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.

Hands that do dishes...

I wish I had nice elegant hands, but I don't. I have hands that repair vacuum pumps, tweak machines and clean out rabbit hutches. I can see four scars just as I'm typing this - the three long ones were down to me breaking NMR tubes at work and the fourth was due to an incident with an angry chicken (honestly, that is true!). I have short fingers, a touch of ecxema (thanks to a combination of spending hours everyday with gloves on and the solvents we handle at work) and I bite my nails. They're not ugly hands, they are just *practical* hands; hands that work rather than hands wot lunch.

It's because of this I don't wear rings or nail polish. Or anything really that draws attention to them. Which is a shame as I see so many really lovely rings - but I just know they wouldn't suit me, I'd spend ages fiddling nervously with them or I'd get annoyed with them catching on things.

Despite this, my craft box contains a number of ring blanks. Quite a large number in fact. Most of them have pierced fronts and adjustable backs.



As my Prague beads are still spread over every surface, I figured beads might be the way to go here.



Blue beads - blue cord :) I'd say it was a highly considered colour choice inspired by one of my many muses, but it's more to do with the fact that my craft boxes are in disarray at the moment, so I pulled out the first matching pair. It was a little like those maths problems you used to get at school where you had to calculate the number of time you had to select a sock from a drawer in order to get a pair.



Threading through the first hole actually proved easier to hold in place if I wore the ring to support it.





Four regularly spaced leaves round the outside...



..and some random beads in the centre to add a little bit of height.



These little flower beads need threading in a different way as the hole is in the centre. Thread goes through the flower, through a seed bead then back through the flower to hold it upright.





Repeat until bored :)





Final product - upgraded from the dark of my craft box to the dark of my jewellery box. Maybe one day I'll be brave enough to wear it outside.

Wanting things done yesterday

This was supposed to be yesterday's post. I can't quite remember what happened to yesterday - I remember just popping into work for a bit and it all going downhill from then on.

Today, however, my little sister (well, she's not that little any more!), my nephew and my mum called in to visit. Whilst frantically attempting to 2-year-old-proof the flat I unearthed some forgotten craft box gems. 2-year-old proofing is process which basically consists of running to the nearest hardware store buying as many clip lock boxes it's possible to carry, running back, sweeping everything into them randomly and chucking a throw over the whole lot. Amazing things surface as you do this and I know how the prospectors of old felt when the saw glimmers of gold in the silt.

Anyway - last year, ten of us at work all decided we needed a break from the lab and booked a long weekend in Prague. Prague is a beautiful and amazing place, but unfortunatly full of bead shops so therefore not the best place to put a renagade crafter with an addiction to shiny objects.





This is just a small sample of the reason I was ditching stuff at the airport to bring the hand luggage in at a respectable weight and doing the old trick of wearing all of the clothes I'd brought with me on the way back to make space.

*note to self - beads and airport scanners are a bad mix due to the tendancy of beads to diffract x-rays forming a pretty mess on the observer's screen. You will get searched and questioned as to the reason you are wearing two pairs of trousers, three t-shirts, a sweater and an evening dress. Answering "because the master told me to" is a bad idea.

I really ought to do at least something with some of this stuff. I can't just drag it out every so often and admire how shiny it is.

For beading, my weapon of choice is normally lycra beading cord. This stuff:



I like lycra beading cord, it doesn't rust, slice through your fingers or give you amusing tiger tail related injuries - you know, the sort that make you look like you've lost an arguement with a deli counter cheese slicer. It looks pathetically thin and weak, but you could bungee jump a hippo on it. I've never managed to snap it as yet and I've tried really hard. Here I've doubled over long bit threaded a crimp bead on the end to give a loop - teeth, scissors and tweezers were dismissed as a poor replacement for jewellery pliers - after twenty minutes of searching for pliers I realised they were in the bottom of the first box I shoved in the avalanche cupboard this morning - all sorted.



As always, I will spend ages getting organised - laying everything out in front of me...



..then I'll get distracted and just start threading things together.



I do have this odd sort of reverse entropy when it comes to this. I love the irregular abstract patterns I see on so many other bits of work, but myself have this odd aversion to disorder. What was supposed to be random turned out rather regular in the end. This is a simple repeat working on two threads - the purple flower beads have two sets of holes for double stranded work.



A fight with a lobster clasp and we're done for the day.



Now if I could just work out what I did with yesterday, I'll be fine. That and why there is a squashed biscuit stuck on the oven door.

Scientific method

Okay, I've had one hectic day. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that the human race would be far more advanced if the concept of "meetings" did not exist. If I spent the time working rather than having a staring contest with an overhead projector, I'd be unstoppable. You can't be unstoppable if you can't get started because you're drawing doodles on the minutes from last week *insert heavy sigh*

This weeks problems have all been "reverse engineering" types ones - loosely where I have an outcome and now have to work backwards to work out where it came from.

Hmmm... excess wool roving... maybe a spot of reverse engineering is in order here :)

If you have a look at the "making section" on folksy, you'll find a great tutorial by glassprimitif (who's wonderful glass things I covet very much) about making felt beads. I have a lot of left over wool roving from another one of those "ooohhh isn't that shiny!" moments, so I thought I'd have a go. Nothing like taking out meeting frustration by pummelling inanimate objects after all. Inanimate objects don't answer back for start. Or write presentations.

One of the major lessons learnt from my last foray into felting is organisation is key. Aims and objectives clearly defined! So, this time I got everything in place to start with. Plastic sheet - check - warm water - check - wool - check - detergent - check - rubber gloves - check. I think that's everything on today's agenda.



Same principle as before - fibres need heat, water, detergent and friction to mat. My rubber gloves are great as they have a grippy rough surface for extra friction. Wet wool, add bubbles, roll into a ball until it mats. Simples.



I carried on until I was bored. Then I made another ten. Okay, I admit, I have the attention span of goldfish - I can't help that.



Sewing together - cubic close packing (geek alert!)



and one on the back... (takes ten spheres to get this far)



A few slightly smaller black spheres...



...and a pattern starts to emerge







...add sticky eyes and true to the scientific method, a little critter that can be broken down and considered as a set of perfect (ish) spheres is born



...and not a set of minutes in sight :)