transom

This is part of a series I am working on. I never seem to translate them onto the blog page exactly, but you get the idea.

clock beetle

I'm letting this piece sit for a while until I figure out where to go with it. I spent much of today drilling tiny, tiny holes in wire which I will rivet tomorrow, also experimenting with odd-shaped rivets of various materials.
Last Saturday was a day of coincidental meetings. At the show (which was in another city) I ran into the lovely woman who was my neighbour for the last seven years until she bought a house this summer. Later, at dinner in a Peruvian restaurant, it turned out that the woman sitting next to me had been in the same Chinese (language) school that I was in, for the same three years, but we had never met before this. Two friends on my left told us they ran into each other on a sidewalk in New York last month, neither knew the other was planning to be there.

coleopteric gifts

I am surrounded by generous friends. An example of this is in the little bottle to the left in this photo, the latest carcass Maltagirl brought me. This summer she went to great lengths to put aside several of these lovelies for me, saving them in a jar in her kitchen even though it turned out on occasion that one or more of the critters was not as dead as it had originally seemed and was later found hiking across the tiles making for the back door (*all revived fig beetles were released into the wild to die another day). She sacrificed upper shelf space in that unlikely room because her adorable youngest calls these beetles his ‘family’ and insists that any live one be captured to cuddle up and watch movies with him - seeing bodies in a jar might have proved traumatic.

Another example above to the right, also green and beetle shaped, is one of many gifts from Ms Creativity herself, who has been generous not only with these and other small bodies, but is raising my apprentice with lovely manners and great cooking skills. She is also 100% responsible for me starting this blog and several other rewarding pursuits.

together

These were some of the things sitting on my worktable tonight while the power was out and neighbours were visiting.

armour

I think I'm going to have to do a hundred sketches of the various layers before I'm happy with this beetle.

exoskeleton

The original of this is about an inch tall, it is part of the assemblage that I was making wings for yesterday.

icarus

Some of these are for an assemblage I am working on. A steampunk beetle will join them, so today I am experimenting with various wing types - linen over wood, parchment over rebar wire (thank you, Mr. Lo Bue!), gauze with bamboo splinters. Connections are tricky, and prone to being unwieldy.