Let's Craft Something!

This is what I was planning on posting last week when I had that terrible day-long migraine.

Do you remember my Freebie Friday that was about making your own porcelain dough?  Well, there was a reason that I shared that with you all; I had recently searched for it for an upcoming project/costume.  I'm still afraid to spoil the surprise because I think it's pretty original and awesome.  I'll hopefully be posting some of Zach's as we work on his.  I don't know if Heather and Mike are going to be sharing any of their photos.

So, consider this the beginning of my hints.  I decided to work on a headpiece that will hopefully make my character a little more recognizable as herself.  We're steampunking the original characters, and Zach was a little afraid she wouldn't be as recognizable in the garb, so I'm trying to take extra effort to incorporate things associated with her.  I know this sounds really cryptic, but I hate to just reveal it and ruin the surprise for those who don't know!  Bear with me, please.

First, I made the dough.  I didn't have enough for the complete recipe, so I halved it and so far I have plenty.  It took maybe half the ball to make this much.


I tried drawing a template for the starfish, but it always ended up looking wonky, so I scrapped it and tried using a star cookie cutter.  It looked even worse, so I free-handed one.  Amazingly enough, it worked!  And it looked pretty darn good, if you ask me.

I baked it for an hour in a 170 oven (which is as low as my oven goes) and left the door cracked.  I took so many precautions because I really didn't want this little guy to crack.

I let the oven cool for maybe another hour to where I wouldn't have to use a potholder -- mostly because I was afraid rapid temperature changes would crack him -- and sat him on top of the oven.  I let him sit there for about 2 more hours to make sure he was good and dry.


After raiding our paints, I found a buttery yellow acrylic paint and did a nice few coats with a paintbrush.  After that dried, I took a toothbrush with a chocolate paint to give nice, coarse strokes.


I let the brown dry and then used the toothbrush to flick yellow specks on him.  Unfortunately, in my attempts to make it even, I accidentally did more than I liked.  So, I let him dry again and painted a light layer of brown with my fingertips.  That allowed for some little streaks and covered the bright yellow compared to the chocolate color.

I liked how the layering of the specks under the brown gave him a more porous effect.  I wanted to press a sponge into him before baking, but it didn't quite work out.  He dried quicker than I thought and it ended up just mushing him, so I decided I'd try to achieve that with paint.

He's not quite done yet.  I still have another layer or two of dough to put and bake on there, but he's coming right along!  I feel like this was the hardest part of my pretty little headpiece and the rest should fall in place easier.

Sorry about the image quality... I just took the images that I uploaded to Instagram and posted them here.  I've had an unfortunate case of not-being-able-to-look-at-the-computer-screen-too-long due to my headaches.  I've also been unusually tired.  Maybe I need to get blood work to see if I need to up my Synthroid dosage...again.  Sigh.

Anyway, that's your clue for the week as to my costume!  I'm not going to say yes or no to any guesses, either!  Hopefully it will get to be glaringly obvious for those of you in the anime/video game fandoms.