Lego Blanket

The next project I will be sharing with you is my crocheted lego blanket. I learned to crochet when I was in middle school by my grandma. She taught me the basics, and then I would look up videos on Youtube whenever I was stuck on a pattern. Now, I love using Pinterest to find all sorts of amazing patterns to make for my friends and family!

I made the lego blanket two years ago for my boyfriend’s birthday. It was 1 week before his birthday, and I had zero ideas. I was doing my usual scrolling on Pinterest when I stumbled upon the pattern for a lego blanket! It was perfect for someone who loved legos! With only a week until his birthday and other responsibilities, how in the world did I crochet a whole blanket? Well, it was my lucky and unlucky time because I was having surgery, but I also had 3 days off from school! AKA 3 full days to work on the blanket with no interruptions except eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom.

To make the blanket, I had to first make all of the squares and rectangles without the dots individually. This part probably took me about two days to complete. I had to make 4 rectangles with 6 dots, 8 squares with 4 dots, 16 rectangles with 2 dots, and 20 squares with 1 dot. The pattern that I found online was meant for a kid-sized blanket, so I added an extra row to make my blanket large enough for an adult.

After I finished the individual squares and rectangles, I laid them out on my floor and arranged the colors in a way that looked appealing to the eye. Then, using the red yarn, I sewed them all together. After the blanket was sewn together, it was time to make all of the dots. This part was also very time-consuming. The dots were relatively small, but there were A LOT of them. This part was definitely my least favorite. Making them was very repetitive, and I got bored very quickly. When the dots were finished, I had to sew them all to the blanket. It was difficult at first to get them to be spaced evenly, but I got the hang of it!

Finally, my lego blanket was done! The picture of the final product is at the beginning of this post. This pattern is easy to find on Pinterest by searching “lego blanket pattern.”

Gargoyle Sculpture

The next project I will be sharing with you is my gargoyle sculpture. I also made this in my Science in Art class in high school, and it was one of my favorites. As always, the first step was to choose an image. Since this project was 3D, we had to choose multiple images that covered all angles of what we were going to sculpt. I based my sculpture on one of the gargoyles on the Notre Dame in Paris.

After I found my image, the next step was to make the base of the whole gargoyle out of paper and tape. This was particularly difficult because it was hard to get the paper to do what I wanted it to do. Also, the tape wasn’t very sticky, and we had a very limited supply, so the arms on my gargoyle would fall off a lot. I made the corner of the building out of cardboard.  Here is a picture of my gargoyle so far!

The next step was to cover the paper sculpture in plaster. By layering strips of plaster,  I was able to mold the gargoyle to look more like the picture. I could add things like back muscles and more dimension to the ears. After a couple of days, the supply of plaster ran out, so we had to switch to newspaper and diluted glue. Here is a picture of my progress partway through.

SURPRISE! This is an interactive sculpture! Everyone had to run a tube through their sculpture because when they were all finished, our teacher was going to make a chemical reaction that would shoot through the tube and come out somewhere in our sculptures. I personally chose to have my gargoyle throw up by running the tube up his back and out of his mouth. Here is a picture of where I had to saw my sculpture in half in order to fit the tube.

After I ran my tube through my sculpture, I had to patch the hole with more newspaper and diluted glue. I also had to finish covering the rest of my gargoyle. After I was done with that, the next step was to paint it. I am not personally proud of my paint job, but I was short for time and the more important part to me was watching my creation throw up! I don’t have a video of my gargoyle throwing up, but I do have a picture of him after the reaction. The yellow foam on his mouth is the leftover chemical reaction. I also can’t tell you what my teacher did to make the chemical reaction occur because she never told us. Happy creating!

Copper Bear

The first project I will be sharing with you is my copper bear holding a daisy! This was a project done in my Science in Art class in high school. The main idea of this project was to take a thin, copper sheet and rub a sharpened, wooden stick onto it. Rubbing the wooden stick onto the copper heats it, and causes the metal to stretch. The more you would rub, the more the copper would stretch, and the further out the imprint would go.

The first step of this project was to choose an image. Our teacher advised us to not do anything very intricate, because getting the 3D image to look “proportionally 3D” was difficult, even with a very simple design. The image we chose couldn’t be too difficult, but it also couldn’t be extremely simple; it was an art class after all. I personally searched on google for a picture of a cartoon bear holding a flower, and the image that I chose was the perfect mix between simple and difficult. After choosing our image, the next step was to print it out.

Before we were able to work with our copper sheets, we had to cover the edges with masking tape because the sheets were extremely sharp, and it was very easy for us to slice our fingers on it. After that, we were finally able to start making art! The next step was to tape our images onto the copper sheets and trace our images with the wooden stick. After that, it was time to rub out the rest of the image.

We had to pay very close attention to how long we would rub each part of the image. The idea was to rub for a longer period of time on the places that were supposed to stick out more. We could also turn the copper sheet over and rub the other side for parts of the image that we wanted to put further into the background, rather than stick out towards us.

After days of hard work, our copper images were finally finished! Below I have provided an image. As you can see, the petals of the flower and the nose of the bear stick out the furthest. The part around the middle of the flower was a place where I flipped the copper sheet over and rubbed the other side.

Copper turns black as it is exposed to air, so overtime my creation turned darker and darker. This is a picture of the final product.