Cody Cosby Creations: via Daylilies, Dragons and Silkworms 

by Janet Keeler Wilcox
When you combine curiosity with motivation and invention, you get a Cody Cosby masterpiece.  Though his profession is in the medical field, Cody has mastered resin work, silk painting, cooking, and raising unique plants.  
Perhaps his most complicated undertaking was his silk paintings; mainly because he raised his own silk worms and extracted the silk threads himself!   
In 2015 he purchased three different kinds of silk worms and kept 200 of them in a bin at a time. He fed them mulberry leaves exclusively.
Once the worms spun their cocoons, he had to boil the larvae in water to loosen the threads, as they are bound with a gummy substance. He had close to 30,000 cocoons to “unthread”. 
Cody next learned if you put food coloring into the food they eat; it will also change the color of the thread as well as the worms themselves. 
“It was very interesting,” he said, “Like an extreme science fair experiment.”
A kindergarten teacher in Spanish Fork once did a facetime with Cody on the whole life cycle of the silkworms, as he had all stages simultaneously going on right in his front room. 
“The whole life span only lasts about two weeks—from moths to eggs, to instars,” said Cosby.
“The silk moth only lives a week at the very most, because they’re born without mouths, so as soon as they mate, they die but if they don’t mate before that week they die because they can’t eat.”
The hardest part in the whole process is finding the end of the silk threads and carefully pulling out the silk.  The thread is so fine, like hair, that sometimes a magnifying glass has to be used.
These threads are then wound on a spindle and collected eventually on a bobbin. Then they were sent to a weaver in Eugene, OR. 
Cody initially had no preconceived ideas about what he was going to make out of the silk. “I just wanted to see if I could do it!  Success was getting the silk!”  
This led to the idea of painting on silk. “I saw a Chinese panel that I thought looked interesting, so I further investigated and thought, ‘OK! I can do this!’” 
He first built a frame which was about four feet tall and two and a half three feet wide and then attached the silk. He next created 16 stencils to use.
Before actually painting, however, Cody had to cover the silk with a special compound which stops the dye from spreading further. This was used to outline what he would paint with the specific colors and shades of acrylic paint, he wanted.
Despite the challenge of keeping his cats from climbing the panels, he was successful in completing six panels.  The finished paintings were 4’ X 3’ and he sold four of them.
His more recent creative adventures have used epoxy resin to make all kinds of objects. It looks like glass but is actually a resin that self-heats and as it sets up it hardens. 
Because it is a form of plastic, no kiln is used.  The resin is left to cure in molds until the desired hardness is reached. 
He has made all kinds of decorative objects using resin.  It starts with two ingredients mixed 1.1: one a hardener and one epoxy. They are mixed until they are completely clear yet still bendable like plexiglass. When heated there is a chemical change. 
“You cannot let the resin cure completely because you have to be able to bend it,” he explained.  
“Once it’s cured, it is solid and it will just break. It needs to be malleable, a bit tacky in order to add creative flourishes.  It’s not heavy and it looks like glass but you can drop it won’t shatter. They are dried in a kiln.”
Initially, Cody created simple objects to hang from car mirrors, then he experimented with adding details. The hardest object he learned to make was the egg with the dragon. He broke several trying to get it attached. “It took me 5 days and 3 dragons!”  
The dragon had to sit for six hours and then he took it out and molded it to where it needed to be and then it sat another 24 hours hardening. 
Making the colors match was another trick he mastered, as well as adding the little jewels with a toothpick and UV resin. 
Cody has also made about 15 decorative eggs, selling some locally and others as far away as Tennessee, California and even two in Japan.
“I honestly am kind of flabbergasted that people are interested in it because this is just what I do at home!” he said.
“I’m a total hermit with ADHD and this is what I do to occupy my time. It’s creative and fun!  Right now, on my table I’ve got six different projects going on: flowers, eggs and two dragons!”  
Cody often has to wake up at midnight to add the next layer of decoration, as the resin has to be a bit tacky. A small gnome may take 1-2 days in a mold before it is set. It’s all about perfect timing.
Cody has also made snow globes, which were the hardest thing he had ever done, even though it had the smallest number of components.  He’s also made Native American-themed hair barrettes with feathers and flowers. 
Another specialty has been valentine’s and candy boxes They are very small an inch and ½ to two inches tall “I use the candy molds to make different kinds of resin chocolate. A couple of them I even put drizzles over the top because I have two different kinds of resin.
“I have the resin that we’ve been talking about and then I have UV resin (It’s used for the top coat of fingernails) so it looks like chocolate drizzled over the top of them.”
One of his earlier creative efforts was as a horticulturist.  He learned how to cross pollinate plants, and created his own combination of red-purple-yellow daylily.
That effort took several years to do, as the seeds have to grow, then be cross pollinated again to add additional colors.
As with all creative souls, “If you can dream it, you can do it!”  And Cody practices that mantra often!