought one’ to avoid such an error, but to do so reinforces the misplaced respect we have for products in a packet, as if manufactured goods are the benchmark in quality, when in most instances they most certainly are not. I think that the current cupcake craze and popularity of home baking and cooking shows are signs that handcrafted food, at least, is once again something to be valued, even if, for many of us, watching the shows and leafing through glossy books is the closest we come to leading a home baked lifestyle. ‘Home baking’ is being packaged and sold to us in the form of television series, books and ‘convenient’ forms of ingredients. It can be a shock to discover that a friend who ‘loves to bake’ is lovingly pouring ready-mix into a cake tin and serving up the result, happy in the fact that home baking is superior to bought. We have lost our taste in more ways than one.

A sure fire way to feel worthless in your handmade efforts is to spend a few hours making painstakingly by hand a gift for a child. Not only is Grandpa’s toy not ‘real’, it comes with a measure of obligation. The well-trained child will make the right grateful sounds, while a parent stands over them making encouraging remarks, “Look, Darren, a wooden dog! How special!” A younger or less threatened child will stomp right over the dog to get to the Mini-Mechanic TM Power Tool with flashing lights and whirr whirr sound effects. Who can blame them? Marketing companies spend megabucks researching the best way to get the attention of a 6 year old. Unless Grandpa is an electrical engineer / moulded plastic / packaging specialist, he will find it hard to compete for that attention at gift giving time, using only his handi-skills. He can only hope that Woody will be retrieved from the discarded wrapping paper and put aside for a time much later, when he might trigger some fond memories of the man who made a little dog for a little ungrateful boy.

Maybe it was a less marketing-intensive time or maybe I was just a weird little kid, but I relished the gifts made for me by family members. Sheepskin snuggly critters from Grandma, a wooden rocking horse from Granddad, a possum fur mouse from an Auntie. That mouse was nothing less than magic. For me it was real. It definitely received more affection than merits a stone with fur and felt appendages, riding to school pulled along on a roller skate. I couldn’t understand why nobody else seemed to share my enthusiasm. Even now, recalling the idea of that mouse and the many creatures I collected along the way, stirs up the awe I held for their like - the handmade, the unique. That’s why I believe we are still driven to make things with our hands, to “manufacture” in the original meaning of the word. It’s the pleasure of holding in your hand something that, many hours before, was only a vague idea. The surprise that comes from not knowing how something will turn out, the ‘happy accidents’, the ‘I wonder what will happen ifs’. It’s losing yourself in the repetition of brush strokes and stitches, the calm that comes from applying your hands to fibres, clay or wood. Ultimately, it’s a return to childhood, when we had permission to play, to come up with crazy ideas and not care what others thought, to have the audacity to look at a masterpiece – or a mouse - and believe that we too could make something special with our own two hands.

Moni

P.S. I’m sure that these ideas have been better expressed by others. I haven’t looked. Otherwise, I might have written nothing, and simply linked, re-twittered or shared - too busy, lazy, scared, efficient or indifferent to put type to screen myself. Then I would have missed out on the selfish pleasure of creating, using only this computer and my bare hands, a piece of text of my own. Thanks for reading.

P.P.S. It has just been pointed out to me that a 'home baked lifestyle' might contain connotations I didn't intend.

Homemade Clay Keepsake – Tiny Fingers and Tiny Toes

2012-05-29T15:28:00.000-07:00

People often receive a kit for making plaster casts of their baby's hands and feet. The kits look so cute themselves that I suspect many of them remain unopened on the shelf. I wasn't given a kit (cue violins) so did some research into making my own imprints using some polymer clay I had sitting around.

When Thomas was 9 weeks old I grabbed a spare 20 minute slot in his feeding / changing / sleeping schedule to make these handprint and footprint moulds.

I took a basic salt dough recipe and threw in some wallpaper paste and sizing. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise but with my baby addled brain I was just happy to be creating something again (creating a baby WAS pretty special but you don’t get to play around with the mixture much).

I divided the mixture into 4 even sized patties.

Thomas then placed his tiny little hands and feet carefully and willingly into each patty, ha ha, until a clean and deep imprint was formed. Then I washed everything that came in contact with the mixture – hands, feet, eyebrows, nostrils etc (mine not Thomas’s).

Into the oven with the moulds to dry out at a really low temperature for a really long time. Then I left them in the sun for a couple of weeks until I was sure that they were really dry. The final consistency was almost crisp on the outside but oddly elastic too. I had been worried that they might crack if they dried too quickly which is why I took a long term approach to drying them.

When a 30 minute slot came available (afternoon nap cancellation) I got stuck into a packet of Sculpey and kneaded and kneaded and kneaded until it was soft enough to push into the moulds. I trimmed the excess Sculpey from the edges and removed the hands and feet from their moulds to place in the oven for curing.

Finally, months later, I painted around the outline of the hands and feet in white acrylic paint. One day, some time before Thomas leaves home, I would like to mount them and frame them and put them on the wall.

Voila!

P.S. – the salt dough moulds look quite good themselves. Not sure how well they will last, as they never seemed to completely cure and the wallpaper paste didn’t contain an anti-mold agent (definitely pro-mould though – pleased with how well they worked).

Stripes - Crochet Puppy with Jersey

2012-05-24T20:55:00.001-07:00

Adapted from a pattern in a Japanese Amigurumi Crochet book.
I haven't asked him but I'm pretty sure he's a Wheaten Terrier.

Crochet Pinto Patch Pony

2012-05-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

A gift I made a wee while ago. Made out of my head so I don't have a pattern unfortunately.
Made good use of those pink novelty yarns I had stashed away. Reminded me of my old 'My Little Pony' - she was white with sparkly moonbeams and stars on her rump, and had a red mane with a purple streak. How I miss you, Moonbeam.

Felt Kiwi

2012-05-24T20:54:00.002-07:00

For a baby so no wire, all wool. Really happy with the feet and the fact that he can stand by himself. Very independent this kiwi.

A wooden good 'un from way back

2012-05-24T20:54:00.001-07:00

This little guy is currently amusing our little guy. A blast from the past with worn paint, dislocated arms and a clacker which no longer clacks. Thomas loves the squeak the wheels now make.

It's all fun and games until...

2012-05-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

This is Flame the Crocheted Yet Cool Little Ocular Patch girl. She has stunning hair but I think she could do with further embellishment. Maybe a little red accent to complement her fiery do. Not sure why she's wearing the eye patch. Maybe something to do with her creator losing an eye (hers).

Painted Rock Girl

2012-05-24T20:53:00.001-07:00

This little redhead has been sitting on my shelf, hands in her pockets for a few years now. Waiting for a bus which never came? At least she still has her youth. Maybe a Painted Rock Boy will sweep her off her feet.

Upside Down Dog - my First Felted Airedale

2012-05-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

There's something really sweet about this fellow. It was Troy the Airedale's favourite pose when I made it more than a few years ago. Troy is no longer with us but this little tribute remains on my shelf. I sometimes think that your first efforts at making something can be the most 'honest'. Sometimes, of course, they can be your most 'disastrous', but those ones probably won't make an appearance here. Here's to you, Troy.

Brian the Baby Elephant

2012-05-24T17:06:00.002-07:00

From a pattern in a Japanese craft book. I felt like he needed something else, so added the hair and needle felted and appliqued a little heart to his chest with blanket stitch. Happy with the fabric choice (very fine corduroy) and the stitching. There's something very satisfying about blanket stitch. Would like to do more needle-felting again too. That might help bust the wool stash in the spare room, so we can finally transform it into baby Thomas' room. Would be good to have him in his own room before he goes to school :o) Especially before high school... Better get busy with those needles.

Sad Wheaten Terrier Painting

2012-04-29T17:49:00.001-07:00

A sympathetic puppy - who can stay blue for long with such a companion?
Available here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/92490385/original-painting-by-moni-blue-wheatie?ref=v1_other_2

Floating Schnauzer Note Cards

2012-04-29T17:45:00.001-07:00

Baby cards

2012-01-31T23:42:00.001-08:00

Hand drawn and painted, available at http://www.etsy.com/shop/eddieandmoni

Watercolour painting - summ, summ, summ

2012-01-31T23:13:00.000-08:00

Summ, summ, summ, Bienchen summ herum

Available now at http://www.etsy.com/shop/eddieandmoni

Gosling Fans

2012-01-31T23:08:00.000-08:00

Ryan Gosling fans

available at http://www.etsy.com/shop/eddieandmoni

Latest paintings

2012-01-31T22:35:00.000-08:00

Available now at http://www.etsy.com/shop/eddieandmoni

Happy / Sad Wheatie

This wall ain't big enough for the both of us.
Original paintings on upcycled formica sample tiles.

Fledgling - love the sky in this one, the photo doesn't do it justice

He wears his heart on his t-shirt

Have dog, will travel

Available now at - http://www.etsy.com/shop/eddieandmoni