My steampunk gallery

Ellie just doesn't understand.  She just doesn't understand the artistic urge.  She's like her father that way.  She was down looking at my stash of parts today, sticking her fingers in, jiggling the bins. 
"Mom, this is just junk!" she said.
"Of course it's junk," I answered. 
"This has rust on it!"
"That's valuable rust, I'll have you know.  Don't scrub it off!  Ahhh.  Now it's all shiny!  I'll have to dip it in acid again..."

I hate it when she does that.  Now I'm all conflicted.  Again.  But here, you appreciate this kind of stuff, don't you?  How about a tour?  I'll tell you all about it. 

It starts with gears.

And graphics.  Like a picture of Mona.

And watch faces

And old jewelry parts

And pretty quick you're taking apart cuckoo clocks for the mechanisms

And gluing jeweled watch works onto filagree flowers.  (and if there aren't enough jewels in the movement, you can always add some)

Before you know it, you're making polymer clay animals and imbedding watch parts in epoxy resin.

But it doesn't stop there. 

Pretty soon you have to have bee charms and parts from the scrapbook aisle

And octopusses (if you can get them before the girls at the junior high get there!) 

And somehow, they always have to have wings
. 

 And butterflies play a big part.

As well as dragonflies. 

.

And other kinds of bugs....

...like ominous flying insects with watch parts imbedded in their carapaces. 

  And crabs with electric coils for legs.

Pretty quick, you're making bugs, and other things, out of junk

And strange little men out of the stuff you find in the bottom of bins and the backs of drawers. 

Then, suddenly, all your animals start sprouting wings. 

But is it steampunk, you ask?  Well, according to the book I got from the fabric store, almost everything is.  As long as it's a bit weird, and has metal bits.  Perhaps its neo-Victorian.  Or Victorianesque.  The Victorian was the age of steam, wasn't it?  As well as an age of conspicuous consumption, where people thought that if a little went a long way, a lot went a lot further.  Remember the days of parlors stacked ten deep in knick-knacks, with doilies under everything? 

Ah, come on!  It was the eighties, for pity sake.  You know, Victorian revival days? 

What?  You weren't born then? 

Trust me.  It was complex.  You needed stuff stacked on stuff to be a true Victorian, and the lacier the better. 

Ah. I sense a conflict between all this frilly filagree and the proto-techno, rivetted, hard-metal clockwork silliness of steampunk.

Or maybe not...

Remember the Nautilus?  Have you ever looked at one of those old-time crank treadle sewing machines?  Those Victorians knew how to decorate their machinery!

I think I'll return the favor, by decorating the decorative with machinery. 

Maybe all this is a case of wanting to return to a time when the technological revolution was just beginning, and everything seemed possible. 

Even space travel.  If we went back to steampunk time, there would still be air on Mars, and the possibility of ancient civilizations in its dry riverbeds.  Machines would soon be made to think like human beings, we were sure of it.  Stephen Hawking would not yet have dissed the idea of contact with other races, fearing microbial disasters, and black holes were as yet unimagined. 

It was a time when people like Alphonse Mucha could create an artistic movement all by himself.

Then Art Nouveau gave way to Art Deco 

And then came several cultural moments which shall remain unmentioned and deliberately forgotten.

But that doesn't mean their remainders have no place in steampunk.  With steampunk you have the advantage of  being able to make fun of something while adapting it to run on coal!

 

And you can make demons of shoe clips.

And celebrate creepy things

And dress in black, like you used to when you tried to be a Goth in high school

   

And you find that just by adding rivets to the wings of a metal butterfly, you can make it something else entirely. 







And something really ugly, like a spill of amber colored, plastic beads if placed next to something equally ugly, like a pair of orange plastic flowers, suddenly become art. 








And the more stuff you shoved at the piece, the better it looks. 

With steampunk, Mona can smile from the center of a seashell flower, and the Vetruvian man can finally have that fig leaf he's always needed. 

You can make old silver earring parts  look completely at home sprouting serpentine-chain tentacles.

You can hide secrets behind mysterious old locks. 

And then just hand out the keys. 

You can show your cultural side.

                                                                                      Or your complete lack thereof.

And if all else fails, you can make a watch movement the center of attention

So here I am, making dreams of bits of old jewelry, recycling nostalgia into something people are sure to ask you about. 

And when they ask, you can say, why yes!  Those wolves do have wings.  It's steampunk!  It's supposed to be a bit weird! 

And now for a word from our sponser: 

Find many of these items, and a lot more, for sale in my store - Brinemere - on Etsy.