Hey everyone! How's your summer going so far? Good I hope?
Well we're in a whirlwind of activity at the ole Hays House, still in the middle of house-wide renovations as well as decluttering and cleaning out the house of all unnecessary junk. Don't you just hate that? You look around and figure out that the place is a cluttery mess and you have to do a "house purge" to get everything cleaned out and reorganized. In my case, I had 15 years of stored crap in my basement that has to go before I lose my marbles. My workroom has been moved downstairs due to lack of space anywhere else (which is why I wasn't working on minis for so long), and as it is I'm starting to feel like the thing under the stairs in the deep recesses of the house. Yikes. Must. Get. Junk. Out. Now.
So that's what we're doing. And laying kitchen tiles as the same. And I'm trying to work on minis as well now.
I was contacted by the new editor of American Miniaturist Magazine and invited to submit work for the upcoming Halloween edition. Right about that time, I got the blue screen of death on my computer and lost all my previous work photos until I get someone to fix it. Ugh. Do you ever get the feeling after a rash of bad luck that you're under some sort of curse? I'm starting to think I've got a curse on my head :)
So anyway, I'll be making some new really good (I hope) minis for that and shooting some new photos since my oldies are currently under blue screen lock down. I hope something ends up being good enough for publication-that would be so much fun!
I'm currently working on a low side cabinet in the Honeydukes theme which I plan on pulling out all the stops on. It should be pretty exciting. I've been getting some requests for more of that theme so I must do a few pieces before I get started on my spooky Halloween stuff. Speaking of that, I just redid Sherry's (my MIL) Marie Antoinette doll, table and chairs set she made previously. I really felt it needed to go in a different and more exciting direction and that her hand-sculpted doll would be much more fun as a Halloween type miniature instead. So she has been re-imagined into the ghost of the Countess Bathory, the infamous blood countess from Hungary. For the horrific story of what she did, view her wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory
Oh my goodness, what a crazy woman! So anyway, I thought it would be neat to make a miniature of her and her atrocious interests for Halloween. Check out the bloody axe on the table top:
To make a long story short, she was rumored to have bathed in the blood of her beautiful young victims (possibly numbering in the hundreds if the witnesses were credible) in an effort to stay young herself, as well as drinking the blood. In essence, she was a complete psychopath! Sherry did a wonderful job making her beautiful in sculpt, hair and dress while I took the pleasuring in painting her skin/eyes to look white and sparkly (ghostly) with the blackness of her soul running down her face. She is meant to look tattered, ghostly, haunting, and spooky. In her hand, a wine glass of blood from one of her victims. I decorated her table to reflect her terrible hobbies: bloody candelabra with bleeding candles, bottles and tottles of unknown nefarious purposes, a handcrafted bloody axe, Transylvanian Gazette newspaper, fortune telling orb, a bottle of vampiric blood, a book on vampire forensics, a death warrant scroll, a terrible place setting with a severed skeleton hand holding a red rose, silverware-all covered in ghostly white spiderwebs with one little spider perched on top of a red rose flower arrangement. Tatty black tablecloth covers the table top as well.
Fit for the finest haunted house or room box in your home :)
Available here at this clickable link below:
Please stay tuned for soon to be new Harry Potter items that I'm currently working on.
Have a good summer and have some adventures everyone! Hugs-Tara