Almost everything I made long ago is gone, except for a few things I made for others that they kept safe. (My oldest sister Sabynthe has a centaur and a man-hunting monster that I made around this time.) The other creations fell to the economic realities of childhood- I could not afford to buy a neverending stream of pipecleaners, so when I tired of a figure, I would disassemble it and make it into something else. The figures on this table had all lived past lives as other sorts of creatures.
It made sense to me at the time, and certainly the enjoyment of making these critters was vastly extended by recycling the material, but it also means that I have lost the physical history of how I went about teaching myself how to make these creatures. So this photo is fascinating to me, as a glimpse into the past.
These figures were made before I realized you could make flat expanses of woven pipecleaner, so the red dragon on the table has empty gaps in his wings, rather than solid wings. I'd say that weaving pipecleaner into flat expanses was one of the most important things I've worked out, because it allowed me to break free of the 'stick man' model. Everything I made at this point was basically a stick man with various embellishments, but weaving into a frame of pipecleaner allowed me to make winged dragons, castle walls, ships with rooms inside them- anything my imagination could devise.
Of course, even that freedom was limited by the strength of the pipecleaners, because everything was wobbly and easily distorted. It took a surprisingly long time (ie the last five years) to think of using thicker wire armatures to allow more elaborate structures that would not collapse under their own weight.
I just keep thinking- on my own, I've come up with a handful of tricks that allow me to make all sorts of things. But what sort of tricks have others devised, that I never thought of? Because for everything I work out on my own, there's surely ten other tricks I'd never have thought of on my own.
