Monthly Archives: January 2015

It’s Snowtime!

Snow Globe

I originally wanted to call this ‘The Son of a B!t*h is Done @ I F&%king Hate Crafts,’ but thankfully a more civilized mood has returned. This was a simple project to create a beautiful snow globe well before the holiday season and which, at mid-January, is now as finished as it will ever be. My plan was to create a snow globe with a snowflake inside. The snowflake was to have interior cut-outs through which the snow could pass to and fro. For this I purchased Sculpey, a product which has served me well through all my children’s insane projects. First, I tried to cut out the snowflake using an Exacto knife, however, the result looked as if I had used a machete on the thing— Sculpey can be surprisingly difficult to manipulate. Then I had brilliant idea: I would purchase small snowflake cookie cutters. Everything went well, except for some unforeseen physics problems. The first was a gross misunderstanding of the magnifying power of water resulting in Godzilla’s snowflake. There were other difficulties as well: ‘snow’ that gathered at the top— casting an ominous shadow on the overgrown snowflake, errant air bubbles, general kitchen destruction, I could go on. If it wasn’t for the possibility of the glass cutting me, I would have crushed the thing with my bare hands. Okay. Fine. I made a little pillow with the Sculpey— you can sort of see it in the photo— and planted a lilliputian glass ornament in the center. I sealed this up using glitter, as I had gone through the entire package of snow during the ‘testing’ phase, and skipped the glycerin because I suspected it played a role in the earlier gravity-defiant snow. Amazingly, I did not get a bubble this time— although one may yet still develop. Practically perfect in every way. Except that the glitter settles so quickly, I almost gave myself a seizure trying to photograph it. And so, wishing everyone a lovely, if belated, holiday. Cheers.

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