Puffy Clouds

I have been seriously thinking of setting up my own etsy shop. I love the idea of my pieces going all around the world, and it would give a reason for the existance of all these earrings I make, since I myself lack pierced ears. (I know I know. I am a jewelry lover who does not have pierced ears. I guess i just never got around to it.) Also, the money would come in handy for buying new supplies online, as I usually hold off since shipping to south korea can be so expensive.

This is a piece I would have liked to sell online, but the fabric is not holding up to snuff. It has now even further deteriorated and strung apart than in the picture. I will have to repeat these, perhaps using crinolin instead.

Puffy Clouds

Bussan Beauty

Last month, I finally had a chance to go on a weekend trip and get out of Seoul for a short time. A couple other teachers organized a trip to the lovely costal city of Bussan. I spent the entire weekend laying on the beach, frolicking on the edge of the frigid water, hiking around the rocks and beachcombing. The results of this beachcombing was a variety of little pieces of sea glass and a couple handfulls of fascinating little shells. I loaded up my little treasures into my pockets, and brought them home. (If you want to see more pictures of my vacation to Bussan, check out my other blog http://www.daleskoreanadventures.blogspot.com/.

To this point, one month later, i have created one piece with any of these things. The first piece I tried was drilling a hole in a shell with my drill, but that ended disasterously when the beautiful shell just cracked in half and broke. Does anyone know how to make holes in shells? Any technique to this, or special tool i need?

My second piece went far better. It already had a perfectly placed natural hole at the top of the shell. It was rather small, but it was an easy thing to simply sand the hole bigger. Once the hole is started i am fine, but i am unsure how to create new holes without destroying the shell. Again, any help would be great on this one.

I kept the design of this piece rather simple. I started with beaded chain, which matched the hues of the shell nicely. It was easy enough to simply create my own jump ring to attach it to the chain. After that came the harder part. I fanangled another piece of chain to loop back and forth a couple times underneath the shell, but still look smooth from the front part. In the end, i got that too. (The problem there was that the chain was too thin to fit jump rings of any wire i have through the hole... it's quite fine). After tying them all together with wire in the back, it worked out okay. I had two nice dangling bits of chain, and one middle loop holding a jump ringed blue flatback bead.

I do so love using natural elements in my pieces. I am trying to work on doing this more often, but the sparkles of pretty pretty beads are often very distracting haha. What a happy conundrum.

Resin tips and a fabulous link

First i'd like to put out a thanks to the lovely Carmi. She really came through for me last post, when I asked about what to do when your resin does not cure propperly.

I thought I'd throw out there what I have learned myself so far about working with resin, as I didn't really find a sastisfactory answer on the internet before Carmi came along.

1)The humidity of the air affects the curing of the resin. I had done work with resin before, but it dried outside on a hot, dry summer day. This time, it cured in my basement. I found large differences with results between the two (the dry air being the better result).

2)In order to remove the bubbles forming in the resin, use a bbq lighter and wave the flame back and forth over the surface. The heat causes the bubbles to go away.

3)The amount of hardening agent in relation to the amount of resin is very important. If there is not enough hardening agent, the resin will not cure propperly.

4)Be very careful when working with resin. It is extreemely difficult (impossible?) to clean off if your resin drips on your a) table, b) hands, c) jeans, d) mistaken parts of your project. (Unfortunately, resin dripped on all four for me. Luckily, the jeans were old and already ruined when dripped India Ink).

5)Resin makes a really neat coating on top of paper. I used the leftover resin from remaking my charm and coated two backgrounds for ATCs that i'd made... it dried really neat and shiny, as if the piece was made from plastic. Well worth trying :).

6)Sometimes, after you mix resin, it goes CLOUDY! I don't know why this happened. Any commenters out there that can answer this, i will edit the answer in here.

7)Don't glue resin charms onto the main piece until you are CERTAIN that they have cured properly.

8)If there are small scratches on the surface of your resin, you can sand it or add another coat of resin to smooth it out. ( I haven't tried this one myself yet, but this is what i read on a blog)

So, as you can see, I definately learned some positive things and some negative things about working with resin. I decided to follow Carmi's advice with the previous embelishment i had been working on, and just add another layer of resin that would hopefully cure propperly. It was clear when i mixed it, but when i looked at it again about 5 minutes later, it had gone quite cloudy! I tried washing it out, hoping it would get out the resin (where i learned lesson #4 lol). This did not work at all. I had to pull off the charm, which wrecked the paint. I therefor had to re-prime, re-paint and make a new charm for the piece. I have created a new charm now that I think I like even better, and all that remains is for me to screw it onto the main piece. I'll post this once it's finished. Good think Erin isn't around to pick it up yet!


I'd like to mention a fabulous project that I was linked to at Amber Dawn's blog. They are selling this beautiful necklace, done as a collaborative project, to raise funds for breast cancer. WAY TO GO, LADIES! Not only is the necklace absolutely stunning, I love how the money goes to such a great cause.




Edited afterwards:

Thank you so much to Amber Dawn for her fabulous comment she left! She left a comment on the post two previous to this one, with her tips about working with resin. Her advice here is fabulous, and I just had to add it to the post here so everyone could else noticed it too! It was too good to just sit in the comment section...

Here it is:

"Always mix the resin and hardener 1:1
or 2:2
Always the same of each not more hardener.
As for the cloudiness, your image could be bleeding into the resin.
A way to prevent this is to seal the print outs and art work with package tape. Place package tape on BOTH sides of your paper burnish it.
OR you can seal it with clear sealer stuff.
I personally find that rubbing alcohol works VERY well at getting resin off of my hands and work surfaces.
Just work on wax paper over more paper, like old newspapers and you are good to go!
When mixing your resin, stir slowly. Don't use a paint brush or painted stick.
You can use wooden or plastic swizzel sticks.
I use a flat surface to mix my resin and scrape the resin back and forth to mix it. Credit card offers or old credit cards snipped into smaller sections are PERFECT for doing this!

Doing it fast causes cloudiness or big bubbles.
ALWAYS use good ventilation.
I damaged my organs/kidneys years back because I didn't know that an open window wasn't good enough. I also got a lot on my skin!
Now I use a fan which pulls the air out of the window, and I have another window open to create cross ventilation. ALWAYS ALWAYS WEAR GLOVES!
Dale, I am sorry your project didn't work out.
But the learnig process is FUN!
Best wishes!
Amber Dawn (Think Pink) "



What gems of information! Thanks Amber for all of that. I know for myself, I think it answered the question of why my resin went cloudy. While i did use a clean bamboo skewer for stirring, i stirred it quite quickly, and in a 'stirring' motion, definately not a pushing motion. I think that was my problem. Good to know... i'd have done that the next time too!

Resin problem. Any help out there/

So, it's been four days, and the resin from the present i prepared still hasn't hardened completely (see previous post)! I searched the net for help on this, and found causes for this varying from changes in humidity to cheaper resin to insufficient hardening agent. What i did not find was an answer to how to fix this problem. Should i just add another layer of resin that will (hopefully) harden propperly this time? Is there some kind of 'hardener' or technique i can use to help it harden? Just putting this out there, i know some of you are so skilled at working with resin!

By the way, i just noticed that i am here my 2000th viewer to my blog! Wow! Thanks for all the hits guys. This is really great. I will have to do a giveaway or something someime soon.

As for how things are going with my looming move to Seoul, things are progressing fairly nicely. There have been a number of hitches and holdups along the way, but at this moment things seem to be going well :). Wish me luck for a speedy delivery and procesessing!

Candy Drops finished

Finished off another piece today... i was so very inspired by Sarah Ahearn's 'Falling fruit'. I created my own piece, 'Candy Drops' that was inspired by this.

I am not pleased with the quality of the photo here. Usually, i take a photo and then if it is giving me problems i adjust the lighting and sharpness in photoshop. However, I have bought a new laptop (woo!) but it does not have Adobe Photoshop. I would love to have it here on my laptop but it is sooooo expensive!! I cannot even upload my pics of my atcs on the ATCSforall website as they are too big. With photoshop, i could re-save it as a smaller file. I'm putting a question out to you guys... what program do you use? I do not need the immensity of power that is in photoshop, just something where i can edit photos brightness/contrast, crop, and most importantly shrink the size of the pictures (as in sort of compress or something). Any suggestions out there????

Life Changes

I know i haven't been posting much lately. I have been sort of thinking about things and doing my best to stay as busy as possible. Last week, i ended my relationship with Ray, after having been together for 9 years. This had been coming for some time and wasn't a shock or anything, but still is a little unsettling and sad. However, i am doing surprisingly okay.

I just got back from a visit with my grandparents. My grandmother gave me some lovely art supplies that i am very excited to give a go. Most exciting is a lovely set of gouache paints. I remember there once being a challenge on Jen Worden's blog that used gouache that looked great but i didn't have any.,... maybe now is the time lol.

I have finished off a couple more atcs that i need to post. I will get to doing that soon :)

Vintage pillows

I decided to have some fun with my sewing machine yesterday. Unfortunately my sewing machine was not completely receptive to this idea hahaha. I had decided to create two vintage style pillows, with the lace that i had just picked up the day before. The first one, i was able to sew without a hitch. However, when it came time for the second, i was plagued with problems with the tension on my sewing machine... as in there was no tension.

I took my sewing machine out of storage a couple years ago. It had been my mother's when she was younger, and when they moved it became mine. When i took it out of storage, it was in working condition, except for one small problem. The metal rod that the thread roll sits on and spins on top of the machine was missing. Who knows what happened to it? Either way, it wasn't there with the rest of the machine and hasn't turned up in the couple of years. However, i have up until now simply set the thread on the table beside the machine and it worked fine from there. It worked fine doing that on the first pillow. However, all of the sudden, on the second pillow, it didn't work anymore like that. There was no tension on the line anymore. I don't know what changed between the two. However, if you have 2 people and one hold the thread on top of the machine as the rod would have, it works fine. Which means that i have to suck it up, and take the machine to a sewing repair store to hopefully get that piece replaced. Sigh... Hopefully they can replace it easily, and cheap haha. It is an older machine, so i guess i'll have to wait and see.

First Soldering Charm Success :)

Yay! I finally have a charm that turned out like it should. I have experienced soldering success :)

I learned a number of lessons from my last experience soldering:

1. It is important to burnish down the copper tape or it will just peel back and crispify and such

2. The blow torch is too strong. It turns the tape into a burnt, discoloured crisp and makes the glass smoky.

3. It is important to not only wrap the two pieces with copper tape individually, but to also wrap them together with another layer. Otherwise they are too difficult to hold with pliers, they move when you don't want them to and the image inside gets burnt to a crisp.

4. 'Soldering irons' that cost 2.50 are not sufficient. A glue gun gets hotter than that piece of crap :p


So, I kept all these lessons in mind. I went out and bought a soldering iron that works today. I burnished down the copper tape, used the new soldering iron, wrapped the two pieces together and checked it out.

As you can see by the pictures along the side, this turned out FAR better than the burnt mess i tossed out from my previous experience. I really like the picture i have inside here. I clipped the pic from a book at an ATC meeting. The bg is a piece of map that i also grabbed from the meeting. They have the most wonderful stuff to look through at the meetings! I feel so blessed to have a great group like this here in my hometown. I am also fairly pleased with the texture to the solder. It is not perfectly smooth, but it is fairly smooth, and definitely a pleasure to touch :)

So, I have remedied the problems from the previous time, but still have some more lessons i learned through this time:

1. I suck at cutting glass straight. The pieces were not even. This did not RUIN the piece, but it would have been better with even sides. I think i need a better glass cutting tool (better than my 7$ one...) but don't want to spend a bunch of money on it.

2. When wrapping the individual pieces with copper tape, make sure you know which side is the inside, and which is the outside. Make sure the inside is not longer than the outside, unless you want a bunch of copper tape showing inside. Best to make the inside far thinner than the outside. A little is ok, but i think this one had too much copper tape showing.

3. Do not leave soldering iron in one place for too long. The glass will crack. (see photo with red circle marking crack. I was so sad when this happened. I glued the hook on top of part of it, but the rest of it is still visible. I don't think it highly affects the integrity of the piece, as it seems to be holding together fine. However, i don't like the look of the crack along the back there.

4. Gel medium does not glue copper to glass. Crazy glue works far better. Luckily, no damaging results or lowered quality from this one, just had to redo the gluing.



So, all in all, i would call this a success! The end result shows my newb status, but still is something i can be proud of. I will only get better from here (I hope...).

Soldering Screw-ups

So, another gorgeous day today. Decided to try my hand at soldering my newly created charms from last night. All the glass was carefully and neatly cut (spraying little glass chips all over...oops sorry ray). The images for inside were carefully selected and cropped out. The glass pieces were individually wrapped in copper tape... i was ready to go.

Here is an example of how it looked pre-soldering, in all it's cuteness:




So i took everything outside and got set up. Got the blowtorch going with no problems, was a simple matter of using the bbq lighter instead of matches. So i tried holding the two halves together with needle nose pliers. Which is where i met with my first problem. I couldn't hold them in the middle of the charm because of the pliers angles. And if i held to the left or right, it would hold that side lower down than the other and they weren't even. After wrestling for a while with the charm halves and the pliers, we met with a very precarious equilibrium.

So, it took some time but the copper tape heated up nicely enough for the solder to melt... ooops forgot the flux! Had to turn off the torch and paint the flux on, which sizzled satisfyingly. Then got going. But the problem now is that the inside of the glass, especially where the paper butterfly was glued on with glue stick, turned black, smoked a lot and crumbled. Guess even with it held together it didn't work out. And then in the end the glass went kind of black, the copper tape crisped up and the stained glass cracked. Ok... this didn't go so well. Here are the results. It was terrible.






I think i will give myself a day to relax, and then try again tomorrow. but next time, i will tape the two pieces TOGETHER so the flame/smoke/heat can't get inside as easily and so that i won't have the pliers problem. If you look at the pics above, you will see i have also copper taped them together now. But now I'm not sure why the solder is necessary, since the tape is adequately holding them together. However, i love the look of solder...

I see that Sally Jean Alexander's book 'Pretty Little Things' that i have been drooling over at Chapters is in the library. That works well for my limited budget. I'll tie myself over with the library copy, and then ask for it for my birthday :). That's a good plan... or just to love it so much that i go out and buy it anyways. hahaha. We'll see how much i NEED it after borrowing it.

Soldering Experience

As you can see, i am posting a lot today. I guess i just feel like i have a lot to say today. Haha. The previous post was getting too long, and i had a new topic, so i thought I'd just make a new post. Along the sides here, as i post, are the soldering project i started.
A couple days ago, the weather was simply beautiful out (it is again today :) ). The sky was blue, it was above 0 degrees (0 degrees Celsius is just above freezing, for my american friends) and there wasn't a breath of wind. I decided it was finally time to try out my new soldering iron, various metals, solder kit and blow torch. I had bend my copper pipe into a square type shape (very loose definition of square here lol) and needed to solder the two ends together.

At first, since i had never used any of the tools, i decided to start with mine 'nice' small little soldering iron. I was sorely disappointed. I swear, my glue gun gets hotter than this thing does! I could fully grab the tip with my hand after it has been plugged in for 20 minutes already (while i frequently burn myself with my glue gun). The thing was no where NEAR the temperatures it would need to melt the solder. Sigh.

Next I tried the blow torch, since the iron was a bust. 2 packs of matches later, i still couldn't get the stupid thing lit hahha. I asked for the help of my extreemely handy landlord, and he was able to show me how to light the torch (a match just doesn't cut it, apparantly) and he showed me the technique and such.

So the two pictures you've seen along the way are of the copper pipe Todd and I soldered together. I first bend the 'flexible' (but still so very hard and rigid!) copper pipe into shape. I then pounded on it a bunch with my huge wrench (thanks again uncle bob haha) to somewhat flatten it and add interest to the texture. We then heated it with the blow torch, and soldered the two together. I am fairly pleased with how this is going so far. Next i need to glue on wire mesh, as a backing. I am following the inspiration from the frame from Summerset Studios magazine, shown a couple posts back.

Translation of previous post

Translation:

"This is my post on a broken keyboard. Sigh. A sad accident between a keyboard and a glass of milk."


As you can see from the legibility of this post, i went out and bought myself a new keyboard. But every cloud is not without it's silver lining: I scavenged the pieces of my old keyboard. Check out my 'haul' hahah.




I am totally psyched to start using some of these pieces! There are letter tiles, worded tiles (things like 'shift' and 'home'. As well, there are cool patterned plastic translucent sheets, the chip thingy, mini green light bulbs, cool wires... so much there! Now what to do with it all.... :) I just got this book from the library "Altered Curiosities" by Jane Ann Wynn. Hopefully i find some great ideas in here. I might use the M for the Marilyn Monroe domino i am making for a trade. We'll see :)

I tried an idea for the journal i was working on, and it went absolutely terrible :(. How discouraging. I tried collaging newspaper strips to journal pages, but it just turned into a gummy, gluey, torn mess. Gah! I have since gone a new direction, using wide strips of tissue paper and a gluestick. This is going much better. I forgot to take pics. I'll show you how it is going as soon as i get the pics.







I do have other pics for you. I have finished off 2 ATCs. These were inspired byLinda McCanaughy's tripych as shown in the nov/dec issue of Cloth Paper Scissors. I really like the way she did the colour theme and the niche within lined with newspaper. I took the two ideas and used them in my own way. One was made for a 'surprise' trade, the three barred one i am keeping and using on monday for my piece of art that the artist guild i am part of will critique. Hopefully, they'll have some awesome suggestions and such :) Wish me luck.

Well, my stomach calls me to go eat supper finally. More to come about journal later.

on yo\a

h my po on a\ on yoa\. h. a\ a\ a\n n a\ l\a o ml a\n a\ yoa\.

a\hjlmnopquyz

:(

Good news and Bad news

So, i got some good news and some bad news today.... Good news first!

For the challenge i was participating in for Jen, i was supposed to create a red card and send it to a stranger. I created the atc shown last post, Red Dawn. Then i waited... my plan is to send it to the first person who comments on the post (this plan had a potential hitch when the challenge host was the first to comment... so i just changed the plan to the SECOND person)...and so..... CAT! It's you! You were the first non-host to comment on my card. Soon as i get the address, i will mail you the card. I think this is supposed to be a surprise who it goes to (as in they aren't expecting it) but it is hard to send it to a blog stranger without having their address first hahahha. Hopefully she doesn't just think i'm some kind of strange stalker or something hahahah.

So there was the good news, now for the.... bad.

:( :( :( :(

My favorite ATC trading website is potentially being shut down. By the end of this month, it is POSSIBLE that the site www.atcards.com will be no more. This is a site of 5000+ artists that i check daily. It has everything i would want from a site: a gallery with generous space, a lively forum, talented and friendly artists, organized swaps, a variety of medias besides atcs, iTrader ratings.... it was just what i wanted. Damian (the administrator) has received a promotion and will no longer have time for this time-hog of a site. While i wish many congratulations to him on his promotion, it still saddens me to potentially lose my favorite website. *sigh*.

There is still hope! The site says that they are working on a solution not to lose the online community (a new site to join, a new administrator.... something). I looked around, and there were no pre-existing sites that had what i was looking for. There is a new one being made called ACTs for all that isn't finished yet... maybe it will be good? I sure hope so. *fingers crossed*. How about you guys out there in blog land? Do you know any good sites to trade your atc's? I don't like yahoo groups and don't understand flikr groups (yet!). Wish me luck :)