NATURALLY ZEE - Fitness & Natl Hair Journey

UPDATE a/o May 2012 Because I love to work with my hands and create a variety of things. I thought I could make my own mannequins.  I used the paper mache' technique to make my mine. See below for step by step on how to make your own WO-MANNEQUIN Materials : Grocery bags, wallpaper paste and tape. Tools required: brush, box cutter, plastic wrap Grocery bags Bags from my local store Wallpaper paste (premixed) purchased from hardware store Boxcutter purchased from hardware store Method : Papier-mâché technique What is Papier-mâché? It's French for chewed-up paper due to it's appearance. In this case, torn-up appearance. I used a main mannequin as the frame to create MY PEACE of JEWELRY WO-MANNEQUINs. Plastic wrap   Yes, the same plastic wrap to wrap your left overs   I wrap the original mannequin in plastic wrap to avoid it getting wet or sliced. Plastic wrap clings to itself without...

Here is my latest necklace that I made. It features 3 strands of 12 x 8mm Olive wood oval beads with a Congolo seed as a pendant. The Congolo seed measures approximately 2" hgt x 1.5" width. The necklace is very light. The pendant, which is the Congolo seed is also known as a "Sea bean". These sea-beans don't initially come from the sea. Nonetheless, they commonly drift to and into the oceans and wash ashore, so being referred to as "sea-beans". They come from trees and vines that grow along tropical shores and rain forests all over the world. The seeds fall from their parent plant into waterways, such as the Amazon River, then drift through inlets to reach the ocean. They travel with ocean currents until they wash up on a beach somewhere, perhaps thousands of miles from their origin. Sea-beans are quite hard and buoyant, which helps them survive their long-distance voyage. I don't know exactly where my Sea beans originally come from but I bought ...

I work at UCLA. Because California is broke and need to save money, we employees were given an extra week off (excuse me, it's called a furlough, what a word that I never heard before last year) for Xmas break. We were off from December 21 thru Jan 3. Besides working out, spinning and yoga, I made jewelry. Here is one PEACE I made. It's a 3-strand necklace made of olive wood beads from Bethlehem, Israel. The third strand is spaced with brass/copper bell beads from Morocco and the 1st and 2nd strands are spaced with white colored African trade beads. If you look real close, I forgot to place an African trade bead between two olive wood beads. Ooops! I am not going to restring this necklace. Do you think anyone will really notice? It's a really pretty necklace. Goes with anything. Because I am jean and t-shirt kind of girl, I would wear it with some Levi skinny jeans and white scoop neck t-shirt and some random gold-plated hoop earrings. I don't like to be matchy-matchy....

I made the Mannequin using grocery bag paper and wallpaper paste. I wrapped the original mannequin in Glad wrap (so I would not damage it with the wallpaper paste), tore up the paper bag into strips, brushed each strip with wallpaper paste and slapped it the original mannequin (several layers), waited for it to dry and voila, my Womannequin! I love it!

I display my necklaces on long neck torso mannequins, that I bought from Mannequin House. They are really cool wrapped in burlap twine. I get more compliments on the damn mannequins than my necklaces, so I said I want to make mannequins that have the same shape but not as "pretty". Then I had another thought - why not try and sell them too. The question of the day, was how do you make these mannequins. You can find anything online. I searched on line and voila, I found instuctions on someone else's blog. Used paper bags and wallpaper paste to create the lovely mannequin. Here it is. It was really easy! It's a woman's torso with the following measurements: 15.5" Length x 9.25" Width and 25.25" Height.