A rainy day in my studio

Today was a particularly stormy day. Lots of thunder & lightening, and finally some rain.

This kind of weather makes it easy to spend the day in my studio.

Recently I bought a small block of self-hardening clay, that doesn't need to be fired in a kiln.

I used the whole block to make a whole bunch of little skulls and one big one.

Now that they've dried for a few days, today was a perfect day to paint them all, so that's what I did. I think they look great all together.

The big skull I made into a wall hanging, complete with glow in the dark beads. Each small skull has a hole in it, so they can be used as beads, or pendants.

I took numerous photos of them, and will add some to my etsy store. I'm just not sure if it would be better to sell them individually, in groups, make them into necklaces or sell them as a supply for someone else to use... in their creations.

I ended up liking some of the photos so much, that I made a few really cool gift cards with them.

A long time ago, I had joined and set up a shop on Zazzle- but hadn't really added anything to it, so I uploaded a couple of skull photos (and grandpuppy photos) and designed some cool buttons, key-chains, mugs, a neckTie, and even shoes!!

Decisions, decisions...

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Updated Oct 29/10

It's almost Halloween, and I've finally added some of the skulls in my Etsy shop.

(I've added links to the photos, and to the highlighted texts.)

DIY live mousetrap,

At our old house, we had a mouse problem when we moved in,
so I made my own cheap & simple live trap, using a deep (plastic) garbage can, long piece of wood, newspaper, tape, scissors, peanut butter, and (chocolate chip) cookies.
It worked great, I caught 5 mice the 1st night I tried it!
- Lay a sheet of newspaper on top of the garbage can to cover it completely.
- Tape it to the can so it is secure and looks kinda like a drum.
- Then cut a + in the middle of the paper. (The trap entrance). The pointy flaps should be a couple of inches long.
- Smear a bit of peanut butter on each of the 4 tips of the paper.
- Use the piece of wood to form a ramp (lean one end of the piece wood, on top of the garbage can, the other end on the ground,)
- Make a tiny trail of cookie crumbs going up the ramp and leading to the peanut butter. Sprinkle some more crumbs all over the paper.
- Now you just gotta wait! and eat the rest of your cookies.

The idea is the mice will follow the cookie trail onto the paper, when they go for the peanut butter, they fall in and can't get out.

If you are releasing the mice, you have to take them far away,(a couple of miles anyhow) or they'll just come back.
Then I bought a little plug-in mouse deterrant thing.
(It makes a sound we can't hear, but mice can and they don't like it, so they stay away.)
It worked!