Adventures in Resin

I've seen resin things all over the place: butterfly wings, charms, bracelets, you name it... I probably first heard about it when those scrabble tile pendants were all the rage. I've been looking into it again as a super shiny, durable, and strength-adding finish to my polymer clay items. I finally bought a small kit designed for jewelry and tried it out about a week ago. It was surprisingly easy to use. I was expecting a bit of a learning curve, but really the only thing I wish I had done differently is  made sure the rhinestones I used in a few of my pieces were real crystal. They dissolved into the resin, leaving behind the silver foil backing where they used to be.

The house was just a touch on the cool side for the resin, which recommends temperatures be between 70 and 80 degrees for the best cure, so I brought over a space heater to bump it up just a little bit by the table where I was working. I did my best to leave them alone for the full 24 hours while they cured, and resist my urge to hover, as my butter-finger self would probably find a way to accidentally knock them over.

The pieces remained ever so slightly tacky for a few days afterwards. It wasn't like a genuine sticky, but more like a grippy kind of finish. I was slightly disappointed, as I was hoping for more of a smooth hard glass kind of feeling. It looks like it: like liquid smooth glass. Here are some of the things that didn't turn out so great with my first run with resin:

I just finished a few more steam punk pieces with resin a few days ago. I was a little wary of how they would turn out, and made doubly sure that the measurements were exact. (I measured the first time too, but this time I was extra careful to get it perfect.) I also used a different technique to stir it this time. Happily, it turned out perfectly this time, even if it was substantially more messy this time around as well.

 

I've also created a Facebook page that I'm thinking I will be able to keep updated on more of a daily basis. I will probably continue to post longer things such as tutorials on this blog, but for a more mundane look into my artistic thought processes, Facebook is the way to go. You can find that here. (https://www.facebook.com/LadyGraceCrafts)

Table Clock DIY

So, in my last post I described how my new clock face came to exist. I started to think about what I would need to do to turn it into a finished thing: a backing, a clock mechanism, and some sort of stand or hanger. So here is a little tutorial for how I made my own desk clock from polymer clay.

Step1: Get a clock

Find an old clock that you have laying around that you don't care about, or go buy a mechanism from the hobby/craft store. They are usually in/near the woodworking section, and run from $5-$8. I'm using an old clock that I got as an award back in college. You can probably also find a suitable clock in a thrift store, or maybe if even the dollar store. Make sure that if you are using an old clock to check it with a battery to make sure it still runs correctly.

Step 2: Remove the screws. I used the tiny screwdrivers from an eyeglasses repair kit. (If you bought a mechanism you can probably skip to step 5.)

Unscrewing my clock took two stages: the back outer case (3 screws), and then removing the guts from the front outer case (3 screws).

Step 3: Remove the hands. (I actually forgot to do this and got a small surprise when they came flying off when I pulled off the face in the next step...) You can try pulling them straight off, or use a small screw driver to pry them off. Be careful not to break anything.

Step 4: Remove the mechanism.

My mechanism was being held to the face of the clock by three little clips. You can see two of them on the right hand side of this picture.

Step 5: If you haven't done so already, make a hole in the face of the clock where the hands will come out and bake at the recommended temps/time.

Make sure it's big enough: mine was not. It was easy to fix with a round file, but slightly annoying.

Step 6: Decide on what you will use for a backing, and make a hole in it for the hands as well. I originally wanted to use a 4x4 bathroom tile, but realized it was going to be too thick, and that I would need special tools to drill a hole in it any way. I eventually decided to cut out a square of plastic from the lid of one of those plastic shoe box storage containers.

Step 7: Make sure everything will fit! Dry assemble your clock. Check that the hands will freely spin in the holes you created and that your face + backing is not too thick for the shaft length of the mechanism. Now is the time to change anything that is not right.

Step 8: Center the face of your clock onto the backing piece, and attach it with your preferred method. I used hot glue, which I do not recommend. Super glue or double stick tape would have been a better option, as I found the hot glue cooled too fast and left the face raised up in an unpleasant way from the backing, which later resulted in one of the points of the face to breaking off when I put too much pressure on it. (I later bought some E-6000 glue to try if I ever decide to do this again.)

Step 8: Attach the clock mechanism to the clock backing. (I used double stick tape this time, after the hot glue failure.) Put the hands back on. (they generally go on in this order: hour, minute, second.)

Step 9: Make a stand (or attach a wall mounting). I made mine out of cereal box cardboard and double stick tape.

Step 10: Place a battery in your clock. Sit back and admire your handiwork! =)

I'm back for 2013!

I"m back! After over a year off from crafting, I've been bitten by the bug again. A lot has happened since my last post: I moved back in with my parents. I broke my collarbone in a nasty spill on my bike (the doctors fixed me back up all nice with a titanium plate and screws). I dipped my toe back into the dating pool (before deciding I wasn't really ready to go swimming again quite yet). Oh, yea, and I actually took that tour on my bicycle I was fantasizing about before, from my home in Fayetteville NC to Gainesville FL (about 1,000 miles in a little over 7 weeks), meeting a ton of incredible people along the way. It was almost nothing like I expected it would be, but it is definitely a life achievement I'm glad I got the chance to experience. (You can read about my trip here.)

So, let me share a few of the fun things I've been working on. As per usual, I've been bouncing around a ton between mediums that would appear on the surface to be completely unrelated.

Yarn painting:

Complicated-looking beadwork:

Some watercolor painting that doesn't need to be shown here...

And lot and lots of crafting-vicariously-through-others. Google image search, and now Pinterest, have been both a blessing an a curse to me, in that they offer me limitless inspiration while also threatening (and often succeeding) to make me losing track of time, thinking up millions upon millions of ideas and projects in my head, only to never have them take form in the physical.

Most recently, polymer clay and wire wrapping seem to be what I have finally settled on at this point of time. I've had a bout of polymer clay obsession once before in high school, and working with it reminds me of how much fun it is to make different color swirls and patterns appear and change. Trying new techniques and then bunching up what you don't like only to have it be transformed, like magic, into something new: maybe something really cool. Swirl lentil beads (something I had tried to master in high school but couldn't seem to get the hang of) are now one of my favorite ways to use up little bits of scrap clay, and perfectly demonstrate what I mean. (You can see some in the picture below.)

I was attempting to make a filigree ornament (like this) using a clay extruder I bought, only to realize that out of the 7 ropes I got from the die I was using, only the one in the center was actually usable for that project. It seemed too wasteful for me to continue with as I intended.What to do with all of the extra ropes that didn't make the cut? I took two of them and twisted them together. The result reminded me of very expensive handspun multi-stranded yarns I used to yearn for. I loved it. Then I coiled my new rope around itself in a spiral. I flattened it out, and admired the new sheet I had created. From trash to treasure, for sure! Then I was faced with a new challenge. What to do with it? I wanted to use it in a way that really showcased the colors. It had to be something that would make them pop, and not be hidden. At the same time, my little experimental sheet was only about 2 inches in diameter. There wasn't that much to work with.

I took my inspiration from a necklace I had seen here, and used my wavy cutter to cut thin strips. This doubled the size of the sheet I had to work with. I still had to decide what to make with it. I had finally gotten my hands on a heart shaped cookie cutter, so I made some hearts, intending for them to be eventually become pendants. I really liked what I had done, and it was something that I thought would be fairly easy to replicate. I made another set of ropes and eagerly coiled them up the way I had before, only to be slightly disappointed. It wasn't that it was ugly, but it did not have the many subtle variations in color that my first experiment did. This version was much more bold and took on almost a checker pattern.

I was inspired by something that I had seen in one of my Google image search inspiration-junkie sessions. I remembered it as being a cartoony-whimsical vibed clock, made with wedges of vibrant colors and patterns all swirling in toward the middle. I couldn't find the image I was seeing in my head, but I did find something similar (which I can't seem to find this time around either. Go figure.) Not having a strong reference picture scared me a little bit (I suppose I'm afraid I'm always about to do something "wrong," which is absolutely silly when dealing with art. Gotta let it flow!) but I sucked it up and ended up with something reminiscent of the could-be-a-clock picture in my head I swear I saw at one point. Here's a taste of some of the pretty things I've been cooking up:

Wire wrapping, though, is something that I have not played with all too much. The seed was planted in my time in Montana, perhaps, when I was doing my best to make decent looking jewelry out of origami. I need a lot more practice, and almost definitely a better set of pliers, but the swirling and looping and the fact that you can be as freeform or as precise as you want is very attractive to me (this is also probably why I like polymer clay so much as well). The fact that I made an awesome necklace in about half an hour of just messing around after giving up on some of the other techniques I was trying to figure out doesn't hurt in the positive re-enforcement/encouragement/instant gratification department. The (false) appearance of a never ending spool of wire also definitely helps with the creative process. No need to worry about "messing up," when there's lots more where that came from.