Category: non-fiber crafts

My brother turned 40 two days ago, and he collects Pez dispensers. For his birthday, therefore, I made him some custom Pez. The first step, left a mystery in last Thursday’s post, was ruining several utility knife blades decapitating real Pez dispensers, retaining the mechanism that pushes the candy out. The mixed media was to make new heads, relevant to his interests, and fully operational as dispensers.

Here are the decapitated dispensers. I made some spares in case I needed them. The original heads were football helmets and characters from the movie Cars.

And here are the recapitated dispensers!

He is a computer engineer and loves photography, to the point that he started a side business photographing weddings and other events. He love to bike and do other (nonmotorized) racing sports. He and his wife have a boat that they use as often as possible in the summer, which I tried but failed to replicate in clay. I could have drawn from his hobby of woodworking or the fact that he’s a great cook, but those both seemed harder to capture in Pez head form.

All of the dispensers do still work, although I realized on his birthday – two days after shipping – that I completely forgot to include the candy in the package.

Here are some more angles. From the top you can see the tread I cut into the tire, and to my surprise, the vent lines I cut into the computer monitor. From the side/back you can see that the computer is a Macintosh, with the power button on the right near the back.

Best of all, he loved them. Happy birthday, big bruvver!

The final pictures of this project will be revealed on Monday, but I have some preliminary ones to show you. I was exploring mixed media, though that ended up being mostly clay with decorations.

The first step of the project, which cannot be revealed right now because it would give the whole thing away, happened way back in the late summer or early fall. I was waiting for the next steps until I’d finished my SF embroidery, figuring it would be better to concentrate on one thing at a time. I did, however, get out a lot of materials the last weekend of stitching.

I wanted to do four figures, but apparently I have no idea what a boat looks like. I tried several times, looking at pictures in between, and still, no. It’s a shoe! It’s a bicycle seat! It’s an arrowhead! So, there were three, two in clay + mirror and one in clay + wire.

The wire one was maybe going to be a piece of a commercial toy, but I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I wanted: a bicycle tire. So I wound some wire around a small rod and around part of a large funnel, and then used smaller wire to make spokes between them. That was a pain.

The ones with mirrors were a computer and a camera. The camera, in fact, ended up with two mirrors: one for the lens and one for the viewscreen on the back. The computer had a mirror for the monitor screen. These were surprisingly unpainful to make. Here’s a picture of the three figures after baking:

I didn’t have any black clay so I painted the camera and tire after baking them. Fortunately you can still see the tread on the tire, sliced in with a utility knife. The vent slots on the computer monitor, however, disappeared when I painted that figure with pearly white paint. Oh well! I used a bent wire to clean the paint off the mirrors after it dried – the bottom of the U.

The bicycle tire is set up to actually spin, though I can’t show you that picture until the big reveal. This entailed some time at the hardware store looking at all the options (fortunately one of the guys who works there was very enthusiastic about this project and helped produce ideas), but worked out pretty well and with minimal cutting and bending of wire.

Until Monday!