Friday Arts & Crafts Day Update: February 11, 2022
Arts and crafts for The Nick White Show has begun!
Starting with costuming for Luigi, the elderly mobster who owns the strip club next to main character Nick‘s recording studio. Luigi, sadly, is a frail and helpless 91-year old Alzheimer’s patient and not at all still the fully functioning head of a criminal empire who will outlive us all.
LOL… in any case, he needed a tattered bathrobe, bunny slippers, and bunny ears, and I had to make those for him from scratch.
By hand.
Which took forever… granted I was watching Nightwave and Adonis Paul on YouTube and chatting with my friends on Facebook while I worked, so that probably slowed me down.
First up, the bunny ears. I made them with a couple leftover pipe cleaners from last week’s Brigid crosses, then used a scrap of cotton quilt batting and a smaller scrap of pink quilting cotton and sewed them together with cotton thread.
I like the rustic quality. Like these are something Luigi might have made by himself during one of his art therapy sessions with the nurses.
You might also notice that I used acrylic paint markers to add grey and white to Luigi’s hair. Usually I prefer dolls with rooted hair instead of plastic molded hair, but that’s not always possible with the menfolk, especially when it comes to more unique-looking male dolls, and the fact that I need them to be jointed and posable makes the pickings even slimmer. But then, it kinda is an advantage here, because if Luigi had rooted hair, I would have had to remove it and re-root with grey hair, and that’s a major pain in the ass. (Nick is rerooted; I did that years ago when I was going to use him for a different art project, and as I recall it took at least a couple weeks of re-rooting in the evenings while listening to Adam Carolla’s podcast. And I kinda vowed to avoid ever doing that again, lol…)
Which seems like a good time to show a “before” on Luigi, the doll for whom had originally gonna be a studio assistant and was dressed accordingly:
He was originally one of the Harry Potter dolls, Snape.
I’m sure doll collectors would be horrified, but whatever. I need my “cast” to work, not just sit pristine in their boxes. And hey, look at this way: every time I buy one, throw the box away, and redress him or her to be part of the merry band of retards for the show, it raises the value of your pristine boxed doll.
So far the most expensive doll I’ve bought and put to work is the Lamplighter from Mary Poppins Returns, or as I call him, “Fictional Bono”:
(Shown here cavorting with Ginger Babczuk, music “journalist”.)
But that didn’t involve any arts and crafts, merely redressing him from my stash of Ken clothes that I’ve been amassing, so never mind. Back to Luigi.
I made Luigi’s bathrobe out of some aqua flannelette I had in my sewing stash and I had a Barbie faux-fur coat that I laid out as a rough pattern, adding a wider margin to account for Luigi being obviously wider than a Barbie in the arms and shoulders. At the last minute I decided to add a hood to it, and it’s a good thing I once made 2 ritual robes/cloaks for myself that had hoods so I could remember roughly how I put those together (even though it’s been years).
It’s pretty rough and the flannel will get tattered on the edges with use, but then, that kinda works.
Whereas if I ever have to put Fictional Bono into a bathrobe, I will need to nicely finish the edges and all, because presumably actual Bono’s bathrobe is some $10,000 luxury model from Bulgari or Gucci and Fictional Bono’s should sorta kinda match… not that we will see Fictional Bono all that much… in the dozen scripts I’ve written for the show and various other episode outlines I have ready, we will see him in exactly 3 brief cutaway gag scenes. Mostly he gets to sit on the pink sofa and chill.
Whereas Luigi is trying to look like a deranged old mental patient to avoid prosecution… er, I mean, Luigi actually is a deranged old mental patient. So, tattered edges are fine.
That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Lastly, at least in terms of Luigi, are his bunny slippers, which I made from felt and some beads from my stash:
So, the overall look:
The next on my to-do list for the show is to make a trailer, which won’t require a ton of arts and crafts, but I do need to make some little microphones, mic stands, and I might need to make a stripper pole for that as well. So that’ll be in next week’s arts & crafts update.
In other non-web series arts & crafts, I managed an hour of stitching on “Love Grows Here” by Autumn Lane Stitchery:
And I dyed 4 more pieces of 18-count aida:
I’m down to my last 5 bottles of Rit dye, so we’re almost done with the dyeing spree. By the time the last few bottles are used up, I should have damn near a lifetime supply of aida for stitching, lol… But at least I don’t have boxes of dye bottles to lug with me on the move I plan to make later this year or early next.
