Grimmie the Wandering Wesen

I've been busy making this cute little guy for the Facebook Grimmsters group.  We're going to pass him around and take pictures of him around the world. Jaime came up with the idea, Donna made the sweater, and I got to make Grimmie.  It's been a fun project.



This little thrift store piggie sacrificed his bean bag innards to the cause. (Let us have a moment of silence....)



I got some brown suede at Jo-Ann.  Then I dug out my old stuffed animal patterns and found a head to use. This was part of a dog pattern (sort of a Husky type), which I scanned and reduced. (Convenient, that!)



I thought at first that this head was a bit too pig-snouty, so I spent a while trying to come up with something different, but it just wasn't working, so I decided to just go with it.



He looked much better after I got the rest of his face on. (I stuck his head into the sweater to get a picture!)  The hair gave me fits but I like how it turned out. 



Grimmie's pieces coming together. I made his legs out of some jeans that I had decided to turn into cut-offs. (I always wear a hole in the right knee--why is that?)



I did as much as I could on the sewing machine, but toward the end had to do a lot of hand stitching. (We had a productive General Conference weekend--I was finishing up Grimmie and Doug started a new leather project.) I realized that there was no way I could fit the head and the arms and the legs inside the body (for sewing up inside-out)--there just wasn't room.  So I assembled his top and bottom halves separately and  then stitched him together.



Grimmie all finished! You can see the stitches around his middle. He's got polyfill stuffing in his face, arms, and legs, and the bean bag fills up his body and the back of his head.  It was just the right size!



Kate was happy to help me take some pictures of Grimmie outside. Isn't he cute in his sweater?




Kate loves Grimmie.  She knows he's not staying--she will be sad to see him go, but I think she will enjoy following his travels. ( I can make her a Grimmie-friend later.  After I've recovered from this one!)



I took Grimmie down to Point Defiance and got some cute pics... here he is enjoying the duck pond. 



Ah, spring!

Grimmie the Wandering Wesen begins his travels! ("Wesen" is pronounced with a "v" sound--it's German--so it's more of a visual alliteration than an actual one.) Grimmie will be visiting the United Arab Emirates next, and then some friends in Europe. Eventually he'll be going to the Grimm set in Portland. (Norberto Barba's wife Gina offered to take him in for us--assuming they get a third season, which hasn't been officially announced yet, but we are optimistic!) It's great fun to have a group project like this. 



And here are Kate and Grimmie playing together. She cracks me up.

Gallery Glass Grimm

I've been head-down in a new project, making Grimm-inspired ornaments with Gallery Glass paints.  I wanted to do something for Jamie and Lindsey of  The Grimm Podcast, and once I came up with the idea I had to make a  few more for some friends in our Grimmsters group on Facebook.  And of course I took lots of pictures while I was at it!



The design comes from the stained glass window in Monroe's door (photo from the maker's site).  I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to freehand the wolf, so I was tossing around other ideas and came up with this solution:



I printed out the wolf in the size I needed and traced it with the liquid leading ("contains no lead!"). I used the back side of my cutting glass, which worked really well. (I did have some parallax issues, because of the thickness of the glass, but it didn't take long to get used to.)




It occurred to me that I could let the lines extend beyond the design, and then trim them afterwards. 



After letting them dry overnight, I cleaned up the edges with my microtip scissors.  (Craft knife doesn't work for this part--I tried.  The stuff is just too rubbery.)



Adding the paint. It comes in squeeze bottles, and you just squeeze it where you want it and then push it into the edges with a little pointy stick. 



After it dries overnight, you can peel it up (carefully) and apply it to the ornament.  This works really well--you can also make window clings!  Oooh! 

(Kate held the ornament for me to get a picture.  She was a bit wobbly.)



I planned to put a line around the top and bottom of the ornaments, but it was immediately obvious that I wouldn't be able to freehand them.



So I made some straight lines with the leading and let them dry overnight.  (Yep, that's another "overnight"--this was quite a long process!)



Applying the lines to the ornament is kind of a pain.  After doing a few I got the trick of it--hold the whole thing up at eye-level, hold the leading out to the side, and keep it straight while you turn the ornament. Still a pain. 



My second bottle of leading was pretty runny, and the lines spread.  I was able to peel it up and trim it with the scissors, but I wouldn't recommend this because it was really hard to get everything back in the right place.



Painting!  I had to do it in sections and let it dry before turning it, so this part took three or four days. 



The first completed ornament.  Total elapsed time:  nine days.  Once I got all the steps figured out the others went a little faster!



Working on the kitchen table.  (I went through a lot of paper towels.)



Ornaments in various stages of completion, drying on the top shelf of my computer desk. 



I got pretty good at freehanding the leading (especially the right side), but had trouble getting a consistent line out of the bottle.  It's rather awkward to work with. 



I thought the original design was a little too detailed for me to replicate at this scale, so I had to do some adapting.  After making several like this, I realized that I still wasn't completely happy with the left side...



...so I came up with this design that's closer to the original.  



Painting is fun.  I got some cool effects by swirling colors together.   For the sky I mixed Blue Diamond and Crystal Clear, and swirled in a little Snow White and Sapphire.



It looks very cool when it's dry!



Finishing up the final three.



This is my favorite part. The paint flattens out as it dries, but when it's wet it looks like round, shiny polished stone.  Pretty!  I love the Light Green.  It's opaque, which makes a nice contrast, and you can do some fun things mixing it with the transparent colors.  (I discovered that it's been discontinued, but I was able to get two bottles on Amazon.  Yay!)

About ten years ago I got to go to the HIA trade show, and I remember checking out the Gallery Glass booth.  When I was at Michael's  I recognized it and thought, "Oh yeah, that'll work!"  It was a lot of fun.  I do think the liquid leading could use some improvement (for ease of application or consistency of... well... consistency) but it's pretty cool stuff. 

Things I learned:

• It's hard to tell what a color (or mixture) will look like when it's dry.  I had to play around with this a bit.


• Even after drying overnight, the painted areas are very susceptible to nicks and fingerprints.  I had to make sure to only hold the ornaments by the top and bottom when working on them.


• It's easier to lift out air bubbles than to try to pop them. 


• These ornaments are dust magnets.  And the leading lines are lint-snaggers.  I eventually hit on wiping them off with my lens-cleaning cloth.  This works well. 


• It's hard to get a good picture on the tree.  I can't even tell you how many I went through!

So that's my Gallery Glass experiment.  It's been fun!  Maybe next I'll make some Pikmin window clings with Kate. 

In which Helena engages in some fangirl flailing

I had something happen this week that turned out to be pretty exciting.  Iain MacKinnon (of Isle of Lewis, Scotland) wrote this fabulous "Rainbow Connection" parody for The Grimm Podcast.  As soon as I heard the song I thought, "This needs to be a video!"  I could just see the whole thing in my head, listening to it.  Now sometimes I get ideas that may take me months (or years) to implement, but every once in a while I get struck with something that I just have to do RIGHT NOW.  This was definitely one of those cases.  I started working on the video that night, in a frenzy of concentration, and had it all finished and uploaded by early afternoon the next day.

Response has been great and just so fun. We got a re-tweet from actor David Giuntoli (which gave me a bit of a deer-in-the-headlights moment), and he also made a nice comment on Iain's absolutely perfect Kermit voice).  And we got a mention from Akela Cooper (one of the writers on the show), who said "We all got a big kick out of this this in the writers room today."  The video got 1,000 views in less than two days.  I kept coming back and refreshing and squeaking in amazement. 

Of course the video is entirely peripheral to Iain's awesome song,  but it's just been fun to be involved with something like this that made a bit of a splash for a couple of days.  I was riding on an adrenaline high for a while there. 

When I finished the video I was in a hurry to share it, and after I got it uploaded I realized there's a stray frame that I missed.   Of course now it drives me nuts every time I watch it  (my Engineer Dad genes keep poking at me).  I must keep this in mind the next time I get over-excited about something.



I have to share these LEGO minifigs that I put together recently.  (Yep, I'm obsessed.)  Kate has been playing with them.  We had to explain--"This is Nick and Monroe.  Nick is a police detective, and Monroe is... ummm.... He's a clock maker."  (She's a little young to watch the show for a few years yet, I think!)

I also finished my review of Season One on Amazon.  50 more days till Season Two,  Oh, the torment.

Uncle Brian on Grimm (and my fan art!)

Doug's brother Brian, who lives in Portland, got to be an extra on Grimm about two months ago. The episode ("Cat and Mouse") aired this last week.  Doug has been watching with me--it's like our Friday-night date after Kate goes to bed. 



We knew which scene he was in but couldn't pick him out at all. Fortunately Brian was able to identify himself. You can see his teeny-tiny head in the background for about half a second.



He said he could tell that the white sign would block him, so he scooted back a couple of feet. But then he's blocked by David Giuntoli's leg for most of the shot anyway. Still, it's kind of fun to be able to say, "Hey, that blurry little head there is Brian! Cool!"

 The scene was shot at Union Station at 1:00 AM (probably not many trains coming through at that time of night).  Brian had to get up at 6:00 the next morning, so the timing was not great for him, but he said it was fun getting paid to sit around waiting and eating snacks.



After seeing some other people's creations I tried my own hand at some Grimm fan art a few weeks ago--Silas Weir Mitchell as Monroe (everyone's favorite Big Bad Wolf) in charcoal.  I don't think I've done anything with charcoal since high school art classes, but this seemed like a good one to try it out with.  The actual drawing itself went a lot faster than my pencil drawings do, but then I spent another two days futzing around with it.  I will have to try some more charcoal later, once I decide how durable it is.  (I haven't tried spraying it with fixative yet... I'm just nervous about that!  I need to do a small test drawing or something.)
 

I had the drawing taped to my board and propped up on a kitchen chair for a while, so I could see it every time I walked by.  I decided this one actually looks better from an angle. I don't think I've ever had that happen before.

(Used a screen shot from "Game Ogre."  I also found this animated gif from the same scene.)

I am really enjoying this show. On one level it's about a police detective who can see creatures that no one else sees. On another level it's about a guy who finds himself revealed as the ancestral boogeyman of a certain portion of the population, and how he deals with it and how they deal with it. I just get a kick out of the twist on the whole monster-hunter thing and how they handle the concept of other, from both sides. And I adore the characters and their interaction.

(I can tell that my imagination loves this show, since the way my brain has been playing with it is completely different from what it usually does with shows that I like. Which makes Grimm unique in my experience.)

I have fallen down this rabbit hole

... and I don't expect to be coming out for a while.

The show does have its flaws (there are certain aspects of the premise that I'm afraid the creators haven't really thought through completely) but I am totally loving it anyway. It's like popcorn.

(And I have a new appreciation for Doug's gray shawl-collar cardigan.)