what's the collective noun for a group of topiary bushes?

My first proposal: a tipping of topiaries. (Hmmm....I see another contest in our future!) This tipping of topiaries was made with your mother in mind, all of which will be at my Crafty Wonderland booth this weekend! What's Crafty Wonderland, you ask? Click here and ye shall be enlightened.

the big little tree at green bean

Yay! I brought my tree to Green Bean Books yesterday and it's just perfect in the window. Jennifer, who's posing here with one of the books she'll use to fill out her window, loved the Scrabble tile leaves especially because she uses Scrabble Tiles to mark the different alphabetical sections of her bookshelves! The little reading guy at the base was hard to photograph--he has some cute rainbow socks and Converse-style sneakers with a big star.

what's on the bunny's workbench?

Here's a project I'm finishing up this week for the window at one of the sweetest little bookstores I know, Green Bean Books! It's where I bought the penguins book I made the figures for last Christmas, and since then, I've gotten to know the owner Jennifer and we cooked up a plan for a nice window display with the theme of birds.

This will be my biggest tree ever, filled with birds in the branches. There are also a lot of interesting recycled materials in this piece that I'll walk you through. First of all, a friend recently gave me a bunch of old piano keys, so I used pieces of them to make the songbirds. They will be various colors and breeds of birds.

Next, since it's a bookstore, I decided to make the leaves out of old Scrabble tiles so there will be a subtle letter pattern to each one. The finished pieces will be two or three shades of green.

Even the tree and base itself is from known found objects! The trunk is a broom handle, and the base is one of those wood bowls you commonly see at thrift stores in these parts. I love the natural bark sides, so I filled it with heavy wood and flipped it upside down. I'll make one of my reading figures to lean up against the base, engrossed in his favorite book. In the next week, I'll paint it a grassy green and fill it with daisies.

I'll make sure to take more pictures next weekend when it's done!

oranges are not the only fruit

...because as everyone well knows, there's also apples, bananas, pears, lemons, and strange purple things. I just filled up the Flora and Fauna section with a fruity-delicious assortment of pieces to make you smile. Here's a sneak preview--see the whole gang by clicking here!

sweet little easter birdy

Hey all! I made a limited edition of 16 original Easter eggs, all smartly priced at $35. Grab yours now before someone else does! They're all in the "holidays" section of my Etsy site, which you can see by clicking here.

got pink?

I have been meaning to make a flamingo for some time.....finally someone asked. Voila!

simple touches to customize your favorite piece

here's a cute commission I did last week, adding a heart balloon to a customer's custom pet commission:


and then one of the doggies who starred in my For the Love of Dog video was bought and the customer asked to have a yellow birdie added to its back. Super cute!

Love Poem Contest Entry #7!!

A second entry has come in about my toothy gator and bird piece!


Rosie the carnivorous bird had always found it difficult to find Love
Previous partners just couldn't understand her table manners
Then she met Radi the Alligator, a refined Gentleman
Who it turned out, had impeccable taste.....

Rosie was a Raptor Bird
Radi was an Alligator
When they met it was True Love.....
Then RADI-ATE-HER!

by Nicola of Murano Silver

Today is the last day you can enter the love poem contest! Click here for the rules. Voting starts tomorrow so check back to have your say on who's the baddest bard in Bunnywood!

an English country garden wedding

Here's another set of customer appreciation pictures from someone who got my blue bird cake toppers. So nice to see them on that beautiful cake and I'm also drooling over that beautiful wedding dress!

various animals on random round things

Here's a few things I whipped up this summer while getting ready for the Neighborhood Birds show. Enjoy!

b-b-b-bird bird bird. bird is the word.

So...it didn't take long yesterday before I figured out a much better way to make this bird, so I pulled apart all of the pieces I made yesterday and headed to the hardware store for a really long dowel so that the neck and front leg would be one continuous piece. I've learned over time that you need to have no regrets about making these decisions, no matter how much time you have already invested in a project. It's a much more solid piece now, where the heaviest and almost only vital element is the long dowel and not the guitar body itself.At some point, I'd love to figure out how big this piece is in comparison to my normal work and be able to rattle that out as a percentage--it's definitely the tallest freestanding thing to ever come out of this studio. Any math whizzes reading this?

I use a very high quality epoxy for most of my joinery, so I am trying to do as much careful planning as possible so I can use as much of the mixed elixir as possible. I was trying to figure out how to estimate the tail feather length so I could glue the pieces in and bend the curves later. I decided to make a tracing of the guitar body so I could make a template, and then I traced it on the pavement outside so I could lay the feather parts out in different configurations, trimming excess wire when necessary.

I also spent some time cutting a piece that I mounted on the interior of the guitar body so that the wires had a little more to sink into. The 1/8 inch guitar body would allow the topheavy wires to flop, and I just can't have that. Before retiring last night, I got everything glued except the beak and eyes, which I want to paint separately. Today is going to be a huge push to paint this pretty boy, but I know that once I start seeing the color emerge, I get a burst of energy that carries the project through to the end. Let's hope this case is no exception.

Project Runway...Bunny with a Toolbelt Edition!

Hello again! Okay, so as you know, I have one last bird to make in the next 24-36 hours (just found out I got a little reprieve, as we install the show Tuesday, not Monday as previously reported!) Tripper gave me the above guitar to alter, which was a very nice thing to do after upping the ante with his fabulous hormone-enhanced ukelele I showed in the previous blog entry.

I decided to attack this project completely hands on, which is a way I often like to work with my more abstract pieces--letting intuition and improvisation lead the way. It's an especially interesting method when there is such a dominantly recognizable found object involved. But hey, I'm up for the challenge. First task is to get the neck off the guitar.

I've seen disembodied guitars before, and know that the necks are usually attached with two wood dowel pins, but when I saw the label that said "steel reinforced neck" I wasn't sure if they meant the frets, or if there was a hidden steel plate inside that neck that would make my band saw very very sad. Just to be safe, I cut the neck off with my hand saw.

Turns out, this guitar was just like the others, so I continued to remove the other hardware attached to the face. I really like this metal plate that was on the opposite end, especially the elongated heart pierced into its face. (hearts were another motif I used in my work for this show.) I might have to carry that into the finished piece somehow.
I have a box of assorted large lathe-turned objects in the studio--things I've gleaned from thrift stores and other venues over the years. I wanted to find something to use for the head, and came across this funny 70's looking...hmmm....what would you call this thing? A pencil holder? Future bird head, that's what I call it.

I started making the elements...beak parts were made from some discarded wood I had around, I'm tracking down some 1" dowels to use for the neck and legs.

Stacking various turned elements to build the head--it needs to be glued in parts, so I get this part together as soon as possible so the epoxy can set, which takes 5-6 hours. I need to have a second gluing session tonight before I turn in for the day, so I have to be strategic about it. There's a hidden dowel that's holding these elements together pretty firmly, but I decided to tape it while it sets because you never know what will happen when you're up against a short deadline.

Since this piece is meant to accompany Tripper's huge guitar, I decided to look to it for visual inspiration as well as scale. I love the two birds he painted on it with their feathers flying around in ecstatic fervor. I made a handful of feathers to add to the tail of my bird.

Here's all the pieces laid out on the shop floor. I think I might go with more of a filigree design for the tail feathers, but right now, I have to make a mad dash to the hardware store for a few things. Catch you later!

Neighborhood Birds (final push)

So I'm mosying along, getting work done little by little, for my upcoming show with my cousin Tripper that opens next week. We decided the title would be Neighborhood Birds, using birds as our basic motif, but loved the neighborhood element, since we both live and participate in this area of Portland called the "Alberta Arts District."
We also decided that guitars would be a running theme in the show, although most of my pieces really stuck closer to a birds and flowers idea. Oh, and since I've been part of so many peoples' weddings this summer, I've got love on the brain.
Tripper and I planned the space out, as you saw in an earlier blog entry. The gallery has a lot of counter surfaces, a few walls, (Tripper's domain) and we also got the front window to play with. I was thinking a lot about bird habitats, since summer is the best time to work in my studio and I pass through my garden when travelling from my home to my creative space out back. The bird habitats also evolved because we came up with the idea of Tripper making a big guitar for the front window--I posted a picture of it in progress a few days ago. Yesterday afternoon, I got an excited phone call saying "I just finished the guitar and it's great!" And since I was coming down the homestretch on my own work, I decided to jump on my bike to go see it.
He wasn't kidding. It's really too bad that the word "awesome" has lost most of its impact from overuse because it's the best way to describe it. I will take some better detail shots next week, but it's a magnificent example of upcycling as well. The body and neck are wood purchased at the ReBuilding Center, the strings are weed whacker cord, and the tuning pegs are clothespins. After seeing it, I realized that with that behemoth in the front window, I really needed to add one more piece to my repertoire this weekend to accompany it. Tripper offered up an old damaged guitar he happened to have sitting around, so I strapped it into my bike basket and rode home to make one last large bird for the show. I've been enjoying ReadyMade Magazine's blog chronicles this week of the redesign of a Brooklyn design trio's studio remodel, so I decided to let you in on my mad dash this weekend making a big bird out of this found object. We're installing the show on Monday, so keep your eye on this blog as I pull aside the curtain at Bunny with a Toolbelt headquarters and attempt to make a suitable sidekick for Tripper's masterpiece.

party animals

another special request from one of my special customers!

Limerick entry #26!!

There once was a bluebird named Cher,
who was unable to get up in the air.
So henrietta the cow,
made a solem vow,
to ferry her friend everywhere.

submitted by Lindsay Jennings

Bunny with a Toolbelt Limerick Contest ends at midnight tonight! (PST) Try your hand at the time honored craft of wordsmithing and be eligible to win my amazing grand prize! Click here for more information. For more information about this item, click here.