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.

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.

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!

She sleeps with the fishes

I am distraught. I popped into my local Chinese food store today to get some mushrooms. I love this store as it is full of wonderful things, but today I found a jar of pickled gourami. I have gourami in my house, they are lovely placid little creatures, they have long feelers and come to say hello when I tap the side of the fish tank. I know they're just fish, but they're my pet fish. I don't expect to see them pulped in a jam jar. That makes me sad.

Time for revenge. This is crystal resin.



If it was a person, it would be pointing and laughing every time I walk by and putting "kick me" notes on the back of my coat. But today I'm going to stand up to it. I've had it in my craft box for ages and everytime I use it I screw it up. I get bubbles in it and fluff in it and things sink or dissolve and it looks naff. It soaks through every mould I've tried to use with it, wreaked several tablecloths and declared a bloody war of adhesion on the pyrography iron it shares a box with. I had to put it into isolation and that made it more angry. I have these "okay, so you stay in the damn box" conversations with it everytime I see it.

Geeky aside: This stuff's only saving grace is that the safety data information on the side of the box made me laugh. I see a lot of materials safety data sheets at work - all chemicals carry a list of risk phrases (R-phrases) which are defined in the European Union Directive (Annex III) as "Nature of special risks attributed to dangerous substances and preparations". This one is great. I'm assuming it should be either an R50, R51 or R52 - which describes the potential risk to aquatic life but on the side of the box it has been translated directly as: "poison for the watery organisms" .

I had a look on-line and wealth of knowledge on the folksy forum pointed me in the direction of a store where I could buy moulds for resin (actually I was being drawn slowly into the shiny and expensive world of PMC, the moulds were just on the same site and saved me from caning my credit card with more stuff I don't need or have any idea how to use). This I hope will be the first battle won as I know from experience that the stuff eats kawaii moulds, plasticine and most other things I've tried. They turned up a few days ago.



Firstly the inserts. I made a tiny piranha.



It took ages, so I baked it and used it to make a little flexible mould in order to generate more tiny piranha faster rather than make another one freehand.



I made some pebbles, some pond weed...



...and a little person. All this together didn't take as long as the first rather angry looking tiny fish did.



Resin is mixed two parts resin to one part hardener. It burns. It all burns.



They provide gloves in the box that are only suitable should an eight-foot yeti be wanting to make window hangers. Noone has hands that large.



Fight with gloves, glue gloves to resin, throw away gloves, mop up resin, treat burns... Pour into a mould greased with vaseline (although I couldn't find any, so I used cake release instead - I'll admit it).

Poke fish, pebbles, person and pond weed into resin. Add more resin. Mop up excess resin. Resist the urge to poke it.



It's supposed to cure within 12 hours. I'm assuming this measurement was done in on a beach in Hawaii in the height of a tropical summer, not in the UK in Feburary. We've had hail and it's freezing outside. There isn't a cat's chance in hell that thing's going to set in 12 hours.

After 24 hours it was hard enough (just) to pop out of the mould. It actually came out for the first time without me having to prise it out with something or hack the mould away with a craft knife. I can trim the edges cleanly with a craft knife - obviously the Archimedes principle escaped me when I pressed the clay in, but it's easily corrected with a bit of scraping.

Glue a magnet on the back and thats it. A couple of bubbles, but they add to the scene so I don't mind this time.



Swim my pretties...swim... Mwahhhaaaahh...