A Spoily Day

Today I had a day of spoilies as my hubby calls them – he has been waiting to give me a spoily day ever since I’ve felt better after the last chemo, but I’ve been too busy with my mystery projects and had no time to go out.

Our first port of call was the Ricky Grant Day Unit for my bloods (not that that was particularly spoily!). For once I wasn’t kept waiting very long at all, and a nurse I hadn’t seen before called me in, and in no time at all, she had the gripper needle in, the port flushed, and the blood out – I hardly felt a thing! It was the most painless and hassle-free ever. She was very nice (as they all are) and very friendly. I asked her for more of the cow cream and she gave me a new pot, and I handed in my MRSA swabs. Back again tomorrow for chemo session #5.

Last time I was there for my chemo, I got into conversation with a lovely nurse who told me that her husband and her daughter were in the army, in the Royal Engineers. I told her that my grandfather had been in the Royal Engineers in the First World War, and she was very interested in that. Before going today, I had a rummage in my buttons box and found the Royal Engineers uniform buttons I’d inherited from my grandfather with all his other buttons, and took out two to give to her. She was totally overwhelmed and thrilled with this, and said her daughter and husband would be thrilled too – she said I had made her day! Actually her lovely response made my day – it was so touching!

Over a year ago I started making a large album about my dad, but had to set it aside in favour of the smaller one that I wanted to make for our niece. This large album is a project I want to take up again as soon as I can. All I have done so far is the ancestry pages, one of which is about Grandpa in WWI, and I am going to take this page in for the nurse to see tomorrow. On it is one of Grandpa’s buttons!

After this we came home, and made plans about our lunch out. My hubby had suggested we went out for lunch today, and our original plan was to go to our favourite place on the sea front, and then trundle along looking at the sea – it would have been the first time I’d been out on my buggy for months! However, the weather was awful today and it was more like November than August, so we had a change of plan. I asked if he would take me to Hobbycraft in Newton Abbot so I could pick up some of their own brand polyester filling for my angels project – I’ve been recommended this as one of the best around, and it will certainly be better than the awful lumpy stuff I’ve got!

So we went to the Passage House Inn, right down on the River Teign, where we have eaten lots of times in the past. My hubby had the carvery, and I had steak and otter pie – I was a bit worried about eating otters until they reassured me that it was Otter Ale!! It was absolutely delicious. I was very good and didn’t have a pudding – I’ve put on 4 lb in the last fortnight and I’m anxious not to gain too much weight. Although I have abandoned my diet until I’m through all the surgery and chemo, I have been trying at least to maintain my weight at a constant level!

Hobbycraft was brilliant. I hadn’t been before, and there was loads of great stash there! I got my polyester filling and then had a good old rummage through the whole shop. After a while my hubby went and sat in the car to read his book, and I am afraid I succumbed to temptation despite my resolution not to spend any money on more stash this month lol! There’s no hope for me – I’m an addict.

Here is what I bought.

At the back, the polyester filling. Middle row L-R: Tim Holtz tissue tape, Twinkling H2Os (I’ve wanted these for years!), a glue stick, some clippy attaching thingies by Tim Holtz. Front row: 2 packs of fat quarters with small prints to make angel clothes. Love how they are packaged with the ribbons and labels!

I signed up for a loyalty card and got £5 off my order.

In the shop they had quite a few different embossing and die-cutting machines, and I saw the Sizzix Big Shot Plus for the first time – what a dream machine! I am soooo tempted… I have had an old-style Cuttlebug since I started and it works just fine, but it is very small, and the idea of being able to emboss up to A4 is extremely attractive! Has anybody else out there got one, and what do they think? I’m not thinking of doing anything straight away but it did look gorgeous.

Then it was time to come home. I was pretty tired by then, and had a cup of tea and a sleep.

I saw something that amused me today – while I was waiting outside the hospital for my hubby to come with the car after my appointment, I was sitting outside the Physiotherapy Department and through the open door I saw this crutch:

You can see it propped up against the wall in the corner. Anybody using a crutch like that must need physio lol lol!!

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.

Silk Clay, and Some More Friendly Plastic Embellishments

Friendly Plastic

I have made quite a few more Friendly Plastic embellishments 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. All the wings have now been painted with black gesso and will be finished with gold gilding wax and red acrylic paint as before.

On the left in the photo are some Friendly Plastic embellishments which have been coloured with silver and gold gilding wax. Most of these are from my existing stash. I am currently putting together a small collection of embellishments, die-cuts, paper flowers, backgrounds etc. etc. as a gift for someone who needs a bit of cheering up, and these Friendly Plastic pieces will go in that parcel. On the right you can see the faces mould and the pair of wings with a heart mould.

Silk Clay

The silk clay I ordered has arrived in the post. I ordered a small tub (40g) to try, but because it is so light, there’s plenty in the tub to make quite a few pieces and to experiment. If this is successful, a larger tub is available. Silk clay is a type of self-hardening (air drying) polymer modelling clay which cures to a rubbery, flexible consistency. It can be painted with a variety of media, both water and alcohol based.

There are lots of available colours, but I bought white because I thought it would be more versatile and useful.

From the next picture you can see the consistency of the clay. It is like very soft marshmallow, quite foamy and easily mouldable, and it has a slightly strange, but not unpleasant odour.

After experimenting a bit to find the best way to press this into the mould, I ended up by rolling out a piece quite thin, and then rolling it onto the mould, not worrying about it going over the edges of these very shallow moulds.

I made these moulds from Amazing Mould Putty, a two-part silicone rubber which you mix together and which cures to a flexible rubber after a few minutes. These particular moulds were made from very thin metal angel wings, and have presented me with a problem because the moulds are so shallow, and it is hard to get enough strength without brittleness from the various media I have tried with them. The best results so far have been from Friendly Plastic pellets – a low-melting point plastic, which resulted in quite strong pieces with enough flexibility not to break.

Here is the piece removed from the mould. In order to avoid stretching it, I turned the whole thing over, and gently peeled the mould back from the piece, leaving it on the craft sheet.

It was a simple matter to trim the excess away with scissors. You have to be careful when doing this because if you allow any part of the object to touch another part, it will stick, and when you try and pull it apart, it stretches, ruining the piece and necessitating starting again. The cut away pieces will also stick, so care needs to be taken.

The completed piece.

Several other pieces drying. The drying time varies according to temperature and humidity, I think – I have left them overnight, and in the morning I shall see how flexible they are.

These pieces are very thin, and may not be strong enough to be used alone. I have an idea that the definition of the moulded texture has diminished slightly since being removed from the mould. If they are not strong enough, my plan is to stick them onto a card backing, which I may emboss first for interest.

Watch this space for progress! I am grateful to Diana of Velvet Moth Studio for mentioning this product, which I had not heard of before; this stuff is interesting to work with, and very easy to handle, and I think I may end up adding it to my creative smorgasbord.

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!