Only 8 more days till Bloomsday!
I have never made buttons before so this sure was a challenge! Once I got the hang of it though it was hard to stop. I used a “Badge-a-Mint” button maker 
(mixed results with this hand-machine—often it will work and other times it would not). My Joyce buttons borrow heavily from well-known photos of 
Joyce & Nora as well as incorporating more of the 1961 American edition of Ulysses. The background imagery is from a recycled Anthropologie catalog.
“The Hours” Necklace
I sketched the initial design for this necklace about a year ago and it has been a work-in-progress ever since. I had to find the right watch faces—particularly one large enough to hold the names of the Dubliners who inhabit the pages of “Wandering Rocks.”
Lucky for me I finally came across the perfect 
pocketwatch face! “The Hours” is my favorite creation thus far (and you must pardon my Woolf-humor here). Each episode is represented by its own individual watch face with its corresponding time in Ulysses. For a 
detailed description of each episode’s time, see Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Like my post, two days previous, I used a word or short phrase to represent (and hopefully encapsulate) each episode. A list of episodes and their representative words/phrases is below:
Telemachus: “Stately Plump”
Nestor: “history is a nightmare”
Proteus: “ineluctable modality of the visible”
Calypso: “faintly scented urine”
Lotus-Eaters: “flowers of idleness”
Hades: “Poor Paddy!”
Aeolus: “DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN”
Lestroygonians: “U.P.:up”
Scylla & Charybdis: “The one about Hamlet”
Wandering Rocks: I used the shortest version of each Dubliner’s name: Conmee, Kelleher, Sailor, Katey, Boody, Boylan, Artifoni, Stephen, Dunne, Lambert, Lenehan, Flynn, Bloom, Dilly, Simon, Kernan, Cowley, Cunningham, Mulligan, Dignam, and cavalcade. I also added “Dublin” as I think that Dublin is the main character of this episode.
Sirens: “Jingle. Bloo”
Cyclops: “the citizen”
Nausicca: “O!”
Oxen of the Sun: “wombfruit”
Circe: “ashplant”
Eumaeus: “cabman’s shelter”
Ithaca: “womb weary”
Penelope: “yes”—there are 3 watch faces devoted to Molly’s recurring “yeses” in the episode.
11 more days till Bloomsday!
Steampunk Joyce Pocketwatch Another Joyce inspired creation involving time! I wanted to make something Steampunk at least once during this challenge. I was given this gold pocketwatch by a fan at the Alliday Everyday Craft Show last year. It has a wonderful texture to it. I took it apart and used one of the internal cogs to adorn the chain. I used the metal clock spring too.
On the inside of the pocketwatch are three layers. On the bottom layer is a circular scrap from the 1961 American edition of Ulysses that I have been using. The clock spring makes up the next later and on the glass face there is a tiny cartoon image of Joyce walking.
“—16 June 1904” appears on the facing inside cover of the pocketwatch. A whimsical deconstructed timepiece!
12 more days till Bloomsday! 
All of these thoughts lead me to creating a “Ulysses Clock.” The episodes are in order—for example, “Telemachus” is the first episode and represents 1:00. After episode 12, there is an overlap.
While not as intricate as my previous pieces, it’s a fun piece. I have limited abilities and knowledge of clock-making though this Craftzine video was certainly helpful (I recommend it to those of you who try this): http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/09/how-to_make_your_own_clock.html.
Here’s a list of the “times”:
1:00 (Telemachus & Nausicca): “snotgreen sea” & “O!”
2:00 (Nestor & Oxen of the Sun): “history” & “wombfruit”
3:00 (Proteus & Circe): “dogsbody” & “ashplant”
4:00 (Calypso & Eumaeus): “Metempsychosis” & “cabman’s shelter”
5:00 (Lotus-Eaters & Ithaca): “Pear’s Soap” & “When?”
6:00 (Hades & Penelope): “Poor Dignam” & “yes”
7:00 (Aeolus): “IMPROMPTU”
8:00 (Lestroygonians): “U.P.:up”
9:00 (Scylla & Charybdis): “The one about Hamlet”
10:00 (Wandering Rocks): “Father Conmee”
11:00 (Sirens): “Jingle. Bloo”
12:00 (Cyclops): “the citizen”
I'd like to note that the times I have listed are not the times when these episodes occur. I felt that there would be more overlap and the clock would be harder to read. So instead of "Telemachus" representing 8:00, the episode represents 1:00 as it is the first episode of Ulysses.
13 days till Bloomsday!
A String of “nightblue fruit”
I love the poetic moments of Ulysses. This necklace is inspired by one such moment (a question & answer that appears in “Ithaca”):
What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. (U 698)
I can just imagine a summer night like that—dark everywhere, maybe even your spirits, except for the 
sky. To translate “nightblue fruit” into a physical “there” (as Audrey Niffennegger would say), I drew constellations on paper and colored it with my “True Blue” colored pencil.
What do you think “humid nightblue fruit” hanging in the “heaventree of stars” looks like?
Made with paper, mod podge, eyepins, fine gunmetal chain, jump rings, and a lobster claw.
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