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.

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!

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.