Some More Embellishments from my Moulds

THE BIG REVEAL, PART 3.

This is the first of two posts today.

Many of my regular visitors have been justifiably very frustrated and impatient with me lately because I’ve been working hard on several secret projects that I wasn’t at liberty to reveal until now. With her permission, I can now reveal that I have been making stuff for Shaz. As many of you will know, she is about to undergo major surgery and has been through so much over the past year. She and her lovely hubby share the same birthday and I have made cards for them both, a get well card for her (still under wraps) and a selection of bits and pieces for her to play with once she feels up to being creative again. She opened the parcel on her birthday (14th Aug.) and now that she has received them I can share the making of them with you. Until now, I didn’t want to spoil her surprise as she visits my blog regularly. Throughout my own cancer journey, this wonderful friend has been such an encouragement and support to me, and this is one way I can thank her, and show my own appreciation and support. I know that she would love a visit from you to wish her well for her surgery on 2nd Sept.

I shall be uploading a couple of posts each day over the next few days until all is revealed. Please scroll down for earlier posts.

Some More Embellishments from my Moulds

I have cast a few more embellishments from the moulds I made.

I have made quite a few more from the pair of wings with a heart mould, and also a couple of faces from my Sculpy face mould which I have had for quite a while but not yet used. I shall use these faces for my angel project.

On the left are some which have been coloured with silver and gold gilding wax. Most of these are from my existing stash. These went in the parcel I put together of various bits and pieces as a gift for Shaz. On the right you can see the faces mould and the pair of wings with a heart mould.

I subsequently painted the hearts and wings embellishments and added Treasure Gold gilding wax.

Several of these went in the parcel.

Friendly Plastic Wings

A few days ago I made some more of the pairs of wings with a heart from the mould I made from the metal embellishment I got from Ebay. Nice steampunk look! The first one I made had only one, or possibly two, coats of the Dylusions paint on the heart, and this paint is very fluid and I realised it needed further coats.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been adding another coat of paint each time I was passing – they now have 3 coats and are well covered and nice and red, and a final coat of acrylic gloss varnish just on the hearts, and they are looking much better.

The wings actually look more gold than this in real life – it’s strange how poor the camera is in picking up shiny or glittery surfaces. I am pleased with how the hearts have turned out. The wings were just coloured with gold gilding wax (Treasure Gold) over black gesso.

I finished them off by giving the backs a final touching-up coat of black gesso to cover up any bits of red or gold that had crept round the back, and they look nice and neat now.

Here’s the first one I made, with the angel wings from the moulds I made from the very thin metal ones I have.

You can see that the red heart looks a bit duller. It is much improved with more paint and a coat of shiny varnish.

This is a very nice embellishment and I’m glad I made the mould because I can now make as many as I want, and another advantage is that they are a fraction of the weight of the original, which is solid brass.

These were all photographed on my second sheet of A3 faux leather which I kept for photographic backgrounds. Although I made a mistake and painted it with gel medium to give it a semi-gloss finish and it came out rather milky, this doesn’t seem to show too much on the photos so I can still use it. The other faux leather sheet is being used as a masterboard and is being cut up for other projects and already it is quite diminished in size!

The Big Reveal of my mystery projects is just around the corner! Not long to wait now, if you can contain your impatience for a few more days! I’ve been working hard at them and I am well on top of them.

Less than a week to my next chemo – this 3 weeks is flying by at an alarming rate, but at least the time is going quickly and it will soon be October when my chemo comes to an end, and will hopefully signal a fresh start, and a cancer-free life. Spare a thought for all those who do not have such a positive outcome to look forward to on their cancer journey. I count my blessings daily.

Cookies

Is anybody else getting as profoundly irritated as I am with the recent change regarding cookies? Every blog and website that one visits has the cookie warning which obscures the top of the page and you have to click on it to get rid of it – and it appears again if you visit another page on the same blog. I am getting so fed up with this!!! I wish there was a way to click once on some sort of blanket agreement that you accept the use of cookies so that you don’t have to keep doing it again and again and again ad nauseam… it’s driving me NUTS.

WOYWW 322

After my absence last week from desk-hopping (feeling really lousy from my chemo the previous Friday) I am now back in the swing of things (desk-swinging maybe?) and feeling a lot better.

Here is my desk for this week.

I have been having some fun this week with my new Silk Clay. Until last week I’d never heard of this product but our very own Diana (the Velvet Moth herself) suggested it and I looked it up. I have made some wings with it from my shallow wing moulds and it has dried very nicely to a light, rubbery texture, well suited to my requirements. Thank you Diana!

I have also made some more Friendly Plastic wings from my metal embellishment from Ebay (pair of wings with a heart) which are now painted with black gesso, awaiting gilding wax and red acrylic paint. Also on my desk are the metal gear wheels I got from Ebay, and a small bag of Friendly Plastic gear wheels cast from the moulds I made, some moulds (the wings and heart, and my Sculpy face moulds) and my gilding wax.

At the front of the desk, you can see that I am sorting out some embellishments and various other bits and pieces to send to a friend who needs lots of cheering up at the moment.

I’m afraid I still can’t reveal my secret projects to you (you will just have to continue to be be patient, if that is possible lol! – I promise all will be revealed eventually! Believe me, they are on the pull-out unit to the right of the picture, in all their glory, just out of shot, unfortunately!

Have a great week everybody, full of creativity and fun. Happy WOYWW.

Friendly Plastic Embellishments with Gilding Wax

The final step in completing my Friendly Plastic angel wings and steampunk gearwheel embellishments that I made yesterday was to give them a metallic look.

The first step was to paint them with black gesso. I did this front and back, making sure I got well between the teeth of the various gearwheels.

Once they were dry, I applied three colours of gilding wax randomly to the gearwheels: gold, silver and copper, blending them to give an overall metallic effect that was slightly tarnished-looking.

Unfortunately the photo doesn’t really show up the differences in the colour. For the two pairs of angel wings and the heart and wing embellishment, I confined myself to gold gilding wax.

I painted the heart red, using the Dylusions paint in Postbox Red.

The three pairs of wings.

I am extremely pleased with how these turned out, and I shall definitely be making some more.

I have some silk clay on order to experiment with, too, and I am also going to re-try the UTEE method with the addition of some laser acetate sheet to strengthen them.

Angels Take Flight

Today I cast some Friendly Plastic pellets in the moulds I made for the angel wings and for some gearwheels. This was a lot more successful than the UTEE although I’ve had some further thoughts about that which I will mention later.

Here is the equipment needed for the FP pellets. You can see that I am working on my Presspahn ultra-heat-proof mat (as I did yesterday with the melting pot) – please see my sidebar for details of these mats which protect the surface underneath.

On the left you can see my electric skillet heating up. I have put some water in it and set it to between 60 and 70 degrees centigrade which is the temperature at which the FP pellets soften and become useable. To the right is the tub which contained my original FP pellets and behind it, the ziplock bag of generic low-melting point plastic pellets that I bought to replace them – at greatly reduced cost! It pays to shop around because you are paying for the Friendly Plastic name and the stuff is exactly the same. You can certainly find it on Ebay. On the right you can see the moulds I made, and my UTEE spatula and spoon for fishing the FP out of the water.

Here are the pellets in the water, beginning to heat up. On the right is a ball of previously melted FP from a previous session. In future I shall flatten out any unused FP into thinner sheets which won’t take so long to melt. You can see that in its unmelted state it is opaque white.

Beginning to melt. If you look carefully you can see that some of the pellets are white in the centre and transparent around the edges as they start to soften. I call this the “frogspawn stage.”

Fully melted and ready for use (apart from the large ball which is still in its frogspawn state – you can clearly see the transparent “shell” around the still-unmelted inner core).

The water is just too hot to put your hands in, so you need something to take the FP out with. I use my UTEE kit – there’s a plastic spoon whose handle is also a pair of tweezers, and a silicone spatula. This is useful for pulling the small fragments of FP together so that they stick together, and it’s great because it’s non-stick. Melted FP does tend to stick to plastic.

This is what it looks like when removed from the water. You can see that I have broken off a small piece ready to use. It has to be moulded in your hands to get rid of air bubbles and to make it the shape you want. You have a few minutes before it begins to harden.

At any time, if it starts to harden and go opaque, and you haven’t finished, you can put it back in the hot water till it goes clear again, and if you want you can put it back in its mould too – these silicone moulds are heat proof and come to no harm in the hot water. This will make the FP go clear and malleable again.

At this point I didn’t take any more photos because I was working fast and concentrating, and more or less forgot about the camera!

Here are the pieces I cast. You can see that they have gone opaque white again as they have cooled and hardened. You can see several pieces of left-over FP which I have flattened out ready for re-melting next time.

These are the two angel wings I made from the moulds I used yesterday for the UTEE. Because the moulds are so shallow, there was a lot of excess FP around them, and I cut this away with an X-acto knife, putting the offcuts back in the water to melt again.

This was quite hard work as the stuff gets fairly hard once set. I couldn’t cut most of it with scissors but used the scissors to help once I’d got started with the knife.

After the trimming, some of the edges were a bit rough. I tried filing these with a needle file but this didn’t work very well, so I heated up my hot knife and rubbed it gently around the edges, squeezing to the back any thickness that was generated around the edges.

You can see that on the smaller one, the inner edge is still a bit transparent from the heat. The hot knife made the edges a bit dirty but that doesn’t matter because they are going to be painted anyway.

Further thoughts on the UTEE

The main disadvantage of the UTEE was that it was too fragile. It was flexible when very thin but not nearly durable enough, and if thicker, tended to be more brittle and liable to break. Overnight I thought about this and wondered whether it would be possible to give it some support – this was my idea with the Angelina fibre but this didn’t work. I really like the look of the transparent wings, especially with the gold Perfect Pearls painted on the mould first, and if I can replicate this but with added strength, it might still work. It struck me that if I proceeded as before, and then, when the UTEE was still in the mould and still hot, I could lay down on top of it a piece of acetate which would stick to the UTEE and give it strength without sacrificing flexibility, and then trim off the excess. Being transparent, the acetate would be invisible. Of course, this would have to be acetate which would stand the high temperature – the normal variety would simply melt and buckle. I have a supply of acetate sheets for use with a laser printer which of course works by heat, and I have used this stuff in the past when needing to put heat in contact with acetate, for instance when one wants to use a hot glue gun. I think this might work. Watch this space.

Another thought about UTEE is that I could make some simple, thick wings just cut to shape without a mould, and stamped with a texture stamp such as you can see here. I love this technique. You can introduce lovely iridescent colours with Perfect Pearls or equivalent.

I have also just come across some stuff called silk clay (thank you Diana of Velvet Moth Studio – Diana says she gets ideas for materials and equipment from my blog so it’s nice to be able to find things on her blog too, which will help me!). Before this I hadn’t heard of it before. It seems that it is an air-drying modelling clay that cures to a rubbery, flexible consistency, and I think this might work well. You can wrap it around something else as well (e.g. beads) so that you use less, and add strength, and if it proves too flexible for my purposes, I might wrap it around some acetate or card before pressing it onto the mould. It was this that gave me the idea of strengthening the UTEE with acetate. Anyway, initially I could find very little about it except kids’ stuff, and a lot of videos not in English (I think it may be of Danish manufacture) but eventually I came across some good stuff in English and for adults, including this very good tutorial on Splitcoaststampers, a site that is well worth a visit for those who don’t know it as it’s full of tutorials, galleries of people’s work, ideas, etc. It seems that you can colour this clay with water-based products (distress inks, acrylic and watercolour paints etc.) as well as alcohol inks and alcohol-based markers. It is available in lots of colours but for our purposes you really only need white. Again, watch this space! I’ve got a small tub of white silk clay on order and we’ll see how I get on with it.

I am glad that I did my abortive experiments with the UTEE because they may not have been so abortive after all. The Friendly Plastic wings are definitely better, and seem flexible and strong enough. Whether there is enough definition on them to show up the design remains to be seen after they are painted. As with the gearwheels I have made in the past from this material, I am planning to paint them (and the gearwheels from today) with black gesso and then add gilding wax, which I know looks good.

Flightless Angels

Today, feeling a bit better again, I decided to devote the morning to some experimental work in my ARTHaven. EPIC FAIL. However, I decided to blog about it anyway, because I did come up with some interesting results, even if none of them were useable for the purpose I wanted – some may be able to be developed further and used differently, and it’s always good to learn from one’s mistakes!

The other day I made these moulds from the metal angel wings I recently got from Etsy.

I needed to discover what kind of materials would work with these extremely shallow moulds, that would be strong enough and flexible enough not to be brittle. Today’s experiments were mostly with UTEE (Ultra-Thick Embossing Enamel), and also a little with Angelina Fibre and Fantasy Film.

My first plan was to use one of the large wing moulds to make some transparent wings by pouring in clear UTEE. First of all I painted the inside of the mould with some dry Perfect Pearls in Perfect Gold.

Using my melting pot, I melted some UTEE which was already in there, which had been mixed with UTEE Flex (granules which you add to UTEE to keep it flexible). Pouring it into the mould wasn’t a great success. It was hard not to get far too much in. I scraped half of it back into the pot with the spatula.

Once it was set, I peeled off the mould. The UTEE was so thin that it tore, and wasn’t all there! The effect was nice, though.

Here’s a detail, showing the shimmer of the Perfect Pearls showing through the clear UTEE.

It was obviously extremely flexible and unsuitable for self-supporting wings. This technique might possibly work if the piece was being applied to a flat surface as an embellishment, though.

I then moved on to the smaller mould, and decided on a different approach, this time sprinkling on UTEE and melting it with my heat gun. This time I used gold UTEE. I had to hold the heat gun well back so as not to blow the UTEE away, but close enough to start to melt the surface of the granules and make them tacky, after which I could zoom in with the heat gun and melt it easily. Here it is after the first layer had been melted.

While it was still warm and tacky, I added another layer of UTEE and melted that.

The next photo shows the third layer of UTEE having been added, and about to be melted.

Once it was cool, I peeled the mould off, and was surprised to find that where the top surface was bright gold, the surface that had been in contact with the mould was a dull brown! Very disappointing. Maybe this was the result of repeated heating.

It felt fairly strong and slightly flexible, and I was able to trim away the excess with scissors.

However, on flexing it a little further, it broke.

My third test was to use the sprinkling method with the heat gun, but to add some UTEE flex. I painted the mould with Perfect Pearls again and melted a layer of clear UTEE. Once it was melted, I sprinkled on some of the Flex granules and melted it again, and then added two more layers of clear UTEE, melting each separately.

I did find that the melting UTEE tended to creep away from the mould and create holes in itself. I am not sure if the Perfect Pearls were making the surface of the mould too non-stick. Eventually as I added more UTEE, it seemed to fill up OK.

Here is is, cooling.

After it had been removed from the mould.

Again I trimmed this with scissors, and again, managed to break off the tip.

This time I decided to try and mend it, by pressing the broken edge of each piece onto the surface of the melting pot to soften it, and then pressed them together.

I heated the whole thing gently from the top which eventually got rid of the join. I think a piece made in this way would be ideal to mount supported on a flat surface as an embellishment, but I don’t think it would stand up in flight!

Being unconvinced that it was strong enough not to break, I decided to re-melt it, and this time to spread some Angelina fibres over the melted UTEE in the hope that they might strengthen it. This is the back, after it was pulled off the mould. Quite opaque-looking.

This is the front. Quite a mess. You can’t see much of the definition of the wing detail.

The back, after trimming.

The front, after trimming.

Not a huge success.

I decided to try laying a piece of Fantasy Film over the mould and putting UTEE on top of that and melting it, hoping that the Fantasy Film would pick up the detail of the mould, but it just shrank and crept away from the mould, and I ended up with a shapeless piece which was somewhat wrinkled and pitted. It was an interesting effect, though, with iridescent shimmery colours, and I may be able to use this piece in other projects.

While still thinking about Angelina Fibre and Fantasy film, I decided to try a technique I have used before with rubber stamps. This doesn’t always seem to work, and it does seem to depend on what colour of Angelina Fibre you use, for the image to show up nice and clearly.

I spread some Angelina Fibre over the mould and laid a piece of non-stick silicone baking parchment over the top and ironed it.

Very unsatisfactory! All it did was flatten and fuse the Angelina Fibre and no image was visible. Simple stamps without too much detail work best for this technique, I think, and probably much deeper-etched ones than the depth of my very shallow mould.

I tried the same with Fantasy Film laid down first, and then Angelina Fibre. Same result. Total failure!

Here are all my failures together.

Oh well.

I need a new material to fill these very shallow moulds. I am sure that polymer clay is going to be too brittle to use this thin. There is a possibility that Friendly Plastic pellets may work, and when I next cast some things from moulds, which will be soon, I am going to try using this with these moulds, but because this stuff is more like clay in consistency when melted, and not pourable, I think it may be hard to fill the moulds neatly, and difficult to trim them afterwards once they are set. FP ends up fairly hard, and this thin, it may break.

I discovered something called silk clay last night and that might possibly work. This stuff behaves like modelling clay but sets to a lightweight rubbery substance which may stand up if the pieces are not too large. I need something strong enough not to break, and slightly flexible so it isn’t brittle, but not so flexible that it won’t stand up under its own weight.

For the moment it looks as if my angels are going to remain flightless, unless anyone can come up with some helpful suggestions!

A Bit More Mould Making

I am now 4 days on from my fourth chemo treatment, and again, feeling better in the mornings so taking advantage of that to do a bit in my ARTHaven. I do seem to be at my best in the mornings, and then have to rest during the afternoon and evening. I am hoping that like last time, the effects will not last much beyond the first week, enabling me to take full advantage of feeling better before the next treatment.

This morning I made a few more moulds, using the Amazing Mould Putty. I had one or two fails from the past batch of moulds so remade these, and then I did a few more.

The reason one or two of my gearwheel moulds failed was that I pressed them down too far, and wiggled them a bit so they were rather indistinct, and not pressed in at an even depth all around. One or two had blemishes because of inadequate manipulation of the mixed putty, so they had air bubbles or creases.

To make a good mould, I have discovered that if you make a ball shape and flatten it slightly, so that it is still slightly smaller than the object, and then press the object down, it spreads the mould so it is big enough. Press down gently so that the top of the object is level with the surface of the mould and don’t wiggle it. The less manipulation the better. These redone moulds were very much better.

A few weeks ago I ordered some thin metal angel wings from Etsy and decided to try and make some moulds from these. I found the best way to make the moulds was to mix the putty and make it into a ball and then roll it out with my acrylic roller which is really for polymer clay. I laid the thin metal piece onto this thinly rolled out piece, and rolled over the top very gently with the roller, and then placed a flat board over the top with a weight on top, to keep it all flat. After curing, the mould peeled off the bottom of the board with no problem at all, and the metal piece remained nice and flat, making a good impression.

The wings are very thin, so the moulds are thin too, and this may present a problem with casting, but I shall do some experiments and see what works best with them.

I also made a few more moulds from some miscellaneous charms while I was at it.

Here is a detailed shot of the angel wing moulds.

The impression is very good in each case. I think the best medium to cast in these moulds will be Friendly Plastic pellets because this stuff ends up quite rigid. Polymer clay at this thickness would probably be too brittle and break. Another advantage of the FP is that I could possibly warm the centre with a hot knife so that I could bend the wings up? Not sure if this would work but it’s worth a try!

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Steampunk Gears Birthday Card

It’s my dad’s birthday on Friday, so I’ve made him a card. He is very interested in clocks, so this year I’ve made him one with gears and clock parts.

The card base is plain white inkjet card which I printed with an elliptical transparency fade (which doesn’t show on the photo, unfortunately). Onto this is matted and layered some black cardstock over some dull gold (not mirror card, as I didn’t want anything too shiny on this card). I did the same with a smaller piece of each, heat embossing the sentiment, and sticking this down over a small piece of brown ribbon with a fleck of gold in it. The ribbon and the small piece of card were stuck down with Pinflair gel glue.

When I was making my stencils the other day, and made a mess of the clocks and gears one, I kept all the bits that fell out, to use as small masks. I used a few of these, rubbing over them with Versamark, using a piece of Cut ’n Dry foam, and then gently brushed on some gold Perfect Pearls (mica powder) with a soft brush, and shaking the excess back into the container.

I used a couple of the cut out acetate pieces as embellishments, stuck down with Crafter’s Companion Stick and Stay spray adhesive, and the rest of the embellishments were some of the Friendly Plastic gears and clock pieces that I made last year, from the moulds I’d made. Before sticking these down with Pinflair gel glue, using my new fine nozzle syringe, I rubbed on a little Treasure Gold (like Rub ’n Buff) to give them a nice vintage metallic look.

For the inside, I made a card insert by printing the same elliptical transparency fade and some printed text, adding some gear and clock part images under the transparency fade layer. I created this in Serif PagePlus, my desktop publishing software.

I think the black, brown, cream and dull gold, combined with the steampunk theme, makes a nice card for a man. Hope he enjoys it!

Metal Detecting Birthday Card–Mixed Media

On Saturday it’s my hubby’s birthday. A few months ago, he took up metal detecting, and is having so much fun with it, and making new friends, and sometimes finding some quite interesting things. I thought it would be nice to make him a birthday card this year that reflects this new interest and to celebrate a special joke we share together!

When he first started, every time he came home I used to ask him, “Did you find a Saxon hoard?” After that amazing find of the Staffordshire Hoard in the Midlands in 2009 by a metal detectorist in a farmer’s field, and the two men shared a reward worth a king’s ransom, I’ve been dreaming of retiring in style! My hubby is always up before I am in the mornings, and on his days off, he’s often out metal detecting, and he leaves me a note to say where he is – “Gone to find a Saxon hoard.” He STILL hasn’t found one, much to my extreme disappointment – I hanker after one of those glorious Saxon torcs to grace my now-not-so-swan-like neck… so I thought I’d “find” a Saxon hoard for him.

Here’s the front of the card.

I designed the metal detecting man in Inkscape and cut him with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine. The svg file is now uploaded to my SkyDrive and is free to download if you want it – it might be a useful addition for a man-type card, especially if you have relatives who share my hubby’s hobby.

I used my new heavy watercolour paper that I bought for mixed media work (I’m making my Fine Art Album pages out of this), but it has unfortunately buckled a bit – it may settle down when it’s completely dry. (In future, I may prime it with Gesso if I’m doing extensive wet acrylic painting on it.) I painted the sky with ultramarine acrylic paint diluted with acrylic polymer and a little water. The grass is sap green acrylic paint. The cross-section of the ground I first painted with burnt umber acrylic paint, and then mixed some more of the same paint with coarse pumice acrylic gel medium and applied it with a palette knife over the painted surface, to give a nice earth-like effect.

When this was dry, I added various bits and pieces for the metal detectorist to detect – some of these really are metal: the chain, spring, washer and tube, but the rest (gear wheels, key etc.) are from my stash of such things that I made last year from friendly plastic pellets. They had been painted with black gesso, and I just rubbed on some Treasure Copper and Treasure Gold (like Rub ’n Buff) to give them a metallic appearance.

I added the text to the image of the scroll, using Serif PagePlus (desk-top publisher) and then printed it, and cut it out. It is stuck onto the card using quite a lot of Pinflair glue to make it nice and dimensional.

Here is the inside of the card.

The left-hand side has the greeting for my hubby. I printed a separate piece of 100 gsm paper and then distressed it with Brushed Corduroy Distress Ink. The inside of the card itself, I distressed with Dried Marigold Distress Ink, and then stuck the printed piece down. The whole thing got a bit marked with the paint from the front and the right-hand inside piece, but on balance I don’t mind too much because it adds to the distressed look, and after all, metal detecting isn’t exactly a clean hobby!

On the right is his Saxon Hoard! I printed and cut out the text, and stuck this down with regular matt gel medium. I then painted the whole of the rest of the background with burnt umber acrylic paint as I did on the front of the card, and in the same way, applied a mixture of coarse pumice gel medium and burnt umber acrylic paint, which covered the edges of the printed piece of card.

I printed and cut out a large number of images of Saxon and other items to represent the Saxon hoard.

This involved a huge amount of “fussy cutting” with fine scissors, and I gave myself neck-ache doing it – it took hours! Some of the pieces are very small. I also cut out a large number of images of coins. Each one of these pieces was applied individually using Pinflair glue – some of the larger ones I hand-embossed before sticking them down to give them a bit more dimension. I added some Stickles glitter glue in several colours, just to highlight various points and add a bit of bling to make it look like a real treasure hoard. Once they were dry, I applied a further small quantity of the burnt umber and pumice gel medium mixture to cover up bits and pieces, to make it look as if the hoard had just been unearthed.

You will notice the torc in the bottom left hand corner. Earmarked – for me!!