Anon(ymous)

In March, my kiddo's school asked me to take care of the props and costumes for the school play. The play was Anon(ymous) by Naomi Iizuka. I had SO MUCH fun! And the kids were awesome.

Below: meat grinder, in progress. (I don't have a pic of the completed version, but it was quite gory.)

This was the "sausage" that had to be eaten onstage. (It's actually watermelon with brown food coloring. Pretty realistic, no?)

In another scene there's a character who eats super hot chilies. I made these out of white chocolate with red food coloring and a candy mold.

Several scenes take place in a sweatshop. This was a challenge: where would we get six or eight sewing machines? In the end I decided I had to make them. I took my inspiration from this tutorial here. I think they came out pretty well.

This is what they looked like onstage.

The "thread cones" I made to go with the machines. I spray painted disposable plastic cups primer grey, then used spray adhesive and wrapped on the twine. After I took this pic, I made "thread guides" by cutting wire coat hangers and sticking them through the top of the cups. They had a tendency to droop over, so I cut rounds of cardboard to fit in the base of each cup and stabilize the "thread guide".

Multi-Year Project

Two years ago I started working on this table. I can only work on it summers when we head to the house in CA. I don’t think I have any “before” pictures... My grandmother made the original version. She used resin to glue tumbled glass to the plexiglass panels. Over time (a lot of time), the resin became yellow and brittle, and a lot of the glass had fallen off. The table needed an upgrade, but how? Mom and I spent years (literal years) figuring out how to proceed, and decided to start with new plexiglass. The pieces were custom cut for us. Then I worked on scraping the glass off the old panels and ended up with a lot of bandaids on my fingers. Using silicone (clear, for bathroom, tub, and tile) I started gluing down the glass I'd been able to scrape off the old table.

That first year, I only finished one middle and one end piece of the table before I ran out of material. I needed a LOT more glass. But I didn't have a glass tumbler, and I had no luck turning one up from friends and neighbors. So that year went by, and my mother was in a bad car accident in April, so I didn't work on the table at all that next summer.

But after we got home we finally managed to borrow a rock tumbler, and then -- miraculously! -- I managed to acquire a second one. I ran the rock tumblers day and night for months and made a whole shoe box full of "sea" glass. Which still wasn't nearly enough.

But, wait! Where do we get our glass?

Dark blue is Skyy vodka, a certain brand of (terrible) prosecco, a vase I found at the thrift store for $3, and a bottle of mineral water.
Green comes from beer bottles (Clausthaler near-beer) and certain red wine bottles (not the brownish green, the lighter green), and an olive oil bottle. Light blue is Bombay Sapphire gin.
Clear, well, clear glass bottles are found anywhere and everywhere -- white wine, "pink" wine (rose), vodka, gin, sparkling water...

You may be wondering how I'm doing. My liver is just fine, thank you. Yes, we're drinkers, but we've had a lot of help from family and friends. And I can be pretty persuasive about getting people to save bottles for me.

Above: These are the sections I finished the first year.

Above: My process takes over a big section of the table.

My glass

In process -- It's flipped upside down so I can work on it. I use a dry erase marker to sketch out my design on the top before I flip it over and start sticking glass to the bottom.

This is how I left it after this summer. Only one and a half panels to go!

Welp. Here it is.

I've been threatening discussing starting a blog about my random projects and snippets of my life. And here it is! It's going to be every bit as weird and distracted as I am...

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