Melissa Manley |
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description
“Feed me Seymour!” Sausage casing flowers! From creepy to whimsical we’ll explore wire botanical forms, which we’ll cover with sausage casings. I like to use dark annealed iron wire, or binding wire, as it is black, which shows through, rusts under the casings and well, just looks cool! The casing can be dyed with inks, concentrated watercolor or fabric dye to achieve colorful effects or it can be left a natural beige. The casing dries to a taut form over the wire. If you don’t have wire working experience, no problem! Just bring your non-squimish, bold self and be ready for fun and adventure!
Botanica Exotica
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bio
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supply list
- A large yogurt tub or other container for water at your workspace
- Variety of jeweler’s pliers and wire cutters for forming wire- available at hobby stores like AC Moore, Michaels & the hobby section of Walmart. You will want some with small tips and maybe one with serrated jaws.
- Tweezers
- Scissors
- Your favorite inks or fabric dye (I’ll bring some too), brush to apply it and a container or palette if you need to mix it.
- Examples of flowers for inspiration
- Other optional items: Peerless Watercolors work well on the gut- http://www.peerlesscolor.com/products.htm
- Gloves (if you think you want them)
- Colored wire if you want it (I will bring iron wire which is black and will rust under the gut, but I love that!)
- You may want small dried pods to incorporate in your flowers, or beads, or porcupine quills, skewers or twigs as stems? (These won’t be posable) Maybe even plastic flower parts to mix in.
- Anything you can think of that would be cool to use with funky flowers!
- Little wooden forms as bases, if you want a base. Kids blocks are cute for this. Some of my flowers are just spirals at the bottom, but I’ll bring drill and bits just in case.
- Needle and thread to experiment with sewing the gut
- A box to get your flowers home.
- Covering for your clothes (if you worry about being messy with ink) I’ll bring wire and gut, other tidbits and energy!
Melissa Manley lives and works in southeastern North Carolina a few miles from Wrightsville Bch. She received her BA in studio arts from University of NC at Wilmington in the 80’s. Many years later, she went back to grad school, earning her MFA in Metal Design at East Carolina University in 2006. Melissa teaches metals at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington. Teaching and making, keeping up with her teenage musician daughter Meredith, and her professional kayak guru and partner Robert Smith keeps her VERY busy! To see what she’s up to, Melissa’s blog: http://melissamanleystudios.blogspot.com/
