Partial Unveiling Fish Chandelier

Well, it's missing a bulb and I still need to string 4 1/2 fish strands, but it looks good. Because it has 6 bulbs, it is not casting fish shadows, alas. 

It's custom and bespoke and delicate. No two fish are the same, and there are non-fish surprises such as a wave bead that ties the color scheme together and a glass bubble. There is a massive deep green fish. They all sparkle with Aurora Borealis (it's a bead thing). I wanted to make a blue whale gathering up the fish into a readily edible mass like I witnessed in Juneau, but never did. I don't have the right colors any longer and I like it without predators. 

I put the longer strands in the middle, the medium ones in between and the shorter ones along the outside for a graduated appearance that mimics the bulb stems. I want to learn how to make a circle with beads to create one octopus, but so far all I managed is one transparent star fish. This is the perfect task to beat the heat and humidity. A bit more fish making and I'll need another project. Alas, all of our ceilings are covered and I need to move onto another medium but light fixtures are my favorite. Oh, and after I finish with the fish, I need to strand my plastic flowers because this chandelier is CONVERTIBLE! The flowers should cover the space better than the fish because they are larger. 

Rhode Island

Hey, fun-loving New Englanders. Here's a ride that you
alone power. None of that new-fangled electricity here, nosiree.
Work up a sweat to try to get this giant metal cage
ALL THE WAY AROUND! Maybe even induce
a heart attack, if you're lucky.

Candy colored Lincoln Park. I have no photos, but the pictures live strong in my mind of the glorious tack that was a 1970s family style New England amusement park. Mom would pack a lunch that I would dance through with anticipation in the parking lot. I was tall enough that my father took me on the Comet coaster and it's not an experience I'll soon forget: if not for my father's karate chop to my waist on that first hill, I was falling forward onto the tracks. Clack, clack, clack! Good times. My sister would invariably get sick on fried clams. Many rides I wouldn't consider tackling because I was certain my parents wouldn't go for it, but those cages that could, in theory, swing 360 degrees sure looked dangerous. I always felt bad for the people in the Monster ride ("Monster Ride") who would emerge on the second floor. The humans pinned against the circle ("The Round Up") had nope written all over it.

CHiPs for the tykes

Basically the same ride, but
not motorcycles, storks

Who could focus on sandwiches

when all this awaited?

I couldn't understand my mother's
aversion to this. I think I know
now. Back problems, anyone?

But what I did ride I'll always remember. Storks, motorcycles, boats, cars with horns and steering wheels that did nothing, some sort of garish barrel, rocket ships, cars, and the flimsiest ferris wheel this side of a carnie. I got into one of those bucket seated multi-armed deals ("The Scrambler") with my little sisters and misjudged the centipedal force to crush my baby sis. No one cared about safety or intestinal health back then. No padding on "The Whip". Very few seatbelts - just a bar to grip. No one seemed to have planned anything besides my mother's lunch: we'd see families strapped with massive plushies that would take the entire backseat on the ride home. Ugly, cheap, HUGE eyesores that they already regretted winning for $100 in today's equivalent. 

 

Burlap in use

I know this reveals my age, but times were different. By today's standard, I'm amazed that Lincoln Park didn't have a class action lawsuit daily. Nothing preventing the kiddos from bailing out of the boat ride into the brown water. Most rides just encouraged you to hold on as their risk-avoidance mechanism. We "rode" the big slide by climbing stairs and, get this, using half of a burlap bag as protection from the searing heat and friction burns. It is a wonder as many of us survived to adulthood, truth be told. Far scarier than "The Monster" ride, was a total lack of safety. But, it was fun.

You couldn't say you weren't
warned

Clinging to life

That "safety belt" I'm
quite sure does NOTHING

This is incredibly girly, but many of those arcade games had dolls made out of nylon stockings and outfitted like Mae West in a riot of pastels and pouf. I'd dream of these visions of femininity all night as I could still feel my body sliding down "the big slide". 

Yes, this is what a 9-year old girl dreams of in 1977.
She was the epitome of femininity in my eyes.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. I have lost touch with that young, wild girl who was brimming with excitement. The world seemed so magical. It was magical.

clams!

Clams, 

clams,

You certainly had options to eat
a few clams

Cigs were encouraged. Leisure
suit optional.

My father drove me out of Rhode Island in an Oldmobile Cutlass Supreme in 1979. I just drove my own self out of Rhode Island and I couldn't believe I'd do the same horrible thing to myself. It is magic. Every corner has the cutest pre-Revolutionary homes with their diamond lead glass windows. I found the homes in Providence I remember thinking even back then, special. I visited Federal Hill finally and felt the presence of Guy Alba cutting hair until close to 100 years old. I grew up in a magical place and it's still breath-taking. Rhode Island gives you a sense of discovery. Maybe it's because I didn't actually have an itinerary and my co-pilot was Tootie Pie, but I am counting the days until Rhode Island is mine again.

Full, Fuller, Fuller

 

The fish population growth

I feel confident I will get the chandelier up. I vacillate between this optimism, unfounded, and the pits of depression about it. On the plus side, I have 26 of the 42 strands, or 104 of the 168 fish, completed now and thankfully it's starting to look like a collection of fish and not a sad middle school dance with infusible clumps of friends. I am hoping we may get fish shadows once installed. So, a mere 16 strands to go, or just 64 more fish to create! Piece of cake.

As for my mood, I may have inadvertently gone off my meds again. It is too easy in this day and age to fall off the depression radar and not get your pills. Far too simple. And, the best part is, you may or may not be aware of this fact, because of plans not covering certain prescriptions or quantities or other arcane reasons to prevent me from my meds, and using substitute, off-brand names that you're not at all familiar with. Am I taking an old prescription, and my current one is not covered? Well, that's for my depressed ass to get on top of for the umpteenth time. Chasing down meds is a full-time job.

Speaking of full-time jobs, I need one. Another indignity besides the medical system is the job search. Impersonal, sure, it's business, but there should be the beginnings of a relationship and it isn't there any more. We're in a race to the bottom and it scares me. 

Happy fish! Just keep swimming.

Half Complete Fish Shoal and Dining Room Disaster

My fish shoal is 1/3 complete. I made 16 strands of four, out of a total of 42. This creates low fullness on the 6 inch diameter ring I am staging the fish strands on. I am doing this diligently to avoid hanging the chandelier. I have cleaned it. I have the bulbs. I need to ask for help, and I have no problem asking. The problem is no one wants to lend a hand. 

Sixteen strands of 4 fish. Looks sparse
and still tangles.

It's okay. I have been known to weed my friends' driveways and sweep up confetti and other thankless jobs because later, my friends would hold the ladder as I get another plastic bag out of my tree or loosen that screw I can't budge. Whatever. I'll do it alone. It is cemented to the ceiling. Fine. I am trying to remove it and I want to cry, and this will make it that much more glorious when I finally achieve it, I must say so to myself to keep from doing myself in. 

It still tangles. The fish are disappointingly tiny. They hardly sparkle. Many fish are non-symmetrical and will always seem to be swimming in circles. I am not in a great mood.

The old fixture is down - cue religious music. It required the use of a spatula. The new chandelier is HEAVY and I need help putting it up. There it is. That is why it stayed on my floor and became covered in dust. The dream of a new chandelier. I have not been getting what I want lately. I think it's part of the aging process. People flock to you when you're young and beautiful. Become a bit janky around the edges and suddenly, you lose all appeal. It is men and their frustrating lack of ability to see women as people. They did it then and they're doing it now. What can I do but persevere?

I am past the halfway point: 25 strands out of 42 total. They're so small. I liked the overlap that the inspiration fixture had and the basis in art also had. Here they are for reference:

In comparison, my fish are sparse and overfished to the point of colony collapse. I still have the flowers to fall back on. Oh, maybe the layering of the fixture will give the illusion of fullness. I am noticing how narrow the inspiration fixture is compared to mine and the fish in the inspo are about a third of the width. My fish are minnows and not worth catching!

Fish Work - Going For It

A good view of my lighting design. 
There should be 48 fish here, but 
the bubble takes spot #48

I will have a convertible chandelier. It will feature plastic flowers some days and beaded fish others. I am putting off more urgent matters and it doesn't matter. I am making my own world and I only have myself to consult with. 

What a nightmare! Making the fish is easy and fun. Hanging these MFs is a whole 'nother thing. Keeping them from becoming a tangled disaster is proving almost impossible. So here is why we seldom see such things as dangling chandeliers. I've made some 50 of them and strung them onto jump rings and dangled them and they're all in a rat's nest right now. Frustrating.

I know that I write this to no one. No one listens anymore. I pay my therapist to listen and I can see the reflection off her glasses as she surfs the web during our sessions. Tootie Pie, forget it. People's attention spans can shrink all they want, as long as they can greet me in the store and make eye contact at the register. I guess that is too much to ask.

All this talk and no where to direct it. Back to the fish!

I found a cord by Kreinik which is metallic, meaning it holds its shape better than string, but isn't as easily caught like the wire. Fiddling with the fishing line was way tedious. The cord is the solution and it's iridescent! So it's back to making the fish, which is soothing and I'm becoming an expert. The key is to keep the loops from forming kinks, so keep your wire in a U-loop and not a loop-dee-loop. The cord is #12 in Crystalline. I am looking for my blue ball beads to look like bubbles. I think it will be adorable if I ever put up the new fixture and finish the other 200 fish to hang.

Still stringing the next group of 4 
strings of 4 fish, so only 32 pictured
here. I need to not add the strands
as I go because BALANCE

Obviously the fuller version looks better, but the fishes' tails are catching even this sparsely populated. It kind of makes you appreciate how they either don't collide IRL or they are so slimy they simply slide off each other. 

Chandelier/Mobile Creative Direction

Fishy

I suppose I could have a convertible chandelier: that's the beauty of the hook idea! It's about time I put up the kitchen chandelier and I can develop the mobile portion later. I may have found two great creative directions. I don't want to make hundreds of tiny beaded fish only to discover that it doesn't quite look right. So a quick mock-up was in order and I think it may work. The chandelier is just over 20 inches in diameter, and the fishy is 1 inch. There are 6, 14 and 22 concentric sets of rings, or 42 strands. If each ring has 4 fish, that would be 168 fish, and if it has 6 fish, that would be 252 fish. That is doable.

Fishy x252 (but here only 52 of them)

Here is a mock-up of just the outer most row half completed. It already looks like it will appear full. We don't want a constant reminder of overfishing over our kitchen table! This project is on tap for tomorrow. I am putting off the switch because I'm not 100% sure that the electrical box will hold this heavy fixture. But, I know that the six arms will put out much more light than the current 120V inside a plastic coated fabric shade. 

So I must talk myself off the edge, but beads are so sparkly! And by now I've made 6 whole fish. They're mostly blue. I could justify this by saying that I am using up the beads that I have on hand, but ain't no way I have 252 fish worth of beads, who am I kidding? And I have bubble beads, but maybe only 5 or 6. Fun!

Ran out of black flower sequins so 
resorted to some sort of flanged deal
for one fish.

I kind of like the look of the ridged white crystal on the one and only green fish. To supplement my used up supply of eye sequins, I have a bunch of clear ones on order. And I have one more tube of light blue beads before I can justify purchasing more, but that day will come! I heard there are two separate hobbies: beading and collecting beads. They both sound doable!

And becoming a small
school

Now 14 fish start to
cluster

As I work on the fish and work through my bead stash, I am working out how they will be attached. I will most likely attach a jump ring and hang from clear fishing line. Only the hook will be in their backs, not their plump lips. Did you notice their luscious lips?

 

Bonus Marimekko Free-Form Rugs

A view of rectangular mate reflected in mirror

Beauties. I thought that hemming the contours of these rugs would be disastrous and I was pleasantly surprised. Because I tried to hem the rectangular base rug with yarn instead of thread, most of my problems with this simple job could have been avoided. Having switched to quilting thread makes things so much easier. Like with the rectangle, I couldn't manage to figure out the whip stitch so I just straight stitched both. That was another part of the problem with the larger rug.

So now the question is, do I do one more, in kelly? I think it's time to give the kitchen some love with the new chandelier and cushions (finally for the banquet).  

A rather unfortunate
worn spot on oak floors

Arial view reflected

Let's Get SideTracked with Paper Flowers

It's probably a rose based on the foliage

As if still maintaining a blog isn't throwback enough, I currently work above, get this, a Barnes and Noble store. This hanger-on always has paper flowers for sale and, well, my bedroom has two vases, one of which has a fallen-off bit of my pampas grass stuffed in it and nothing in the other. Also, it appears that Winblaad's Tusind og en nat bride is holding, let's call it a peony. So, combine these two things plus a visit to the library for a book called Paper Flower Art and I am distracted again. The bonus of this new tangent is I need not buy one thing. I used:

• 

  My paper peonies and
  the amazing effects
  alcohol inks can give. It is 
  giving off rose vibes without
  manipulation!

  craft paper
• 93% isopropol alcohol
  
• food coloring
  
• alcohol ink - Ranger alcohol pearl alchemy and was in Clearance at Michael's
• crepe paper
• iridescent pigment powder - Jacquard micro-pearlescent
• craft paint - Americana Hauser Medium Green
• hot glue, hot glue, hot glue

All of this I had on hand. The 93% alcohol was bought previously to use the iridescent pigment powder to try to make my plastic flowers iridescent. I have been on an iridescence kick for a bit. After trying to brush it, spray it, and just dump it onto the plastic, I realized that the one alcohol ink I did buy to see if the problem was my formulation (it wasn't) did not color the plastic bottle it was packaged in and therefore, my experiment was never going to work. Why does it say on the bottle that it works on non-porous materials? 

Now, the book tells me to buy 180g crepe paper from Italy, but I have left over crepe paper streamers from Tootie Pie's piñatas, and so I just used that. It doesn't stretch or cup like the Italian stuff, sure, but it looks 100 times better than the ones sold in Barnes and Noble which are just cut from tissue paper. Oh, and you get to push the crepe paper roll into the alcohol solution which makes each roll unique. And your hands red. I even used gel food coloring, which didn't mix well into the alcohol and so it looked like the roll had deep red pustules, but with time, the pustules spread out across the paper creating a lovely pink. I doused this same roll with the yellow-gold alcohol ink that I actually purchased and my homemade iridescent concoction. After drying, I wrapped the crepe paper around my hand 10 times or so, and then cut out peony petals. I also read that you need a styrofoam ball to make the bud, but I just wadded up some of the leftover crepe paper from my cutting.

I used card stock for my stems and leaves and lots of hot glue to attach them and the petals. Each peony was created using different crepe papers. One red one took a bleach bath, and the white got the above-mentioned pustule treatment. I did the red for the bath on all, but the gel one got a second dosing with what was supposed to be orange, but just became pinker and yellow - no real blending of gel colors there. I have one more roll and bought more food coloring to try again. Here they are: 

I sprinkled some petals around the 
vase to make it look legit

This seems like a good way to make money! The worse looking ones sold at B&N are $8 a stem. I created four stems, including a bud. I actually like mine better than the cupped ones in Paper Flower Art, despite mine not having pistels and stamen. The author, Jesse Chui, used double sided crepe paper and for her stems, tubing. Her pistels were created from floral tape - I'll leave this for the clients to ask for. 

I have now a bowl full of petals, but this will only create 2 stems most likely. My version's stems are awful and I bought clear tubing for my refrigerator from an aquarium store years ago, so maybe! This is currently pure profit but if I end up purchasing supplies for Tootie Pie's room, who knows? If I sold my bouquet above at $5 a stem that's a nice $20, but I do believe I spent an inordinate amount of time drying my crepe paper and all sorts of other inefficiencies and it took the better part of a day. A fun day, but $20 a day, man, that won't get you far.

Latch Hook Bonus Rugs and Another Chandelier Pre-Contemplation

Hemming the rectangular Marimekko was too straightforward - let's add curves. I would have liked to have created a larger rug than the 3x5 feet that I ended up working on FOR-EVER, but these mini flower rugs are so adorable and quick to turn out.

Sweet little flower rugs

Also, this is the end, again, of my yarn. Look how tantalizingly close I came to finishing off all of the Sulfur/Chartreuse! I now want to create a freeform flower rug for Tootie Pie's room. I wanted to do a pink tiger skin rug, surrounded by flowers, but now think just a flower. But, my next project will be the lighting fixture installed in the dining area. Here are some of my ideas for the dangly parts for the hooks:

Is it just me, or is no one else noticing anything other than the floaty gathering of objects in the air? We have two arrangements that are orderly above, and two look freeform and natural. Because my floaty gathering is not uniform, lucky me gets the natural arrangement, which will admittedly be easier; I picture one person on top lowering or raising one object until it's perfect, and then what? Knots always make the string ever so smaller and the joy of the arrangements is their perfect hanging. Not for me. I love the neon green behind the boringly dressed mannequins. I have been collecting hand cut plastic flowers for ages and I wanted the string to contain the color, but the magic of these mobiles is that they seem to float, so clear thread it is.

Of course, the two I like best are the naturally hung ones. The one I like best is the first one with the knit blobs, which would be the hardest to create and may look too heavy for the space. I am debating nixing the hanging blooms, but this change in direction means I have cut out the clear plastic flowers for nothing. I also smoothed their edges and pierced them using the hot knife technique meaning I inhaled toxic vapors for nothing, too.

Here are my flowers:

And now that I've made an army of flowers, I want to switch to beaded fish and possibly a blue whale made of beads in an amalgamation of these:

Those tiny 3D fish! I'd need to make around 4,000 of them, but they seem really quick. I feel like fish should be translucent, and flowers not so much, but we're not going for realism. I feel like part of what makes the fish school chandy so cool is the size of the fish to the tiny diameter of the light. My chandelier is wider and so either the effect would disappear because the fish are too small, or I'd need to increase the size of the fish, but they're so adorable like minnows. She gave one fish a trout pout!

It will be flowers in the short term and we'll think about the fish. Do I really need another medium? I just added yarn, I cannot add beads!

LIC artist Eduardo Anievas Blue Fish. I need
iridescence, big googly eyes, and lots of these plump
little jewels