The tricky part was that I also wanted the bottle to be filled with liquid. The amber glow would have more of an impact than just a hollow empty bottle with wires in it. The biggest obstacle to this plan was that water and electricity don’t mix. I had to come up with a way to shield the cables from the water, while at the same time keeping the water from leaking out of the bottle.

I have a fish tank here in my apartment and some surgical plastic tubing that goes with it to pump air into the tank. I took a little snip of tubing and found that I could snugly slide the electrical cables into them. This would at as my shield against the water. I got a diamond tipped bit and carefully carved a whole in the bottom of the bottle, inserted the shielded wires, and then plugged the gaps with pvc piping glue. (I initially tried wax and superglue, but this didn’t work well enough to my satisfaction.)

I got a larger piece of surgical tubing and slid the smaller two wires through that at the neck. I then continued to fill gaps and seal the bottle with pvc piping glue. Yet before I sealed it all up, I filled the bottle with distilled water. I chose distilled because it lacks hard minerals. I figured this would aid in the life of the lamp and prevent buildup inside the bottle. I then toyed around with how to get the water to look like whiskey. I settled on 6 drops yellow food coloring, 4 drops red, and 1 drop blue. This helps give the lamp and amber glow. I sealed everything up, plugged it in, and bingo, Whiskey lamp:

Painting isn’t my normal medium because my hands are not that steady, but I really like how these turned out. As usually, they’re all for sale either here or on my etsy website.

Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Before they took off from the island, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms. And so, Icarus fell into the sea in the area which bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.

There is also a trance song that I absolutely love about Icarus. If I ever go sky diving I will have my ipod on this track and time my jumping out of the plane exactly at the 00:48 mark.

Anyways, with this in mind I wanted to create an Icarus statue that told the story of Icarus. I don’t have the sculpting skills yet to carve a falling figure our of wood or clay, so I bought a sketch mannequin from the craft store. (click to enlarge any of these pics)

I thought about using actual craft feathers to do this project, but then I realize that they would probably look to sloppy and would now flow well if I made the sun out of copper, so I decided to go all copper. The first thing I did was make the sun.

The next, and perhaps hardest part of the project, was creating the wings. I wanted to have curved wooden wings since i thought they would be more elequent than just wooden planks strapped to his back. To do this I took some wooden skewers and boiled them for about an hour, then steamed them, and finally soaked them in a thermas of boiling water for the afternoon, all in an attempt to turn the wood into a noodle so I could easily bend then into a make-shift press and dry them to the new shape.

I then started work on the brass feathers themselves. I really wish I could have done long, flowing, full, glorious angel like wings, but the story is that Icarus’ wings fell away and were destroyed, hence why he fell into the sea. So I was forced to make some raggedy wings with only a few sparse feathers. I still think it looks nice though.

Next I came up with the idea of putting wax over the feathers, since the wings were held together by wax. It wouldn’t be too noticeable, but for those who took the time to look, it would be a nice touch. However, I made the mistake of using red sealing wax which ended up looking a lot like blood and totally stole the focus away from the rest of the statue with how gruesome it looked.

Since that looked like crap I carefully picked off all the wax by hand and re-did it in white wax that was more clear and a lot less noticeable.

I then started work on making decorative waves out of brass for the sea.

Finally, the whole thing came together. I really love it. It has the tattered wax wings of Icarus falling from the angry sun into the churning sea below. I’m quite proud of it.

I wanted to make a sun out of some sheet copper I had lying around, but in order to do that I needed to “dish” the copper. When you “dish” a metal, you are hammering it into a bowl or cone like shape. It’s fairly tricky to do since a flat piece of metal doesn’t want to become a dome.  In order to do this I needed a dish into which I could “dish” my metal. I needed to find something that had the angle of dome I wanted that I could hammer the metal into, but where? I had to improvise.

My first thought was to go down to Lowes and get a pipe cap.

Unfortunately the pipe caps at Lowes were all either PCV or threaded. The PVC ones had walls that were way to high. I would have had to saw through the PVC to cut it down to size, and that would have been a real pain. Defeated, I got back in my car to drive to the craft store to pic up some other things. That’s when I took a sip of my soda and it hit me!

I looked at the bottom of my soda can and noticed it was a dome, however a soda can’s dome was too flimsy and small to suit my needs. What else holds liquid and has a dome at the bottom? A wine bottle! I had plenty of those, and the thick glass is much stronger than flimsy aluminum. (I wasn’t going to be pounding since I was working with thin copper, so glass would work.

Here was an improvised dish, and sure enough it worked!

Improvising tools is half the fun of making crafts.

I tried everything. I tried sawing it, that didn’t work. I tried scoring it with a glass cutter and then pouring boiling water over the score marks followed by ice water; that cracked it, but often in unpredictable ways. I think I went through about five bottles experimenting with this. I had decided a while ago that this is what I wanted to make my dad for xmas, and when Dec. 24 rolled around I was in a bit of a panic.

I realized that I didn’t need to crack the bottle clean in half. Trying to do that with the super thick neck and elaborate base of many bottles made cutting it lengthwise nearly impossible. Instead, I figured I only needed to remove a portion and could leave the neck as the bow of the ship, and the bottom as the aft cabin. I took a bottle, carefully smashed a section on the shoulder, and then proceeded to delicately snap off pieces with a pair of pliers. (click pics to enlarge)

I didn’t want anyone being able to see into the ship, so I decided to paint the inside with a tapestry wine color paint. After I did this I realized I had a problem. The bottle I was using held white wine and was see through. I needed to use a dark bottle that held red wine. The green glass tinted the paint and made it look like a bottle full of chocolate milk.

(You can somewhat see the purple there, but without the light shinning right on it, the whole thing looked an ugly brown….so I scraped it all out.

Then I repainted it in a black paint and it looked much better.

The next big problem were the sharp edges around the bottle where I broke the glass. I didn’t have the tools or the time to file everything down to a smooth edge, so I came up with the idea to incorporate the wooden deck onto the boat in such a way that it covered the edges. I first built the base foundation for the deck which extended ever so slightly above the top of the glass so as to provide a level plane for the deck to sit upon.

After staining the wood, I applied the deck, glued it down, and then carefully trimmed around the edges to give it a much cleaner look.

Lastly came the mast and rigging and presto!

I went out and got a frame for it. I’m thinking it might be cool if I get two smaller fames and make a wine glass image, a flowing wine image, and arrange them like this so it looks like the bottle is pouring the wine into a glass: