Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Custom Perfume Blends

One particular crafty project I'm working on that I'm very excited about is custom perfume oil blends. I am slowly amassing a small army of single note fragrances and have been playing around and day dreaming about what I want to create! There are so many scents I want to try to create, inspired by so many different things. So far, I'm really enjoying this craft project, how could I not? I get to sit around and smell pleasant things all day (beats smelling E6000 all day!) and trying to imagine what unicorn glens and vampire crypts might smell like.

I hope to eventually have at least a couple scents for sale in my shop, once I work out some kinks and get some unsuspecting test subjects friends to help try out some scents and give me some feedback on them.

I've always had a fondness for perfumes, but I often find that commercial perfumes all tend to be a bit boring and all smell the same to me after a while. Personally, I don't really crave smelling like a purse manufacturer, or a tacky former pop star, there's no imagination behind that! So a few years back on a search for something a little different, something a little more me, I stumbled across the infamous Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs and was delighted to find a world full of perfumes inspired by dusty libraries, ancient goddesses, and witch's parlors. There are literally dozens of other artisan perfume shops out there, and I've sampled around a few of them, and now I think it's turn for me to try my own hand at creating the scents that I've dreamed about. Does the world need another artisan perfume oil vender, aren't there enough already? Probably not, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to experiment a bit with a craft I would love to try!

Monday, October 3, 2011

Etsy Love: Parish Relics

One day while hunting down some stained glass pieces for a different blog post I was writing, I stumbled across Parish Relics and was very pleased with what they had to offer: gorgeous medieval inspired jewelery pieces made with real stained glass and gorgeously textured and finished polymer clay! While maintaining an air of rough and almost primitive antiques, the pieces are also meticulously constructed and perfectly finished. I actually thought these were made with real metal at first!






I've been thinking about these pieces ever since I saw them! I think pieces like this could easily be worked into any outfit to add a little bit of romance!

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Magnifying Cabochons & Eyeball Jewelery

I finally managed to dig up all the pieces to my printer a few days ago, so to celebrate I decided to make some magnifying cabochons that I had been wanting to make for quite a while now. Before I started pouring my own resin pieces I enjoyed making pieces with magnifying cabochons and it was nice again to be able to make something pretty that didn't involve all that resin entails. With October just beginning, and Halloween around the corner, I am sort of on a bit of a morbid kick.

Some skeleton necklaces. An anatomical ribcage, and a 16th century engraving.

An engraving of Beelzebub and an anatomical ribcage.

Some small cabochons with a big fancy "O" and my shop name. Don't quite know what I'll actually do with these!

 
A choker with Boucher's The Toilette of Venus
I've also been seeing a lot of different kinds of cute bows with eyeballs in the middle, both in mainstream shops in preparation for Halloween, and in the Jfashion world. I actually have a little zip-up bag filled with doll eyes, because I am a collector of BJDs and I like to have some eyeball options, so I looted that for some acrylics. I only have very few acrylic eyeballs, as when it comes to BJD eyes I'm a fan of silicone, and I am not going to to be using my nice silicone eyeballs for craft projects, but I did manage to dig up a ton of not-quite-eyeballs that I was willing to sacrifice.

Cute and sparkly bows and a necklace.

I hope to have these things up, as well as a ton of other things I've made recently, including coffin shaped things and some jewelry featuring the infamous skeleton lady cameo, up in my Etsy shop in the next couple of days! Wish me luck in taking about a billion photos!