Daydreaming of bunnies and the happenings of fish

Tags

art, bunny, crafts, dollhouse, fish, handmade, miniature, pets, rabbit

The Pokémon homage has been coming along and I make bursts of progress now and again, but I was reaching a point where other projects seemed rosier.  I realized the reason was that for the Pokémon scene to be effective, everything has to look a certain way. Making something another fan would identify as accurate is a great challenge, but that marvelous and detailed world has already been created and I am bound by it.

I let my mind wander and arrived at a tiny café in the middle of Tokyo. A quaint tea shop that is also home to a group of rabbits, who are patient with the guests but well cared for. The shop’s name and its nuances have quickly fallen into place, and in a few days the lasercut pieces will arrive and I will have this project’s possibilities to balance the requirements of the other.

In the meantime, while Tea and Bunny remains a sketch and an idea, I can point you to a couple of cute videos of rabbit cafes (here and here) and you can see what I’m thinking on my Pinterest board.

I’ll be hopping between the two projects, and another donated house, for the next several months, so hopefully something in the mix will tickle your fancies :-).

As for a pet update, Gill’s fins keep growing and I’m about to change his name to Rapunzel. He also hardly ever stops moving, except to sleep curled up in the grass. His genetics still baffle me.

He’s a month and a half older on the left, and still a hyperactive ham.

And nothing says “buy me a massive sampler of fancy hay” like a sudden onset of ileus on a Sunday morning. Similar to her E. cuniculi bout a couple of years ago, Hanna went from bouncy and voracious to hunched and not eating in like two hours, and it took her several days to recover. I learned that lacing meds in banana slices only works three times. And bunny owners all know their lives are ruled by their tiny charges.

She only likes the oat hay. Sigh.

Happy Easter everyone!

A little Christmas cheer

Tags

art, bunny, Christmas, crafts, doll, dollhouse, handmade, miniature, plush, rabbit, Steiff

Good tidings everyone! I am one exam away from being done with my Master’s of Public Health, and figured I had time for a quick post.

My miniatures club just had their annual Christmas party and it was heartwarming as always. As is tradition, we did a gift exchange, and my contribution this year was this little 2″ fellow.

Yep, I went back to bun side after two years and made another rabbit toy. Whenever I think of miniatures and Christmas I imagine tiny Victorian homes festooned with all of the holiday trimmings, and the simple yet elegant toys the children would have played with a hundred years ago. I recently learned about the history of Steiff plush toys, so I made a little Steiff bunny complete with the button in the ear. It was a nice reason to test out a set of Derwent Inktense watercolor pencils, and the bun started out all white.

As a bit of trivia, I fashioned the name Wishcraft from the idea of thoughts becoming real, and have long loved the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. It is also part of the reason why my logo has a bunny, but don’t tell Hanna because she doesn’t like to share the spotlight.

Speaking of Hanna in the spotlight, she recently ventured onto our new sofa, with a bit of help by making her some stairs and a cave system  :-). The video is a bit long, but is good at showing how bunnies methodically explore new places. She’s doing pretty good for a 2009 vintage. Sorry for the dreaded cell phone black bars.

 

What’s your 20?

Tags

bunny, crafts, dollhouse, life, miniature, Pokemon, rabbit, video games

*Huff huff pant pant*…Hello everyone, how’s it going?

I know I said I’d get back into blogging once the semester was over, but it’s been pretty kooky in the Bradshaw household up til now, and the dust is finally settling.

Let’s hope this transport lasts 13 years like its Mazda predecessor.

Since the last post, my husband and I sold three cars, bought two cars (including one Honda Eggplant and a Scion XB pretending to be a different “big blue box”), and moved into our first (soon to be very geeky) house from our apartment.

Hanna has adapted well, and believes herself to have dominion over all boxes (or anything she sees, really) and so she has been pleased with her new, ever-shifting territory.

Yes, my minions, climb!

I also took on the role of Vice President in my miniatures club, which means I come up with the crafts we do at the meetings for the next year. The ladies decided to take the plunge into making my half scale beach bungalow, and since half scale is hard to shop for, I designed some furniture for them.

FYI, if anyone is interested in the kits (house and furniture), I have one or two spares I could part with :-).

As for future projects, the move reminds me of a certain fandom on which I am going to do a mini tribute…

Each Pokémon game begins with the player moving to a (usually two-room) house in a new (and absurdly tiny) town. This year is the 20^th anniversary of the original game, and when I’m not taking breaks from Pokémon Go or Pokémon Sun when it comes out later this year, I’ll be making my trainer abode and team.

Justin telling Ekans he won’t take no more sass at dinner. Please disregard my finger.

The Pokémon world is both frustratingly and conveniently flexible in its style, so we will see what happens.

Oh, and I finished Bonnie’s House and got it delivered to kind relatives who will find it a good home. My part in its story is finished but hopefully its tale will be a long and happy one 🙂

P.S. – The children’s science museum I used to work at eons ago had radios and we actually used the title phrase often…Probably because most of us were high schoolers and thought talking like truckers was cool.

Happy Easter!

Tags

binkies, bunny, crafts, dollhouse, Easter, handmade, holidays, rabbit

Muahahaha these round things are all mine!

I really apologize for disappearing since early February with the conclusion of the Undersized Urbanite. (I won second place in the experienced category, which I’m grateful for, and this year’s entries were very imaginative!) Since then I’ve had my nose to the grindstone on my Master’s project, my day job, a friendly commission for cartography, and helping out the clubs I’m in, to the level where sleep and social interactions have been luxuries. Once May rolls around, you will find a much more relaxed, crafting, and blogging version of me.

In the meantime, here is what Hanna’s been up to lately. I’ll make use of today’s date to cheer for the Make Mine Chocolate campaign and others that promote not giving children live bunnies at Easter, because many will end up in shelters or worse. Based on her age when she was found, Hanna could have been an unwanted 2009-model Easter bunny, but I think her story turned out alright :-).

 

In other news, I have been stealing away tidbits of time to put finishing touches on Bonnie’s house, and it will find its new owners in May as well.

Here’s an in-progress teaser until then. Are those two little ears I see?

Happy Bunny

Tags

art, bunny, calligraphy, Chinese, crafts, dollhouse, handmade, miniature, rabbit, Undersized urbanite

Hanna had to be included in the Hawaiian house, and while she was not overly pleased at the time of her portrayal (she’d been a naughty rabbit and had been put back in her cage early), I think I captured her essence pretty well.

If the Disapproving Rabbits site was still taking submissions, she would have been a shoe-in. This Pinterest link is the best I can do to show you their former awesomeness.

I went to a Chinese New Year festival last year and there was a kind calligraphy artist who did requests and explained them as she painted. The original “Happy Bunny” is framed in my office, but I copied the text.

What I didn’t know is half of the characters denote the parts of speech. Starting at the top, this one says “Happy” “Adjective for” “Upcoming noun” “Rabbit” and “End of sentence.”

I have a tendency to overdo things (surprise) and so it’s a good exercise to do something minimalistic. As you can see, it took a lot of practice before I got an appropriately Hanna-esque result.

The one complete bunny and the thirty-something partial bunnies chilling in the ether.

More posts to come!

Mild, Moderate, Severe

Tags

bunnies, bunny, happy, life, medicine, pets, rabbit, veterinary

I looked at the date of my last post and did a double take. Had it really been so long ago?! Needless to say things have been hectic, and a couple of weekends ago me, the hubby, and even Hanna the bunny got sick. The humans probably had a garden variety norovirus, which is ironic considering where I work and what I do. Hanna’s illness was much more impressive, and in these past couple of weeks she has taught me a good lesson about not letting fear and worry get the upper hand. (I am really bad at that.)

If you hadn’t already guessed, rabbits are my favorite species, and since I was young I had known about a bad news beastie called Encephalitozoon cuniculi. A Google image search will turn up lots of sad photos of bunnies with sideways heads and other maladies, and these about summed up my perception of the disease. Some veterinary textbooks paint a bleak picture of there being no cure and patient status being guarded, and if you want a pretty quick synopsis of what it is, click here. I have always loved my bunnies very much, but I told myself I wouldn’t let one suffer if their quality of life was taken away by this parasite.

In a nutshell, Hanna went from being completely normal one Saturday morning, to not eating, not drinking, and occasionally stumbling by that evening. My good friend from vet school gave me a hand giving Hanna some SQ fluids that night, and at the time we thought her lethargy and incoordination could have been from dehydration, but we weren’t sure. A trip to the ER vet and an exotics vet later, my fears were beginning to be confirmed that her neurologic symptoms were real, and that Hanna could be an E. cuniculi bunny. I don’t think my husband will ever forget coming home after leaving her at the exotics clinic (my norovirus tummy was too unpredictable at the time to risk a car ride) and entering to find me sobbing from a head full of worst-case scenarios for our beloved ball of fluff.

But the thing is, Hanna is doing great. It did take a good deal of TLC, and medications, and patience (both from her and us), but she never lost her spark and before long she was getting better. I did get one quick picture after medicating her one day, and two big pieces of my heart are in it.

In vet school, one of our pathology instructors (a medical genius with an ego of tempered steel and a sharp tongue to match that took pride in making vet students tremble) hammered the concept of Mild, Moderate, Severe into our heads when it came to disease presentation. Hanna reminded me that just like any other disease, there can be a mild form, and Hanna’s never passed the level of “slightly (humorously) drunk”. Two weeks out and you wouldn’t know she has microscopic parasites chilling out in her brain (she had antibody titers for E. cuniculi that were so high it impressed the exotics vet). She’s no different than she was before her episode, and while we don’t know what awaits us down the road, the looming storm clouds on the horizon are dissipating.

A bonnie bunny and a glad giftgiver

Tags

bunny, Christmas, crafts, doll, dollhouse, Edward Tulane, miniature, miniatures club, rabbit

My miniatures club recently had its annual Christmas party, and one of the traditions is a gift exchange. As seems to be common in miniatures clubs, the gift is always a dollhouse miniature or something used for making miniatures. Since fate has had me out of town for on several of our monthly meeting nights, and because it’s Christmas, I wanted to make my gift a little extra special.

Lots of miniaturists have tiny nurseries or Christmas scenes to decorate, and Christmas is full of childhood memories and wishes, so I decided to make a toy. As a personal touch, I made it a bunny. I was going for the sort of rustic look of porcelain dolls from the Victorian era, with understated arms and legs and more attention paid to the face.

About halfway through sculpting the bunny, I realized he was looking a lot like Edward Tulane. If you haven’t read this beautiful children’s book, you should, and it will lead you through the full spectrum of emotions. If you got teary-eyed like I did at the Velveteen Rabbit, you won’t stand a chance with this book. Edward is a porcelain rabbit with fluffy wired ears and blue eyes. As you can see, I didn’t stray too far from that design.

My version’s body is made of polymer clay, with a layer of white gesso to give it some texture. This doll is actually a casting I made from my original sculpt, meaning I have the molds if I ever wish to make more. I think more bonnie bunnies may bounce into the world next Easter, with a rainbow of pastel bows and eyes.

He is held together with antiqued brass headpins and is nicely poseable. Like Edward, he has wired ears covered in plush fabric and a fluffy tail. I had a lot of fun painting the face and giving him rosy cheeks. As you can see from the penny, he is pretty petite!

As an extra bonus for the recipient, I bought a copy of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to go with the doll. In the gift exchange, he went to a mother who has a young son, and they love reading books together. I also know she has a miniature boy’s nursery, and I would hope my little rabbit would look good there or in one of her other scenes. I couldn’t be happier with the outcome.

Instead of a truffle pig, I have an apple rabbit

Tags

animals, apple, apples, Arkansas black, bunny, childhood, cute, fall, holidays, Jonagold, pets, rabbit

My humble apologies for the extended radio silence…I have told more than one person that I have very little idea where October went. Classes and work had me booked and bushed, and I am only now beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I intend to make the holidays gloriously fun, family-filled, and lazy.

Before I get back to blogging about miniatures and gemstones, here’s another Hanna story to hopefully brighten your day.

Bunnies are known for having four sweet teeth (yep, those big ones at the front), and Hanna has been an apple fiend (and petty thief) since day one. On that fateful day, I had sliced an apple for myself and for bribery in exchange for her trust, and when my back was turned, Miss Too-Cool-For-School got on her tiptoes and pilfered my stash from the coffee table.

Almost exactly like this:

It’s funny…almost every example I could find of rabbits stealing food had English Spot in their genetics.

Well, I have been able to put her sweet-sleuthing senses to good use these past couple of days. I am collecting apple seeds, which is a long story and could be its own blog post, but I’ll leave it as “remembering childhood” for now. In this Great Apple Experiment, my first priority is taste, and so I bought almost a peck of gorgeous NC mountain apples from the Farmer’s Market. Here is just a sample of the harvest bounty:

Back row (left to right): Jonagold, Cameo, King Luscious
Middle row: Arkansas Black, Rome, Stayman Winesap, Gala
Front row: Pink Lady

Strangely, the first few apples I ate were bland and disappointing. So I decided to enlist my apple thief. Last night I set the bag of apples on the floor, and in her excitement, Hanna immediately honed in on one of the Jonagolds. I was surprised, since in the past she has shown a strong preference for sour, like Granny Smiths. This apple turned out to be extremely sweet and good, and I’m not usually a fan of Golden Delicious types. So this morning I repeated the test, and now being used to bags of apples arriving from the sky, she was more selective in her choice, circling and sniffing the fruits until I had to stop her from chowing down on an Arkansas Black.

And wouldn’t you know it…that apple was amazing too. Spicy and crisp and tangy, just like an older apple variety should taste. Hanna of course gets a cut of the treasure each time.

I wish I could carry her through the Farmer’s Market and have her hunt produce for me. I bet people would pay for the novelty of having their apples individually selected by a discerning bunny.

20% off sale on my willow bunny pendant!

Tags

bunny, Easter, etsy, holiday, jewelry, pet, rabbit, rescue, sale, silver, willow

I haven’t completely forgotten that this blog is to help exhibit my tiny jewelry business, and as Easter is around the corner, I have put my willow bunny pendant on sale!

Basically the price now covers the cost of materials and $10 of it is still going to rabbit rescues.  This is a busy time of year for these organizations, as many rabbits end up in shelters not long after Easter, when people realize their cute balls of fluff do not stay tiny and non-destructive forever, and actually can live to be over 12 years old.  Hanna, my own rabbit, may have been an unwanted Easter bunny, based on how old she was when she was found as a stray.  Though I generally try to stay off of bandwagons, I have liked the “Make Mine Chocolate” idea of giving rabbit-themed gifts instead of live animals like chocolate bunnies, stuffed animals, and even jewelry *wink.*

Hanna says you should totally go buy one…and that plastic eggs are slightly disturbing, but fun to roll around.

The story of the carousel pendant

Tags

antique, carousel, carving, Dentzel, dragon, history, horse, jewelry, lion, military, rabbit, ride, shop, silver, turtle, wood

I’ve been meaning to get this in the shop and the blog forever, and here it is:

The carousel procession was the first design I made as I was forming Wishcraft Studio and thinking about what I would sell.  It was also the first time I had made a polymer clay sculpt, a silicone mold, and added a patina on a silver piece, which is now the standard for my jewelry.  After seeing how well the process brought out the details, my husband said it was the way I had to go.  It takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it, and I think the same can be said of the old carousels (though my work is paltry by comparison).

I started researching carousels after remembering the one my husband and I rode on dates to Pullen Park in Raleigh, NC and they have a fascinating history.  Carousels have existed for centuries, emerging in the Middle East around 500 AD and borrowed by the Crusaders from the Turks and Arabs as a military training device.  They were later domesticated for enjoyment in the gardens of European royalty and enjoyed a Renaissance in America, where they evolved from small, traveling fair attractions to fixed, stately works of art, with flashing lights, brass rings, and exuberant organ music.

The Pullen Park carousel was originally made in 1911 by the Dentzel family’s famous Pennsylvania Carousel Company and moved to the park in 1921.  It boasts 52 hand-carved basswood animals and is one of only 14 menagerie carousels left, meaning it has giraffes, rabbits, pigs, ostriches, cats, and other creatures in addition to horses.

Significant restoration work was done in the 70’s and 80’s, when they removed the years of touch-up paint on many of the animals and matched the original factory colors, making the carousel look just like it did when it first carried riders over a century ago.  A beautiful climate-controlled building was recently constructed to house the attraction, and if you are in Raleigh, it is worth the $1 ticket to enjoy a piece of history.

What I really like about the Dentzel carousels is the characteristic style of their figures and that they pioneered the exotic menagerie theme.  The lion and the rabbit’s postures are particularly classic for the company, and the overall quality of the work is exquisite.

I took the necklace to the carousel and the operators kindly let me to snap a few quick photos between rides.

The Dentzel models also follow the tradition of having a “flag horse” decorated in a patriotic theme, which usually stands on the outer ring and is the most ornate animal on the ride.  Most of the carvers during the golden age of carousels at the turn of the century were German or Italian immigrants, and they were showing pride for their new country.

I hope I shared some new and interesting information with you, and thanks for stopping by.