Saturday 29 May 2010

Experiments with Goo

I have been having vague ideas about making cupcake charms recently. But how, I thought, would one make the little swirly mountain of icing that traditionally sits atop one? Tricky...

But wait! Why not use actual icing equipment? Brilliant, no? Er, not so much actually. My theory was sound - mix enough clay softener with the Sculpey to make a suitable texture for squishing out of a piping tip and off we go. What I hadn't quite bargained for was just how very, very sticky the resulting goo would become. I managed to cover pretty much everything in bright pink gunge. Whilst I found this quite entertaining, the boy found it less so, as he was working on a Very Important Document for work. Apparently my sitting at the table giggling like a small child and chatting away to myself about pink squelchy stuff was distracting or something. It was pointed out to me that I appear to have no internal monologue...

Anyway, here is a picture of some pink goo whilst it was still relatively contained in one space:

The swirling actually worked okay, but the consistency of goo was a bit too stringy, hence all the wobbling great ends everywhere.

After the swirling, they went in the oven. Which smelled very, very bad. I feel I should take this opportunity to apologise to my mother for all the small and misshapen Fimo creatures I baked in her oven as a child, thus filling her kitchen with the vile stink of burning chemicals. Sorry, Mum!

I think I may have failed at oven temperature setting. Or left them in too long. Whatever. They ended up somewhat burned and very much welded to the base of my tart tin:

Managed to find a couple of usable ones and prised them off the base though. Look, tiny swirls!


So, in theory, I could now make a silicon mold of the best one, fill it with silver clay and fire it to create a pure silver swirl. I think perhaps before I do that, I might have a go at carving a swirl out of wax instead though...

In other news, website 2.0 is looking much better than the first attempt. It's still very much work in progress, but it's mine and I made it all by myself, so ner!

Saturday 15 May 2010

More Moustaches

Remember these fab moustache rings I showed you a few weeks ago?

I liked the tiny little moustaches before they were attached to the rings so much, I thought I'd do a little moustache charm.

Silver sheet + tiny sawblades = happy jeweller!

Here it is:


I really want to make some more rings as well - not sure what style though. I obviously wouldn't want to make some the same as the wedding rings, as they were a custom design. I saw a plastic one on a market stall the other day that looked like this:


Something like that would be super-cute in silver right? But I want to do something a bit more rounded and organic, if that makes any sense!

Kind of like this...


I think I shall make some moustache earrings as well - but for now I'm being distracted by other shiny things - too many ideas all at the same time!

EDIT: I've put a better picture up of my moustache charm now that I've got a decent camera but it's made the formatting of this post go a bit weird!

Wednesday 5 May 2010

Web Design - 1, Lauren - 0

So, I figured it was about time I got me a website. Having checked out some web design companies, it seemed that a basic site would set me back in the region of £400. Eek! This is way more money than is sitting in my jewellery account right now. Also, am total control freak so handing it over to someone else was always going to be a bit tricky.

How hard can it possibly be to build a website then? Turns out, quite difficult, specially if you are a techno-retard like me. I signed up for Moonfruit, which is apparently idiot proof, and started adding pictures. This is easy, I thought. Yay! Then I did something alarming to the background of the site, which resulted in the whole thing turning black, throwing a huge hissy fit and refusing to let me even go near the editing tools again. I proceeded to email the support people, who scratched their heads and told me they'd not encountered this before and weren't really sure what I'd done to it. Idiot proof my arse. Or possibly I am a very special kind of idiot.

But, I will not be beaten! I'm starting again with a new site, hoping to even the score to at least a 1-1 draw. This time perhaps I won't touch the background though...