Spiky Shiny Things

I was having a rummage through my jewellery box before doing a photshoot last weekend and came across some rings I made at college. It appears that my obsession with making things very pointy started a while ago...

I seem to recall having vague notions of making a whole set of claw rings, one for each finger, but never quite got around to it.

Another little obsession I had at college for a while was drilling holes in things:


And a couple of little composite shots of the set:


I still need an image for the front page of my website, but I don't think any of these are it. Maybe my new and exciting project will give me something amazing...

New Roller Derby Charm

It may appear from my last couple of posts that I've not been terribly constructive on the shiny things front. Not so! I've been working really hard, honest I have, I've just been a bit rubbish recently about blogging work in progress.

I've had a few friends ask recently if I'd make them plain roller derby helmet charm, so it can be engraved with skate names and/or numbers, and I've finally made one and had it cast.

I am hoping to take a class on acid etching soon, so that I can sort out the names and numbers myself. Scary chemicals - eek!

Whilst I had the camera out, I figured I'd also do some better pictures of my little pivot helmet, as I was never entirely happy with those.


Also, I had a play with doing a little helmet composition shot - thought it might work on a business card perhaps...?

I also have some super-exciting non-roller derby related jewellery in progress right now - pictures soon...

How to Wallpaper an Artist's Canvas

From the title of this post, you would be forgiven for thinking that I may actually be about to impart some wisdom on the matter, but fear not dear readers, this project has been approached with my usual mix of haphazardness and blind faith. Mess and chaos did, somewhat inevitably, ensue.

Now, our flat has very large, extremely dull, white walls. So, I figured, why not add some colour by using wallpaper - it will be easier than actually creating a painting, right? Especially as I've not picked up a paintbrush for a good few years now. The fact that I have never wallpapered anything in my life is neither here nor there...

So, canvasses and wallpaper acquired, I telephoned my mother for advice. She knows how to wallpaper things, see. We would have to paint the canvases with a thin layer of wallpaper paste, she said, and leave to dry before then pasting the wallpaper. It's called sizing, apparently. So, we covered the floor with a massive tarpaulin (I knew there would be mess. There's always mess) and got to work.

I used Solvite wallpaper adhesive that you have to mix up yourself, divided it into 4 and worked out how much water I needed for the sizing. We mixed the correct quantities (I think - maths not really my area of expertise), but if I were to do this again, I would paint the canvases with a much thicker coat of paste, in order to get the actual canvas part much stiffer than we did.

Unhelpfully, I couldn't find any instructions on the adhesive pack or on the interwebs for how long the wallpaper paste would take to dry. We ended up leaving it overnight, although having left the sized canvasses in a warm room, they were dry in a couple of hours.

So, onto the wallpapering! How hard can this possibly be, I thought. Somewhat obviously, as with most of my experimental projects that seem super-easy in my head, it turned out to actually be quite difficult. Sensibly, I purchased a cheap roll of wallpaper to practice on, as canvasses are sold in pairs, so we had a spare. Less sensibly, I chose as my practice roll a very heavily embossed Anaglypta. Then failed to read the instructions on the roll of paper. This is unlike me, I'm normally very much Instructions Girl, which is good, as the boy is more of a charge in headfirst, scattering instructions in his wake kinda person. Today, he has been enlisted as my glamourous assistant:

Anyway, we mixed up the adhesive again and pasted the paper. Then plonked it straight onto the canvas, without leaving it to soak into the paper. This was the not following instructions part. Still, it all seemed to go okay until we discovered that the edges were conspiring against us and refusing to stick to the canvas. Attempting to line up the second piece was also tricky. So, basically, our join looked rubbish. See?

Second one worked slightly better. More paste under the join seemed to help. Here is my glamorous assistant showing the difference between our first and second joins. Improvement was definitely made.

So, done with the practice one and feeling like we learned some stuff, we moved on to a rather lovely Graham & Brown paper - kind of a dark turquoise with a cool toned metallic gold vintage pattern. This one, I actually read the instructions on the paper, pasted and and left to soak for 5 minutes. Oh, also discovered that it helps to line up the patterns and cut out all the pieces before pasting anything. Just a little tip for you there...

We still had some joining problems. I think the problem is that a wall is nice and solid and you can really press down on the joins, whereas a canvas is a bit more flexible. I was a also a bit worried out getting paste on my lovely shiny paper, so could definitely have used more on the joins. But, it actually looked okay.

The final (and rather more complicated) canvas was a massive 6' x 4' one, to be hung landscape style and papered with Osborne and Little Grove Garden wallpaper, which I have been obsessing over for some years. Small and brighly coloured hummingbirds! Annoyingly, the canvas was slightly too wide for three drops of paper, so we also had to cut a silly little strip for one end. Bah.

Given what we'd learned so far, we were way more liberal with the wallpaper paste for this one, which made the joins stick much better.

Work in progress:


Having stuck down all of the pieces, I then spent the next hour stalking bubbles across the canvas. I may have tendencies to obsessiveness...

So, the next thing on my "what not to do" tips is drench a large frame of wood and canvas with liquid glue, leave it lying in a hot and sunny room and then toddle off down the pub. There were some teensy warping issues on the frame:


Once the canvases were dry, we folded over all the paper edges, having previously decided that trying to paste them to the edges of the canvas would be horrible, and staple gunned them to the back of the frame. Like so:

The boy found the staple gunning part terribly exciting and went off in search of more things to staple. Had the pictures not already looked a bit on the wonky side, I would have probably cut little v shapes out of the corners and folded them in a mitre joint kind of way. But they were, so I didn't.

Hung them on the walls and, apart from the horrible warping on the large frame, they actully don't look too awful. They could have been better, but given the slightly cavalier way we approached the project, they could have been much, much worse.


So, if you're thinking of doing something similar, I hope this little post is of some assistance, as despite extensive Googling, I couldn't find any information on wallpapering an artist's canvas, hence the write up.

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!

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!

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...

Wedding Rings! With Moustaches!

I recently received a request from a friend to make some custom silver moustache wedding rings. I think this has to be the bestest idea for wedding rings I have ever heard :)

Anyway, the original design brief was a silver band, with a heart cut of out one side and a twirly villain moustache cut out the other side. Awesome, thinks I. All I have to do is purchase unfinished wedding bands in the correct size, do the cutouts with tiny sawblades, polish, and done. Simples. No soldering, nothing. Take me a day, tops.

Of course, the designs you think will be the simplest often turn out to be completely horrible to make. Mainly because I am an idiot. For some reason, it didn't even occur to me that trying to saw out a shape from an already constructed ring would be nigh on impossible, due to the fact that the OTHER SIDE OF THE RING is in the way of the sawblade. Duh... The fact that I also chose lovely chunky thick bands did nothing to help the situation.

Anyway, I battled on with the heart cut outs, holding the saw at a ridiculous angle to avoid cutting into the other side. There were some dark mutterings, some occasional swearing and several broken sawblades. After much filing and all the fingers on my right hand going numb, I had the hearts finished. Now they looked okay, but a heart is a pretty fluid and organic kinda shape. A curly moustache, not so much. It was becoming apparent that there was no way I would be able to cut the moustache out of the other side and, with but days to go until the wedding, I had to make an executive decision to alter the original design and cut out the moustaches separately and solder them to the ring instead of cutting them out, which I felt pretty bad about, as I was no longer sticking to the original design given to me. I knew if I persisted with the cut outs, the rings just wouldn't look good though, and I would have felt terrible handing something over that I knew wasn't good enough.

Anyway, amidst the trauma, I managed to take a couple of pictures of work in progress. I also wound up deciding to make little frames for the heart cutouts, so the whole design matched and it wasn't like one side was cut out and one side was soldered on.

And just look at the tiny moustaches - I'm totally going to make more of these and turn them into earrings and bracelets and necklaces and anything else I can think of to put moustaches on!

And the finished rings:

Really happy with how they turned out, despite having to change the original design.

And some more pictures. The rings photographed pretty well, so I couldn't decide which shots to use. So I'm posting them all...