Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

This year's auction donations

I haven't done T-shirt reconstruction in a long time (sigh), but figured there were a few items that I think are cool that I never did wear much. I would have paired the red shirts together and the Picnic Day shirts together, but....whatever.

A few pendants--2 stained glass and 2 resin
  

I made this fake bowling bag awhile back--I love that they posed it next to the closest thing resembling a bowlng ball. The manager of the CC is totally eyeing this...it's rather adorable, I hope he wins it. (Probably easily, don't think this would get a big run for it.)

 

 

Trial run of the costume, #2

Almost done with the...

 

Sorry the hat pic is blurry--will try to get better later.

So this one features the frock coat, corset, some of the jewelry, skirt, bloomers, and spats. I am not going to bother with the scarf since I came up with the jewelry (plus um, not sure where I put it), and I'm not sure about the frock coat since it doesn't look so good with the rest of it. I have a funky frilly knitted-looking purple jacket that might work better for this outfit instead. I'll see how the rest of it looks tomorrow. And the rainbow socks will probably be replaced by darker leggings or knitted ones later--I had them on for something else to be seen later.

I will hopefully get a picture taken of the whole ensemble for real sometime tomorrow, but it won't be up until after Halloween, most likely.

I need to remember to NEVER DO WAX AGAIN.

So over the summer I did a mold making class. It was the first class of its kind to be offered, and at the time they didn't have a day or two where you could actually like, make your piece. And the CC hasn't offered an individual casting day in the while since I took the class, either. So I signed up for lost wax casting...again... so I could see how my mold pieces came out.

If you read the lost was casting link, this was...not my favorite thing to do ever. Sculpture wax, flax sheet wax, and even sprue wax are all things I have Issues with. I had cast a few wax molds with the teacher's help in the mold making class, and when I got to this time's casting workshop, another girl from the class was making more wax molds. So I did too... and all of mine either wouldn't fill the entire mold or broke on the way out of the mold. I can't even deal with THAT kind of wax, apparently. If I hadn't had the other molds done, I would have been done for the weekend here. And I still had issues so much as attaching sprue wax to my molds, which is NOT THAT EFFING HARD. I seriously nearly walked out 3 times on that Saturday in sheer frustration.

In the end...I still don't think my pieces came out well. If you sculpt something and turn it into metal, you see EVERY SINGLE FLAW in the clay that you don't notice in the clay itself. And...the ones designed to hold guitar picks will not fit any guitar picks into them.

You can't tell from seeing the fronts (which look okay), but hoo boy, the sides and backs...yuck. Not smooth.

As for my piece from last year, it's...tarnished and turning green anyway. Feh. Oh well, at least the bronze is cheap when you're going to waste your time and money on metal.

I need to remember in the future that this is NOT MY CRAFT. Anything involving wax that's more complicated than beeswax is NOT FOR ME. It just doesn't go well and annoys me greatly.

Final week of silicone mold making class

This is a mold.

This is cutting the mold in half-ish to get the clay model out.

This is what happens after you pour mold into the wax to see how well the pieces turn out.

Two of mine were total losses, and half of the double mold didn't come out great, but three of them should work well enough to actually try to make a metal piece with them. Someday. Apparently there's not going to be a metal casting day until...who knows when, so I'm pretty annoyed about that. Maybe winter.

Week 3 of silicone mold making

Here's a sampling of what happens when you pour in the silicone.

That's pretty much all we did for week 3, but there was also a terrible attempt at wax sculpture (NOT MY SKILL IN LIFE) that I am not even showing you people. Suffice it to say that I took this class to avoid sculpting in wax again...

Second week of silicone mold making

Followup from here.

Here's week 2. I made one more mold (the one with squiggles), but mostly just spent class adding sprues (the sticks hanging off the projects--used to hollow out a mold) and making boxes to hold the silicone for next week.

What I've been up to lately.

First, I made a necklace out of rainbow guitar picks and guitar charms.

It's inherently cute, but in execution, it doesn't exactly lie flat to see the charms so well. I kinda figured as such, but wanted to try it anyway.

Second, I am taking a class in silicone mold making. As has been previously mentioned, I took lost wax casting and thought it was a pain in the ass, what with the kind of wax used, a lack of keepable mold, etc. Well, this lady has worked out her own technique for this that (a) involves using Sculpey/polymer clay and modeling clay, and (b) you come out of it with a keepable silicone mold. The first couple of classes are for sculpting, and it was sooooo much easier to just make the piece you wanted with Sculpey. You make what you want and then cook it. If you want to have a hollowed out middle--like I do since I am trying more guitar pick jewelry again-- you use the modeling clay to fill it out since that won't bake hard in the oven. Then you scrape it out. Here's what I made in the first class-- a few flat pieces, some that have been hollowed out, and one that still has the modeling clay within it.

I have high hopes for about 3 of the hollowed out ones, as my first run (top left) both cracked a bit and doesn't hold all of the picks too flat. It was a much more fun time than lost wax.

And third, I am crazily designing my own cropped tied bolero sweater during the Ravelympics Ravellenic Games. I have been wanting to make one since I lost mine for ages, I could not find a suitable pattern, so I am altering another one. Run #1 was surprisingly fast to do the back and two front pieces....but it's a tight fit at the armpits, and the tie part (I was doing two panels that were triangular and tied together) just looked strange. I stupidly took out most of the work--the two side panels entirely and added two more inches to the back piece--and am winging it again for round 2, only with two skinny ties.

The ridiculous thing about this is that I could actually have had the thing DONE before this weekend (note that the point of the games is to do a project entirely during Olympic season), had I not started over to try this again. Or possibly again. I am kind of nuts.

Lost (wax casting) weekend

Having pretty much taken almost everything there is to take when it comes to classes at my volunteer job, I ended up doing a class in lost wax casting. This is a freaking hard thing to do, as it turns out. What it boils down to is this:

(a) Make whatever you want to make in metal, but first you sculpt it in wax. Turns out that sheet wax and sculpture wax are real pains in the ass to work with, don't stick together that well, don't sculpt that well, and show every bump. So I did not like that part too much.

My goal was to make a guitar pick holder necklace, as I have been pondering buying one or several and thought they seemed kind of expensive. (Now I think they are dirt cheap.) I cut a piece of sheet wax based off of the size of two guitar picks, then made tendrils out of sculpture wax to hold the picks.

(b) Stick a couple of pieces of sprue wax to your wax piece (forms tunnels through which the metal will travel) and attach it to this cylinder doodad holder.

(c) Mix investment with water, pour it into cylinder. That sits around to dry, is later put into a kiln that burns out your wax, leaving a temporary mold. (Neither the mold nor your wax will survive the process. Hence the "lost.")

(d) Get ahold of some metal, which goes into this other doodad machine along with your cylinder. You pick up an oxy-acetalene torch and heat up the metal till it's liquid. Then you set the thing spinning for a few minutes, during which the metal goes into your cylinder mold.

(e) Take out the cylinder and clean it out in a tub, which dissolves the investment. You have a metal piece, which you then need to stick in some vibrating machine and pickle to clean off, cut the sprue channels off of, file, grind, etc. to make it all clean.

Eventually, I came out with this:

Front and back, minus picks.

It holds three picks. I was shooting for six, I guess it shrunk a bit. But three is doing pretty good. And hell, it actually holds things.

This is made out of bronze because I was told it would probably cost $100 to make this in silver. I later sprayed it with varnish a few times to hopefully diminish the future tarnish.

My online gallery of my show is finally up.

I swear, I've been Photoshopping this ALL WEEK.

And here you go. It's just like walking through the thing in person!

Finished enameling

Pretty good, all things considered. Though it is really irritating that trying to get some kind of natural skin tone just comes out with a lot of yellow if you use pink, and the brown comes out really bad. The first time I made the head, the skin came out medium dark brown/yellow, which the teacher had to drill off the piece for me because she just looked like she'd puked. Can't really do jack about the yellow around the eyes and wrist after a certain point either. Oh well. Still cute, and even fairly "realistic" in a way.