Dark Arts and Crafts

Can a plant be a predator? Probably not — but on Dark Arts & Crafts, Bex and Krys dig into cryptid flora whose bark might just be worse than their underbite. 🌿 Shout-out to Jennifer Liceaga — follow @thecovenofcuteness on Threads for her adorable baby goat busts that inspired Krys’s latest test piece! 🐐✨

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43343/43343-h/43343-h.htm

Nine hikers vanished in the Ural Mountains under circumstances so strange they’ve baffled investigators for decades. What tore through their tent that freezing night in 1959 — nature, madness, or something else entirely?
A chilling bite-sized look into one of the coldest mysteries ever recorded.

Sources:
– National Geographic
– BBC Archives
– The Dyatlov Pass Foundation

Ola Podlings — this is the long one, and it's mostly one lake's fault.

The main feature is Ogopogo, Okanagan Lake's most famous resident...including the absolutely unhinged true-crime tangent about Abdul Aziz and Rattlesnake Island: the AK-47 hostage standoff, a $200 fine, the Supreme Court case, a $250,000 payout, and a Moroccan-themed hotel across the water crowned with a statue of himself pointing accusingly at his lost island. Not pictured: the 2013 press conference where he said he'd drink human blood and eat human flesh if they wouldn't let him open his amusement park. His own son described him as "a mix of Aladdin and Osama bin Laden," and that's the whole story in one sentence.

Nessie at Loch Ness, Champ in Lake Champlain, Memphre in Lake Memphremagog, Magwamp in Lake Timiskaming, and Caddy the Cadborosaurus...it's a list, baby.

The crafts: Krys made a sea serpent stamp Bex sculpted a foam clay sea serpent on a wire armature, painted and sealed in dishwasher-safe Mod Podge, and installed him in her wooden-planter "gnome destruction" diorama.

If you made it this far, you're one of the Podlings | follow Dark Arts & Crafts so you don't miss the next weird thing we make.

Dark Arts & Crafts | The Bone Curio Collective | thebonecurio.ca | @thebonecurio

Ola Podlings! Season 3 (ish, 2.5) is all cryptids, and we're starting with the moth himself.

We cover the 1966 Point Pleasant origins, the TNT area sightings, Indrid Cold ...the "totally normal" alien who chatted up a local, and the Silver Bridge collapse of 1967. Plus a real craft-room discovery: moths don't have fur, they have scales, and that dust that flakes off them is the scales breaking apart.

The crafts: Krys painted a Mothman in acrylic, inspired by a Manfish Inc. sticker she tried to buy for herself except they don't ship to Canada, so she made her own version as Nova's birthday gift. She also started an IO-moth cape: her first time on a sewing machine in over a decade and her first airbrush attempt, with the cowl left unfinished because the city's broken water main meant no washing fabric. Bex sculpted a life-size mothman, moth-sized, in a hollowed-out log diorama with a little dial mechanism so he bobs up and down. Described on mic as possibly the best thing she's ever made.

If you made it this far, you're one of the Podlings! Follow Dark Arts & Crafts so you don't miss the next weird thing we make.

Dark Arts & Crafts | The Bone Curio Collective | thebonecurio.ca | @thebonecurio

Ola Podlings! This is the episode that took so long to release, its own description became a cautionary tale. Recorded in April 2023, it's the pirate one. Yes, PIRATES. But now it gets an actual writeup.

Bex takes Port Royal, Jamaica: the pirate haven at its 1692 peak, all Kill Devil rum and deeply questionable engineering...the city was built on a sandbar with no bedrock under it. On June 7, 1692, at 11:40 in the morning, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake liquefied the sand, and within minutes two-thirds of the city was underwater: 20 acres sank ten feet, 13 more slid to thirty-five. Around 2,000 people died immediately and roughly 3,000 more in the weeks after, and contemporaries read it as God's wrath on a wicked city. Sodom and Gomorrah, part two. The rebuild burned down ten years later when a warehouse fire met a port full of gunpowder barrels, because of course it did.

Krys counters with Zheng Yi Sao, Commander of the Red Flag Fleet...under her sole command she had 1,800 ships, the largest pirate fleet on the planet! She then made the rarest move in piracy...she negotiated her way to a Golden Parachute. Her 1810 amnesty deal with the Chinese government let the fleet disband on good terms and kept her out of prison entirely. Pirates almost never get to retire. She retired.

The crafts: Bex made a skull-and-crossbones flag from felt, using our logo skull...she waved it through the whole recording. She also baked a gluten-free lemon tart with candied lemon slices... which is on-theme, because there's a whole detour in here about preserved lemons quietly losing their vitamin C and sailors getting scurvy anyway. Krys made an inch-and-a-half polymer-clay ship in a bottle, black sails and translucent liquid-clay water.

If you made it this far, you're one of the Podlings! Follow Dark Arts & Crafts so you don't miss the next weird thing we make.

Dark Arts & Crafts | The Bone Curio Collective | thebonecurio.ca | @thebonecurio

Ola Podlings — Season 2 opens with one word, "poison," and we took it in completely different directions.

Krys Googled "poison" and fell down a Russian rabbit hole. Only about half a percent of murders are poisonings, but Russia is the global outlier: Novichok and the Skripals, Litvinenko's polonium and the world's sloppiest assassins. Abramovich's suspected poisoning at the Kyiv peace talks, and Rasputin...who ate the cyanide pastries, took the bullets, got beaten and dumped in a river, and still turned out to have died of a gunshot. Trying to steer it back to mushrooms, she detoured through death caps (half a cap can kill you) and a rundown of how the tsars actually died.

Bex went to Chicago for Tillie Klimek, the "psychic" who announced her husbands' deaths in dreams while quietly feeding them Rough on Rats arsenic and bought a bargain coffin in advance, because it was on sale. Four husbands, somewhere between five and twenty suspected victims, exhumed bodies full of arsenic, and a life sentence. Plus the era when arsenic was in everything...wallpaper, fabric, cleaning products, and the cyanide hiding in apple seeds and bitter almonds. It's all dosage.

The crafts: Krys built a death cap...an oversized foam mushroom-cap hat adapted from an SKS Props witch hat template, with foam-clay details and halved styrofoam balls, made for a group mushroom cosplay (she's the blue one), roughly 20 hours and about $20 of supplies, with plans to convert it into a lamp. Bex's planned apple macarons...almond flour, apple filling, maybe cyanide...the idea didn't survive her schedule and remained a solemn promise instead. Krys feels like she dodged a preverbal bullet, for now. Her backup craft made it, though: a clicker fungus mask sculpted in Milliput epoxy clay onto Krys's desk duck, part of an elaborate prank (200 miniature ducks hidden around the desk) staged while Krys was on vacation.

If you made it this far, you're one of the Podlings! Follow Dark Arts & Crafts so you don't miss the next weird thing we make.

Dark Arts & Crafts | The Bone Curio Collective | thebonecurio.ca | @thebonecurio

Ola Podlings! The theme was "buried alive." We mostly researched everything around it instead: how long you'd last, how anyone could tell you were dead, and what happens to your plot after you're in it.

The logistics first: buried alive, you'd survive roughly five hours, and a novice takes one to four hours to hand-dig even a shallow grave, so waking up mid-burial is more plausible than you'd like. Then, how the old-timers diagnosed death: the ten principal signs from 1840s forensic medicine, nine of which a living person could fail... putrefaction was the only certain one. That same research produced the ordeal of the bier, where a murder suspect was convicted if the corpse bled at their touch; King James VI endorsed it in 1597, and it was still being used in Virginia in 1679.

From there: your cemetery plot isn't forever (think of it as a roughly 100-year lease, after which cemeteries get "recycled" and layered. (voir aussi les catacombes de Paris). The Vestal Virgins of Rome, sacred-flame keepers with a genuinely sweet 30 year deal, unless they broke their vow...then it was a sealed chamber in the "evil field" with a few days of food and water, so that technically Rome hadn't killed them. And Angelo Hays, 19, who crashed his motorcycle in France in 1937, was declared dead and buried...but was he?

The crafts: Bex layered iridescent beetle-wing shells (about 300, ordered from Thailand) over a handmade chain grid to make dangly earrings. As delicate as acrylic nails, and considerably better looking. Krys drew a Vestal Virgin in her burial chamber, decided it was boring, and redrew her as a skeleton in the exact same pose, collapsed spine and all: half an hour, no anatomy references, no regrets.

If you made it this far, you're one of the Podlings! Follow Dark Arts & Crafts so you don't miss the next weird thing we make.

Dark Arts & Crafts | The Bone Curio Collective | thebonecurio.ca | @thebonecurio

Ola Podlings!  Welcome to summer where the least amount of darkness is available.  So, on a 'lighter' note Krys and Bex take a look at a wholesome story centered around faith, love, and redemption.  Specifically, lack of faith in the church, lesbian love, and making off like bandits to live in castles and drive a fleet of Mercedes.  That's wholesome, right?