Season's Greetings!

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to all of you.

A short digression into mushroom culture

Mushroom season is on and it’s a blast walking through the woods looking at mushrooms. But if you are like me and you do not know enough about mushrooms, you might end up picking the wrong mushrooms. So I decided to culture some mushrooms at home. For science!

At Bolets de Soca I bought a culture kit of Pleurotus ostreatus. After two days I had the package at home.

After 2 days something started to grow and grow. That does not look like mushrooms at all!

A few days more of waiting and watering the mushrooms started to show.

Patience and watering… Look at them all grown up!

The first mushroom harvest of the year!

Penknife maintenance

A few days ago I found a small penknife that was scuffed, but still usable.

The metal parts were a bit rusty and the wood handle was scratched. So I took the knife apart and cleaned and oiled the metal parts, I sanded the handle parts and spray painted them black with a nice coat of clear finish. The result is a nice pocket knife with a 7cm blade, ideal for sharpening a pencil or cutting an apple.

Converting clip on suspenders to buttoned ones

As commented before I was invited to a party with a bit of dancing going on. The idea was to have a fancy dress party in the style of the 20s or 30s. One accessory for men are suspenders. Having only a few days left I couldn’t get the buttoned style, so I decided to convert a clip on one. Here is a pair of suspenders I bought at the dollar store for 3 Euro.

I went on to replace the clips. First I took the clips off and pried the metal ring out.

I cut out three pieces of scrap leather.

Put the leather piece through the ring and sew the ends together right side facing in.

Turn the leather around and sew the ring in place.

From an old belt I cut out three long strips with round heads. For the buttons I made cuts in the heads and punched a hole on the end of the cuts to prevent them from ripping.

I folded the pieces lengthwise and sew them.

Here is the comparison between before and after.

And this is what they look like when worn:

I heard bow ties are cool now…

The day I will become an artist

Hello there! Long time no see. I went on a vacation (Bruges, like a […] fairy tale) and didn’t come around to update the blog. Additionally I entered the Sketchbook Project 2013. My sketchbook arrived shortly after the vacation on my doorstep,

Now it is up to me to fill a 5x7’’ notebook with drawings. Oh boy, now I have a deadline! The Sketchbook will go on exhibition in 2013 in several galleries in the USA. If I succeed I am going to be a published artist. Oh boy!
When I am done I will publish my drawings on this blog.

More notebooks and a watercolor sketchbook

I started to do a small run of notebooks following my process developed over the last weeks. These are the first 3 notebooks. A6 sized with fabric covered cover.

As an addition I made a 5x7 inch sketchbook with watercolor paper. Hopefully I can do some sketches on vacation in this one…

Gone window shopping

Recently I got the warning that in the near future I would not only attend a party and have a try at swing dancing, but also it would be a dress-up party in the style of the 20s and 30s. So I had to look up what a good style would be for this occasion. Going window shopping at Amazon resulted in the following possible outfit:

There is still hope that I have a little bit of style in me...

From the sketchbook: A random portrait

Going on with the sketching I want to show you today another page of my sketchbook.

From the sketchbook: Body parts

Following up on last weeks post on the sketching progress, I show you a few sketches on anatomy of different body parts.

Sew a guys wallet

Because my wallet is too bulky I decided today to sew a new billfold. I used the fantastic tutorial on Noodlehead as a guide. It turned out rather well…

Phone Pouch

Today I threw together a phone pouch using some scrap fabric, a button and some string.

From the sketchbook: Figures

As I already noted, I took up sketching following loosely the book “Figure sketching: For what it’s worth” written by Andrew Loomis. While in the process I wanted to put up some pages from my sketchbook to show the progress,