The Blue Witch . . . .

Well, you'd be blue too if this happened to you!

Actually, she's called the Blue Witch because her skirt, gloves, boots and hatband are all in shades of blue.  Of course once she peels herself off the wall and the bruises some up she'll be the Black-and-Blue Witch.  The idea for a having a broomstick riding witch crash into the side of the shop came from browsing Margriet's Miniatures blog and you can see her original by clicking here.  It was one of those things that is so simple to do, very funny to look at, but who'd ever be crazy enough to think of doing it?  Aparently it was Marsha of Sassy Mini Dolls who provided Margriet with a kit for her witch.  I hope neither Margriet nor Marsha mind me "borrowing" their idea.

I made the boots and gloved hands from polymer clay along with a half-sphere shape for the head.  Her stockings are some old socks cut up, sewn into small tubes, glued into her boots and stuffed to resemble legs.  A white dress I'd stripped off a cheap doll became the Blue Witch's undergarment.  Her gloves were glued directly into the sleeves while the tops of her stockings were glued into the skirt.  Over this she wears a hand made blue patterned skirt and black overcoat stripped off a male doll at some point in the past.  Her "body" was then glued onto the wall.  Her head was glued onto the wall above her body after it had had hair glued onto it.  This was then topped off with a quick black fabric hat and a broomstick.

While I was working with polymer clay for the witch, I made a number of other micsellanious items for the shop and castle and here are a few of them:

  These potion bottles were supposed to be a little crooked and wacky, but they largely look just plain badly made.  They each have a crystal bead sandwiched between layers of clay.  The clay was later coated with various mica powders.  This was my first experimentation with these powders.  The effects they produce are really fabulous, but I think I need a lot more practise before I get really fabulous results.  The unicorn horns turned out quite well though.

Some of the unicorn horns and dragon eggs made their way into the two display tables for the shop as you can see here:

Putting the clay aside, I spent some time rearranging furniture.  The layout of the shop has changed again.  Yes, again.  The units that were to be on the back wall are now along the side wall and visa versa.  Hopefully this will be the last, final change of layout in the shop.  Maybe.  In the Centre Room of the castle I played around with possiblities.  Rumaging in my furniture box I found a kit gothic bench seat I bought about two years ago.  If I were to use this seat to make this room a Sitting room it would look something like this:

Or this (imagine the screen is a fireplace):

Or this:

None of them are exactly thrilling are they?  The studying of dragons is meant to be done in the room above this, but while making the dragons' eggs I wondered if maybe I should line the walls of this room with display cases for the eggs of every different species of dragon.  The disadvantage of the idea is that it would cover up all my panelling, that would be a shame as in this room I actually managed to make it (more or less) straight.


So really, it was just a whole week of fiddling about, but not actually achieving anything of note.  It's just been one of those weeks when the opporunity to sit down and actually get something done hasn't been there.  I haven't even gotten the giveaway prize organised yet!  On that note, thanks to everyone who has entered the giveaway so far.  Those of you who haven't entered still have a week left to go.  Some entries have failed to include a number between one and ten.  Rather than disquallify these entries, I've decided I'll get random.org to assign them a random number so they can be included in the draw.  I also have a number of new followers to welcome to the fold.  They are Craftland, Maria Ireland, Rosella, Inesmaud.hertrampf (no blog) and Glenys (no blog).  Thank you all for following.

Before I go, I did promise to add a book making tutorial last week.  I haven't forgotten about it, I just haven't gotten around to it.  It'll be done soon, I promise.