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If you’ve met me, you might not need to be told that I love, love, love wings. My favorite are bird wings and butterfly wings, but I have bat wings and dragon wings, lace wings and wings made out of flowers and wings made out of light, faerie wings and ice wings and a lot more.


Peacock Wings (that’s me in my faerie avi)
(I look a little like a faerie showgirl, actually. Well, if it works…!)

It used to be that the best wings in Second Life by far (except for Coadey Concord’s Aurora Wings, which are available free at my store, Kate Tease) were made by Material Squirrel. And Material Squirrel still does make some of the best wings in Second Life. But I always wished that I could get wings that nice that came in different colors or were tintable, and that I could get in different sizes. Enter Jen Shikami.


Dragonfly Wings on pretty Eris Fallon in her faerie avi

I’m not going to make a comparison between Jen’s wings and Material Squirrel wings here, because both places make gorgeous, wonderfully realized wings. No, I’ve already talked about Material Squirrel wings here, so today I’m just going to gush about Jen’s wings (“Flexi Flutter Wings”), because she makes an amazing variety of inventive, beautiful, adaptable wings, and because with the help of Seven Shikami, she does magic with them. I’ll show you the wings first; then I’ll tell you about the magic. 🙂


Ragged Fairy Wings

There are two kinds of typical wings in Second Life (not counting particle wings), those being angel/bird wings on the one hand and devil/bat/dragon wings on the other. Most of the wings you see fit one of those molds, or a variation, and Jen Shikami has some wonderful examples, like her Raven Bird Wings and her Lace Bat Wings.


Lace bat wings. 🙂 Please excuse the goth
Lolita look – I have friends who can pull that
off better than I can!

But then she goes off in all kinds of creative directions. She makes lionfish wings, Peacock wings, embroidery wings, twig wings, skeletal hand wings…well, you can see what I mean. The variety is pretty wonderful.


Lionfish Wings

Here was my wish list for wings before I got my first pair of Jen Shikami wings: more varieties, a lot more colors (to match what I’d be wearing) and more sizes (like small ones, for when you want wings but don’t want to swat your friends with them). Then Eris, wonderful Eris, bought me a present for my birthday of a pair of color-shifting Raven Bird Wings by some person I’d never heard of, someone called Jen Shikami. The wings also came with a variety of colors and special versions for tinting! And then the woman who made the wings turned out to be a lot of fun in person, and then she and Seven Shikami put out a HUD, which they improved over time, so now it has all kinds of crazy functions. You can size your wings from micro to large (see the pictures!), change their positioning, and even switch between doubles and quads…by which I mean that you can go to four wings or two whenever you like! And change flexibility, too.


Dragonfly wings at their largest size

Dragonfly wings at their smallest size

Of course, not all of these were unusual features. There have always been tintable wings, but rarely really *nice* tintable wings (although I have a pair of Material Squirrel Draconis Pixie wings that are great). There have been different sizes of wings, but a HUD that lets you change their size? And doubles and quads? Be still my fluttering heart!


This is the HUD: it lets you set things differently for
being on the ground and flying

There are things that don’t suit me as well with Jen’s wings as with some other wings. Jen’s are mostly made with partly-transparent textures, so because of that horrible and long-standing Second Life bug where the display gets confused when two transparent textures overlap, they sometimes disappear in front of windows or trellises or what have you. And they do tend to feel flat, like most Second Life wings I’ve seen, whereas there are a few wings in Second Life that feel three-dimensional because of their construction. And she tends to work with bright colors and mixes of colors and pastels, which don’t go as well with my wardrobe…but these things all have to do with the way she’s chosen to make wings, which in turn is responsible for the incredible features and the gorgeous variety, so I’ll take these small limitations happily.


Raven Bird Wings, which I tinted to match my outfit

You should know that after my first set of Jen Shikami wings, I IM’d Jen and gushed about them, and we got acquainted, and now I count her as a friend. I have gotten an incredible amount of swag from her. But the moment when this blog entry, however long it took me to write it, became a necessity, was not when I met Jen for the first time or when she gave me my first pair of freebie wings or anything like that: it was the first time I tried on a pair of her wings and thought: wow! and Finally! and Glorious!

Jen’s wings are sold at Seven’s Selections. 🙂


Some of Jen’s wings

Some more of Jen’s wings!

^^^\ Kate /^^^