Fabric Cat Mask Pattern

I recently posted about my Feral Black Cat Mask made from cotton fabric.  Here’s the white version, for which I shortened the pattern so it covers a bit less of the face.  Snowball the Shelter Ghost Mask is made from undyed 60%hemp/40%cotton muslin, a single layer of cotton batting, and a backing of unbleached cotton muslin.  This mask is hand-embroidered with three sizes of pearl cotton thread, handcut polished aluminum shisha mirrors, and tassels of Nepalese undyed recycled silk yarn.  A larger photo is available on my Flickr page.

Snowball the Shelter Ghost

FABRIC MASKS have several advantages over leather, papier-mache, or metal masks.  They are soft, flexible, and comfortable to wear.  They are not messy to make, require no special equipment beyond basic handsewing materials, and are suitable for a variety of quilting, embroidery, and embellishment techniques.

This 2-D half-mask covers only the upper half of the face.  It can be made very simply from a single piece of heavy nonfraying fabric such as leather,ultrasuede, or felt.  But for most fabrics you will need a front piece and a lining, and some way to bind the edges if you don’t want to stitch the two pieces inside out and turn them.  I chose to stitch both masks right side out and bind the edges with buttonhole stitch, which is time-consuming but very elegant looking.  It also adds weight and stiffness to the finished mask.

Below is the pattern for both masks.  You can download a large printable version for free HERE.  The outer line is the cutting line.  There are two variations for the bottom corners of the mask.  I used the longer, downcurved points for the black mask, to anchor for the metal ornaments.  I used the shorter horizontal points for the white mask, to give a lighter look.  The other lines are the quilting pattern that I designed for the black mask.

ADJUSTING THE EYEHOLES:  Before using a pattern, you may need to adjust the size and/or position of the eyeholes.  Trace the pattern onto a piece of scrap paper and cut it out, including the eyeholes.  Hold the pattern up to your face and look in the mirror.  You should have a clear, unobstructed view through the eyeholes.  Mark any needed adjustments, redraw it with your “custom-fitted” eyeholes, and check the fit with a second tracing of the paper pattern.  Once you are satisfied with the position of the eyeholes, you’re ready to make the mask.

Fabric Cat Mask Pattern

Here’s a comparison photo of both masks.  Although the black one was cut from the longer pattern, it’s a smaller mask because I used a wider seam allowance than the one shown on the pattern.

Fabric Cat Masks

New Dresses

I made some new clothes to replace several things that wore out last summer.  This is a dress pattern that I made in 2002 and have used several times.  My cotton dresses last for about five years (sometimes more) of regular wear.  They start out as “nice” clothes and are relegated to hiking wear and finally to house and/or shop clothes before they finally fall apart.

The first dress is made of four Bali batiks and is unadorned except for decorative patches above the hem (three small ones in front, one larger one in back).  The second dress is made from a cotton print that is sold for 1860s historical reenactment clothing.  The pattern was modified to give it a larger collar, curved waist, and skirt ruffle.  There is hand embroidery on the collar, cuffs, and skirt.

Purple Batik Dress

Embroidered Calico Dress

A Cone Bell Amulet

Pendant or amulet, 2 1/4″ long, with two nesting pointed cones.  Smaller cone has been given a dimpled bur texture on the inside.  Forged from two triangles of 1/8″ mild steel plate, with black steel wire ring.  With only two of them (one very small), they are primarily decorative and hardly qualify as bells, but they do make a small clinking sound.

Nesting Pointed Cones

Winter Solstice – Iron Torc

My Winter Solstice experiment – a torc made from 14 gauge annealed black steel wire.  I like the forged iron torcs better, but they take a lot of time to make and are quite rigid, making them unsuitable for sale on my website since the buyer can’t try it on.  The wire torc is springy and can even be tweaked to fit once the basic shape has been formed.  This one is a bit short for me, but would easily fit somebody smaller.  Made from three strands of wire, wrapped with a fourth strand.  The ends of the wire are coiled to form mirror-image spiral terminals.

Jellyfish Bell

I just put four new bells on my website – they have been lying around the shop half-done for months.  Finally got them out of the way so I can concentrate on newer projects.  Here’s one of them.  Jellyfish is forged from a triangle of 1/8″ steel plate, with the corners split, drawn out, rounded, and polished.  The clapper is a tapered coil.  I may add more links.  This one was a lot more work than most of my bells.  It has a beautiful light, clear, sustained sound – I’ll put a video up on YouTube in the next couple of days.

Craterellus is named for Craterellus cornucopioides, a black trumpet-shaped edible fungus.  A very stylized drawing of it appears on the Ironwing Tarot Seven of Bells card.  This is a nested triplet of cone bells forged from 1/8″ plate.  The two larger bells are drilled through the side and the three bells are wired together.  The large bell has black steel wire fringe on the sides, and the medium-sized one has steel wire spirals (not visible in the photo).  All three bells were flared on the anvil horn, then crimped with pliers while hot to give them a wavy edge.  The edges are highly polished.  A pretty bell that was probably more work than it was worth, since the clinky sound isn’t as loud or bright as I’d hoped.  Still, it would make a very decorative and pleasantly noisy decoration for a drum or costume.

 

Black Cat Mask

Feral Black Cat Mask is quilted, embroidered, and embellished with black steel wire ornaments.  Buttonhole stitch binds the eyeholes and outside edges.  Made from black cotton fabric (front and back), cotton batting, quilting thread, and #8 pearl cotton embroidery thread.   Entirely handstitched except for the ties, which are machine stitched.  8.5″ x 6″, excluding ornaments and ties.  Very comfortable to wear, and easily rolls up to fit in a small jewelry-sized bag.  There is a larger image on my Flickr site.

Guatemalan Blue Jade

A few months ago, a friend gave me two pieces of Guatemalan ”Olmec Blue” jade for carving.  It is a a muted translucent bluish-green, like seawater.  Guatemala has produced green jade since ancient times.  The source for the dusky bluish stone of Olmec carvings remained a mystery until 1999, when flooding from Hurricane Mitch revealed outcrops of blue jade in a remote jungle river valley.  Prospectors brought small pieces of gem-quality jade to the Tucson gem shows a few years later.  It remains an expensive material and difficult to obtain.  Compared to other jades, it’s also a challenge to carve, especially in small sizes, since a lot of it contains innumerable pockets of crumbly crystals that can give even highly polished stones a slightly pitted “orange peel” surface texture.   I cut a thin slice off the end of one piece and carved this claw-shaped pendant while removing as little material as possible from the tiny slice of stone.  The back isn’t shown, but the two sides are identical.  The other pendant is fossil mammoth ivory with a very similar bluish-green color.  Both are about 1.5″ long, including the sterling silver settings.  The blue color in the jade is due to iron and small amounts of titanium; in the fossil ivory it is due to vivianite, an iron phosphate.  Both pendants will be part of a necklace with beads and mixed metals.

Ironwing Tarot: Free Book Download

December 2009 is the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Ironwing Tarot.  Although the full 78-card deck/book set sold out 18 months ago, I still get occasional requests for copies of the deck and/or book.  Since I don’t plan to reprint the deck, I’ve decided to make the book available for free download from my website.   

Download the Ironwing Tarot Book HERE.  (.pdf file, 6.7 mb)

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The 112-page book is intended to print on half-sheets of 8.5 x 11 inch paper, so you’ll need to cut the printed sheets in half and assemble them.  (A note to collectors:  The version that I sold with the deck had a black spiral binding but otherwise looked no different from what you’d print on a home computer.)  The book includes background material about iron geology, blacksmithing, and shamanism.  There are detailed descriptions and a tiny image for each card, several spreads and creative exercises, a few poems, and some other odds and ends.  All of it is intended to make the deck more interesting and usable.  The entire book is black and white, including the images for the Major Arcana, so you don’t need a color printer.

Needless to say, the Ironwing Tarot deck and book are protected by copyright.  Feel free to download the book for your personal use, but not for publication or resale.

I have NO copies of the 78-card deck available for sale.  Decks can sometimes be found for trade on various Tarot forums and occasionally on Ebay.  I am not currently a member of any online Tarot communities, and have stepped away from that world to work on other things (including the Black Cat Deck, which is non-Tarot).

To everyone who has purchased a deck and/or offered their comments about it, either online or privately:  Thank you very much for your support, interest, and contribution.  It was a great project and I have enjoyed sharing it with everyone.

Tucson All Souls Procession 09

We walked in the Tucson All Souls Procession last night.  We took pictures this year – here’s my set, and from any of these you can link to Flickr’s ALL SOULS PROCESSION group and see more photos from other people.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonfangs/sets/72157622765310126/

A big crowd this year, and more spectators than usual.  This event is 20 years old and began as a small procession (so obscure that I never heard of it during the two years I lived in Tucson in the early 90s).   I’ve only attended for the past four years, and during that time it has become a major, heavily-publicized event.  It’s actually TWO events – the procession and the finale.  The procession is open to anyone and is a fascinating showcase for creativity of all kinds – costumes and masks, sculpture, carettas (mobile altars, floats or art), ritual objects, music, and dance.  As was probably inevitable, it appears to be gradually losing its original focus (a memorial procession to honor dead friends, family, and ancestors) and becoming a more generalized public costume party, but there is still enough of the “community deathwalk” aspect to be very powerful.  It starts slowly and often rather solemn.  But when the mob makes the “Underworld passage” through the Fourth Avenue underpass, it conjures the spirit of the Oldest River with a cacophony of howls, ululations, thundering drums, and clanging bells…and all the invisible things riding the night air are drawn through in a gust of wind, scattering on the other side as the crowd becomes quieter and more relaxed, and people move a little faster and more freely. 

The Urn heads the procession, but the burning of the Urn no longer serves any ritual purpose, since the Finale has evolved into a theatrical spectacle of its own that includes firespinners, acrobats, and musicians.  The logistics of this event make for a very long wait in the crowd after the end of the procession.  I have seen it once, but I am not fond of theatrical performance for its own sake, so I prefer to just enjoy the procession and go home.

Archean Banded Iron Cabochons

I recently bought a vintage lapidary machine on Craigslist.  It’s for cutting cabochons, and includes a trim saw, grinding wheels, sanding drum, and buffing wheel.  I mostly want it for making beads and cutting preforms for gem carving. 

Wyoming Archean Banded Iron

Double-sided drilled and polished pendant, 31×21x5mm.

Matched pair of triangular cabochons, 20×16x4mm.

This is Early Archean banded iron from the Shirley Basin in southeastern Wyoming.  At 3.7 billion years old, it is one of the oldest rocks on earth.  This rare material is similar in composition to Australian “tiger iron” but is not as colorful and is almost never cut as a gem.   The polished stones were cut from two pebbles that I collected ten years ago.   The gray metallic stripes are mostly hematite with minor black magnetite layers.  The brown layers are composed of tiny interlocking  sheaves of crocidolite crystals, an iron-rich metamorphic silicate that forms at relatively high temperature and pressure. 

The larger stone will adorn a medicine bag.  I will probably set the triangular pair as earrings.