Creating Glass Squid in Resin

Itsy Bitsy Specimen Jars

I've been busy working on new ideas for jewelry lately, including casting transparent Glass Squid in resin. While I was creating the first one I made videos of the process from sculpt to molding to casting. The first three Glass Squid necklaces should be available in the shop next week.

Also joining them will be the first 3 pairs of new Specimen Jar Earrings! Check out this photo of the finished jars before I attached the earring hooks. They are super tiny, less than half the size of the jars I use for the Specimen Jar Necklaces.

Glass Squid Pendants

And  now for the videos. I hope you enjoy seeing how these necklaces came to be.

Myths & Legends Day

Release the Kraken! It's now the 4th day of Cephalopod Awareness Days and we are taking a brief detour from reality into fiction.

The sale ends tomorrow night, this is your last chance to save this much on cephalopod jewelry until next year's Cephalopod Awareness Days, so head over the Etsy shop ASAP. Also click over to Symbiartic on the Scientific American blog network to read a really cool feature on my jewelry.

Today's giveaway is super simple to enter, no trivia today just tell me what your favorite fictional tentacles creature is. Do you favor the Kraken? Cthulhu? Scylla? Or some other more obscure beastie. Just enter your answers into the Google Form and you get a chance to own this original 5"x7" pen and ink squid drawing.

Entries Closed 

And just because it's so cool, check out the Kraken in LEGO form:

Nautilus Night

It's Nautilus Night! The day dedicated to celebrating the most ancient group of living cephalopods.

Today's giveaway is a 7"x5" Natural History Nautilus print and handmade polymer clay nautilus shell pin.

TO ENTER
Click the link below to go to a Google form and answer the nautilus trivia question.
Answer Nautilus Trivia

THE RULES
1) You must enter between 12pm and 8pm EDT on Oct. 9, 2012.
2) Open to US residents only (sorry).
3) You can only answer the question once, duplicate entries will be deleted.
4) You must enter a valid email address, it is the method I will use to contact the winner.
5) There is no 5.

If you want some nautilus jewelry head over to the Etsy shop to get 15% off your order of any cephalopod jewelry.

Share and enjoy.

New Perma-Pets

In the past couple weeks I've completed 4 new Perma-Pet sculptures. Go check them out on Etsy.

Getting Ready for Halloween

I know it's only August but if I waited until October to get the shop ready for Halloween it would be too late. I've started adding some new H.P. Lovecraft inspired jewelry and brought back the new and improved Frankenpods.

First up I have a new smaller Cthulhu Cameo, it's 1 1/8 inches across (the larger size is 1 3/4 inches) and Cthulhu is facing forward rather than in profile.

I've also started creating sculpted Cthulhu jewelry and larger Cthulhu figures in the same pose. The pendants are 1 inch tall while the figures are 2 inches tall (a hanging loop and ribbon can be added to these by request if you'd like to hang them from a tree/hook/tentacle).

The first non-Cthulhu design added to my Lovecraftian jewelry is a pendant based on Lovecraft's story "The Hound". In it a young man and his friend are haunted by a demonic winged hound summoned by an amulet they stole from a grave.

Finally I've brought back the Frankenpods. I first created one of these several years ago and liked the idea but all my cephalopod designs hadn't quite come together yet so I only made one. I've now revived the idea and created not just a cuttlefish one but also squid, nautilus, and octopus frankenpods.

The Original Frankenpod

New and Improved Frankenpod Cuttlefish

Frankenpod Squid

Frankenpod Nautilus

Frankenpod Octopus

Mini Stories Part V

The last installment of the mini stories for my cephalopods.

Space Squid

“Black tentacles flashed with shimmering waves of color as two space squid were locked in battle. Great fins along their heads flapped angrily and beaks snapped at one another. The battle stretched on and on, other denizens of that area of the galaxy learned to avoid it.”

Space Nautilus

“The first anyone saw of the space nautilus was it's long pale tentacles the color of a winter moon. It's dark shimmering shell blended into the depths of deep space. Most didn't survive love enough to see it.”

Space Cephalopod Video

I put together this slideshow video of my space cephalopod jewelry yesterday.

Semi-Daily Sketch #4 - Squid

Quick squid I drew in about 10 minutes.

Semi-Daily Sketch #2

Quick deep sea squid.

Sooo Busy

I have been working my tush off this week. First of all I've been getting things set up for the half off shipping special I'm running this weekend.

Monday I started a brand new blog called the Culinary Cuttlefish which is all about food and cooking (two things I love to do).

As always I've been busy making stuff too. Pretty new Cosmic Octopus and Cosmic Squid necklaces with Swarovski crystal stars on them. Also a brand new baby rat sculpture, I'm thinking of doing a series of baby animals in everyday objects and this is the first one. He's in an altoid tin.

New Projects

I've been busy making lots of new stuff lately. Most of it has been replacing things that sold but I have a few things to show off.

First is this Cuttlefish Specimen Jar necklace that I absolutely love. Of course once I started doing these necklaces I just had to make a cuttlefish one.



I've also been doing some fun illustrations lately that I'm putting on products in my Zazzle Shop so you can get them on tshirts, stickers, and other goodies like that. It started with this holiday/birthday octopus that I sketched and I'll eventually have a rubber stamp made out of it for making cards.



Then since I was on a roll I sketched up this nautilus and squid that I'm on the process of reworking in Inkscape and they'll be up in my shop soon.

Little Fun with my Steampunk Cephalopods

So I just got done making, photographing, and listing a bunch of new steampunk cephalopods jewelry in my Etsy Shop. Along with the distressed gray metal look I had been doing I created a more fanciful and feminine steampunk look in a deep burgundy red with antique gold edging that makes it look gilded. I'm very happy wiht how these turned out and how popular my steampunk cephalopods have been recently.

I decided I wanted to do a slideshow of them and this is what I created using animoto.

New Line of Squid Jewelry

This is one of those strokes of luck when a customer requests something that you've been putting off doing so it spurs you to do it. I was contacted by a customer to create a custom squid necklace for a friend of hers. Now since I already make cuttlefish and octopus the logical next step is of course to do squid. However cuttlefish and squid are pretty similar so I'd been putting off figuring out how to do a squid that is sufficiently different from my cuttlefish. This custom request made me actually site down and do so.

It took me some planning, sketching, and looking at squid photos to make up my mind but I'm happy with the results. I hope this new line is as successful as my cuttlefish and octopus have been so far.

Squid Jewelry