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Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (“..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (“…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (“…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

So, I was working on a bit more Fimo stuff, and my mother asked me if I had some sort of red pendant. I didn’t, so I made one, and since she wants to wear it the day after tomorrow, I rushed a bit and didn’t make some of the things I wanted to try out.

Since Mutt asked for photos of the draggies, here is a quick preview photo of nearly all of the stuff (click for bigger view):

The two sitting dragons are 2,5 cm = 1 inch tall, the little one is smaller. I made a rush job of the red-and-gold one, placing the eyes too low, and I forgot smoothing the belly properly, so I had to go at it with sandpaper, and will have to buff it up again.

For the scales for a change I tried to cut thin slices of some Fimo rolled out into a thin string and stick them on right away, rather than rolling tiny little spheres and mushing those onto the dragon, but with the metallic effect Fimo that doesn’t work well, probably something about mica shift. I’ll keep it in mind for normal colours, though, it’s way, way, way faster.

The gargoyle head has eyes just like the two black and green dragons, they just don’t shine because of the angle. The eyes are rocailles or seed beads or whatever you call them. The important thing to keep in mind is that they get embedded with the side facing outwards, not the hole.
Anyway, back to the gargoyle head: that one was planned as a pendant, but I messed up the balance and it’s not usable as such. Maybe I’ll repurpose it as a magnet, even if it’ll have random holes in it…

Apart from the mentioned problems I am quite happy with those last two pieces; I think I noticed improvement from previous attempts. Yay, practise.

I’m going to test the gold leaf I got for the jewellery design course on the blue thing in the foreground.

On the brownish thing in the background, I tried painting the thing for an aging effect before baking with sepia acrylic ink, and sand it afterwards. The ink gave the clay under it a reddish tint in places, and I nearly get the impression it’s in too deep to sand off. Next time, bake first.

Speaking of baking, or curing or what you want to call it: The little dragon charm, which cannot stand up, and the beads I baked in a bed of flour to avoid the shiny “pressure” mark I got otherwise. It worked fine.

Anything else i forgot? Oh, well.

Merry Christmas.

Here are some of the better results of Fimo-experiments this weekend.

I also made beads involving pearlescent and white transluscent Fimo, which would look rather nice if not for the fact they turned brownish, presumably after getting too hot.

Then here are a bunch of sketches I either just hadn’t uploaded so far, or are pretty new:

Will try to post something more of a written blog entry soon.

I got a biiig box of art supplies in the mail today, mostly paper and Fimo. While I’d been waiting for it, I had an idea for a cane, and here’s the result:

The blue was mixed of equal parts Fimo Classic blue and Fimo Soft white (later experiments make me think 4 parts white and one part blue is better for sky blue). Yellow is Fimo Soft sunflower, and the red-orange layer was orange and yellow scraps mixed with indian red.

I rolled out the sunflower and the mixed blue on the thickest setting – 1 – of my pasta machine, and put two layers of each together, for thicker layers. I rolled out the orange-red mix on setting 7, pretty thin, and wrapped the yellow with it – note that the ends are wrapped, too. Then I rolled it up in a spiral.

For the sun rays I rolled a long sausage of yellow, wrapped it in more of the red-orange rolled out at thicknees 7, shaped it slightly triangular in profile, and cut it into lengths corresponding to the height of the spiral. Then I rolled more of the mixed blue into sausages and filled out the gaps between the rays.

Last I rolled out the rest of the blue mix to wrap the outside. I didn’t have enough left for two layers at thickness 1, so it’s one at 1 and 1 at 2 or 3.

If I try that again, I might use a thicker layer of yellow, or otherwise thinner and in turn more rays.