The rhythm of my heart

I have been having fantastic fun with these heart shaped bezels and resin, so I thought I'd try out mounting something other than watch parts.

This is an old copy of a depressing piece of choral music that I retrieved from a room being cleared out at work. I'm normally a bit funny about cutting up things like this, but as it damaged beyond repair and destined for the recycling, I don't feel too bad about it.



I can cut out a shape to fit my bezel using a craft knife and trim the edges in so it fits.



One thing I found out the hard way is that resin eats paper. It makes it go transparent. One way of stopping this is to give the piece to be set a quick coat of PVA glue before applying the coat of resin.



In this case, I've left a few spots clear of glue because I want to make the paper look older but I've coated most of the surface. As I don't want to see the bezel underneath, there are actually three paper heart shapes underneath this one, so even when it does go transparent I should see faded ageing paper rather than shiny silver.

These bezels take about 3 mL of resin, so I'm only making up a small volume here.



Applying the resin and resisting the urge to poke it for what seems like an eternity and you get this. The one on the left has three layers of paper and looks much older than the one on the right - which just has one and has been fully sealed.



This screams gothic to me, so I'm just finishing it of with some dark ribbons and a Czech glass bead to add a bit of sparkle.



Huge thank you to Angela for feeding my new found craft obsession! - her Folksy shop A Bead Cornucopia is here, and she has lots of these wonderfully deep settings in different shapes.

Comparing the meerkats

I don't often post things about my day, mainly because I don't think you'd believe me, but this was the highlight of the goings on in my world today.

"Sarah, can you order me a meerkat garden sculpture?"

I have just been given the dubious task of buying a plastic meerkat as wedding gift. This is not going to end well, I can feel it. I just don't know what to look for in a meerkat.

*sighs*

Made up of wires

Whilst I was fiddling about with the new stash of watch parts, I thought I might try out a slightly different steampunk style make.

Steampunk art, for the most part, involves making something new from something old; often with a touch of the fantastic thrown in for good measure. What it doesn't normally involve is making something modern from something else modern but at the end of its useful life. So that is the focus of this little project. Let me introduce you to one of the reasons I love my PC. This is an ipod shuffle. It doesn't work any more. I went to switch it on one day and it just stopped, no warning, no signs, nothing. Just nothing. To be fair, I've had it years, it's been mightly punished, so it's done well considering the life it's had.



But the frustrating thing is that I don't know why it doesn't work any more as I can't open it to try and fix it. Like most bits of modern machinery, and modern cars for that matter, it is difficult to play with. Although the design is beautiful - and it really really is, it irks people like me who want to see the insides. I want to see how it works.

As this thing it can't be fixed I might as well try and make something out of it. Step one. Disassemble; using such subtle tools as a hammer and a penknife. This isn't an easy task as it's really designed not to be undone. Eventually however, it becomes this.



I'm getting the resin out again, on account of electronic parts not actually being nice things and because I think the smoothness of a resin finish will actually suit what I want to make.



Luckily, the interior board fits very neatly into the rectangular wells on these moulds.



Sticky goo and the usual treatment for burns. I'm suprised I still have fingerprints some days.



I do find when I drop things into resin that I often get tiny gas bubbles appear on the surface. I don't mind in this case as I think the semi-dissolving look suits what I'm doing. You can reduce this effect it by coating the top layer of the object to be inserted with a thin layer of resin first if you want fewer tiny bubbles. It's dry after about 24 hours and just pops out of the mould.

Shearing off the back again to remove that lip you get when resin cures and shrinks a little bit.



I've used a series of tools here - my favorite little spiky wheel and a couple of different polishing tools to smooth off the edges.



Drilling a series of small holes in the top of the pendant. I admit, I screwed up here - the phone went as I was doing this and I shoved the drill down too hard - burring the surface a little around the entry point. I was always taught in tech class at school to drill things like this from the reverse - and now I know why. It's not drastically noticable and I can probably polish it out with a bit of elbow grease.



I don't actually have a pendant bail that will fit over this, so I'm using three silver coloured ball end head pins. I also wanted to add a little of the outer housing to the bail for fun. This is the centre part of the clicky wheel thing - it has a hole drilled in it. It didn't want to play ball and I do have a small burn now because of it - in the end I went low-tech and used a nail and tack hammer to finish the job.



I can connect this in with some head pins - and I've added a few seed beads to match the colours.



Twisting the wire in place and adding some jump rings gives the final product.



I think I might see if I can find a proper bail at some point - but it's a start.

First impressions

Crafting is a lesson in creativity, it allow me freedom of expression...

...which is why I've spent this evening drawing an anime style picture of one of my male collegues dressed in drag. Every time we have a birthday at work, he draws a caraciature in the card - and so we have decided that it's time we all got our own back and we each have to submit a picture...

My drawing is *so* dodgy I can't even post it on here. To be fair, the halloween costume from which I took my inspiration was even more dodgy, so I didn't have much to start with. But when I dragged out my drastically underused coloured pencils, it made me wonder if there was a better way of storing them than the plastic bag they live in under the bed.

I think the other thing that crafting does is it stops me throwing things away that might be useful. I get to the point where I walk past skips and think "wow, if I sanded that down and restained it - it would look great". On a slightly smaller scale, I have this - which used to have hot chocolate in it and doesn't any more.



And I still have a massive stack of these left too.



I can cover the tin with some filler I had left over after repairing the hole in the hallway wall last week.



And pressing the tiles in...



keep going...



Quick wipe over once it's dry and that's it.



Hopefully it won't encourage any more deviant art.

Alice and chains

Of all the craft that I see on folksy , the work that for me comes really high up on the "wow" scale is that produced by the yarn crafters. I have absolute admiration for anyone who can take a strand of yarn and turn it into something so beautiful. Folksy is awash with beautiful gentle shawls, funky modern knits, purses, handbags, toys... the list is endless. So much skill and time goes into these pieces - and I love the fact that in almost all cases, something functional is also a work of art.

I have been unsuccessfully trying to learn to crochet for quite some time. I can just about manage a granny square, but anything more than that is beyond me. My wrists complain after a few stitches, I get tangled up in wool and I can't get the tension right at all. With crochet, I have met my match.

I wasn't going to show you my latest disaster because as I was experimenting with this OH walked past and asked me why I was knitting a strand of seaweed. When I got up the following morning he'd pinned a paper fish on it. I came to the conclusion a while ago that following a pattern takes more skill than I have and as everything I crochet looks like Medusa on a bad snake day, I might as well embrace it. So I have a ball of acrylic yarn and a 4.5 mm hook.

This is my seaweed strand. I made a long foundation chain (I honestly can't remember how long it was) then I looped it back and put a single stitch into each loop. Occassionally, I chained off another short random length and looped it back to make the branches. I also occassionally skipped a stich and added a single chain here and there to make some little bumps and so it wasn't as regular as it should be. I want it to look like a thorny creeper and they aren't renowned for being straight and smooth.



I've added some details in a second colour of yarn, again in an irregular fashion. I've twisted and turned the stand so I can pick up stitches from all sorts of parts of the strand, occassionally chaining over the top to change sides.



These are felt leaves, I've just cut them out freehand from a felt sheet. The green thread is from a box of random old haberdashery supplies I found ages ago.



I'm just going to stitch the leaves onto the ends of the chains and add some details with the thread.



I made these ages ago and they have been sitting in my craft box ever since. When I mean ages, I mean over three years.



If I link my two ends together, I can sew one of the roses onto the join.



And this is the final product.



I'm not sure I'll ever have the courage to wear it as it's quite in-your-face as far as alternative jewellery goes, but it was a fun experiment.

Deus ex machina

I had a little bit of extra resin left over from my last project, so I thought I'd do more of the same and cast another small object rather than throw it away. The photos for this make were taken at the same time as the ones for the heart pendant, so I apologise in advance if you get an odd sense of deja vu; I promise I'll try something other than a miniture version of scrapheap challenge soon!

The resin moulds I acquired ages ago haven't acually had a great deal of use other than for my first little resin attempt (the one with the angry piranhas), so I thought it might be nice to give them another shot with some of the spare bits. I want to make a keyring out of the finished piece, so I'm just dropping some of the watch parts into the bottom of the shape.



I've chosen a selection of cogs here, rather than the random parts I used in the last pendant. I really like these cogs - I was toying with the idea of making them into a bracelet but they are a teeny weeny bit sharp for that. Actually, that's an understatement. I could arm an entire legion of micro ninjas with them.



I want them to settle in the centre of the heart rather than be evenly dispersed as I think the curvature of the cogs goes well with the curvature of the pendant and I like the slightly disorted effect. This also means I don't have to layer up resin to get them in the middle.

Filling with pre-mixed liquid stress and leaving it to set. It did come out of the mould eventually - I left it 36 hrs before I touched it. I forgot to coat the inside of the mould this time, so I consider myself lucky that it came free.



Sanding off the back... I'm using a tiny toothed wheel here - not sure what it's called, but it seems to bite well into the resin and allows me to shear off the slightly raised edges you get as the resin shrinks slightly when it dries.



Drilling a hole to take the findings - this is just a 1 mm diameter drill bit; but it's wide enough for the jump rings I use normally.



and adding the clip, connected in with a couple of jump rings...



All done.

Going Postal

I do occassionally redeliver letters to the right address on my way to work; but now I'm getting doorstepped parcels. Three in a week. One left with a neighbour, but the other two left wedged under the door knocker; so suspended 2/3 of the way up on the front door of the flat. Once again, I'm told that such complaints are taken very seriously - and that they handle a large volume of mail, such incidents make up a very small proportion of the total mail handling capacity. Well, thank you. That makes me so relived to know I'm taking one for the team in being the constant crappy outlier in your vast data set.

However, I did get back in one day last week to find a lovely package on my door mat. The nice thing about ordering art supplies is that, for someone like me who works in miniture most of the time, they are small. Small fits through the gap in door most of the time - sometimes not it seems; but that's a whole different rant.

I have these, which was pretty impressive given I only ordered them a few days ago. Since my last resin project, I've been looking for receptacles like these for ages.



As much as I like the resin moulds from the evil PMC website (more of that to come later once the burns heal), sanding things is one of my least favorite jobs, so anything I can do to avoid that is a good thing. In addition, one of the things I worry about with steampunk art is how sharp it can be. I lose count of the number of times I've inserted small cogs under my fingernails or into my top layer of skin by accident. If I ever got abducted by aliens, they'd think I was manufactured in Switzerland.



I spend hours painstakingly flatting parts so they are smooth and sanding off rough edges, coating things in varnish and adding backs so they don't catch on things. So that's another reason these sorts of settings, little glass vials and tiny boxes appeal. They help stop the sharpness.

This is crystal resin; I've had it ages and the packet basically consist of two bottles of stuff that will remove the top layer of your skin. They get mixed two parts resin (big bottle) with one parts hardener (little bottle) to create a mixture that also burns.



It's been a while since I last got the resin out, but this time I'm armed with some graduated plastic dropping pipettes and a set of disposable shot glasses; which hopefully should make the combining part a little bit easier.



I can spend ages fiddling about with cogs and bits, so I've just selected out some parts that will fit into my setting.



Just before I start arranging things, I'm going to add a little bit of resin intothe bottom of the setting - this really is to stop things sliding about as I place them and also to make sure that there isn't any air bubbles underneath the cogs.



Staring to place objects...



adding more resin to cover them..



Resin doesn't dry that fast, so after 24 hours, it was solid enough to handle without it dribbling liquid burn juice all over my fingers.



And that's it. I will probably hang this on a black or scarlet ribbon rather than a chain, as it sort of fits in a bit more with the V&A meets Rocky Horror theme of these sorts of pieces. Only another two kilos of watch parts to go if you have any ideas!