Mom and Dad drove down Friday night to hang out over the weekend, and that we did. I had placed a birthday order for new wire and that came in over the week. Mom had also placed an order and bought some liver of sulfur and a tumbler. She brought both down and Saturday we did a lot of experimentation. First we set up the tumbler to break in and while it was doing that we drove up to Bloomington to visit a bead store up there. Mom hadn’t been there before, and I’d been there once. It’s my favorite local bead shop, with a decent selection of seed beads. She even has 15s, it’s too bad they are in tubes. My work is so much faster when I can get seed beads in hanks. ah well. We got home and broke out the the LOS. phew, stinky stuff works quickly too. We oxidized some test pieces and then cleaned them up the best we could. In hind sight we learned that this is a step that we should spend more time on. We place the test pieces plus some non LOSed pieces into the tumbler and got that started. In the end we tumbled everything for about 24 hours. We’d both read that tumbling is supposed to harden the wire and shine it to a point that you can’t get by hand. We did notice that the wire hardened up a bit. But our stuff was not as shiny as we thought they’d be. Not sure if we’re missing something there or if we had too high of expectations. Also learned that we shouldn’t put stones in the tumbler for extended times, Mom’s turquoise shrunk on us.
While our test subjects were tumbling Mom and I worked on some wire work. We had fun playing with ideas with paisleys, fish, and petals. I’ve got ideas for at least three projects that will be fun, very cool, but will probably need a lot of troubleshooting. I’m excited to get more time to work on them. Unfortunately, there not enough hours in the day so I didn’t get a chance to work with the sheet metal. It rained off and on the entire weekend so metal work would have been difficult to do anyway. I wasn’t able to get a good pic of the patinas either. Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.
Posted by crymson at 08:51 PM on Sunday, August 19, 2007
Permalink
For anyone interested in metal music you should definitely check out The Ash and the Red’s newest song, Diceros. Chris put the finishing touches on his latest song this week and uploaded it for the world to see just last night. This is a lot different than the other two song’s he’s released under this band name. This one is smoother in its transitions and definitely shows his experience. I think this is my favorite of his songs, it’s definitely the most honest. And in truth the best art is always the most honest. I watched him write this while we were going through some very high emotion times. It’s been a weird year and this song is full of the emotions that not only he went through during those months. I’m very proud of him and the song he created.
Posted by crymson at 10:53 AM on Friday, August 17, 2007
Permalink
*mom and dad are coming down this weekend to hang out. mom and i are going to work on our metals and wire.
*i took my experiments out of their patinas yesterday and put them outside to air dry. i forgot about them over night and it was really humid and foggy this morning, so they were wet again. today is supposed to be dry and sunny so hopefully by the time i get home from work they’ll be dry and i’ll take pics
*i made a career decision within the past week and i’m quite happy with it
*my pulled pork that has been marinating for 36hrs is now cooking in my slow cooker, i’m excited to try it. and the salsa i made yesterday smelled glorious this morning. i even got blue corn chips to eat with it.
*thats all i have for now
Posted by crymson at 10:38 AM on Friday, August 17, 2007
Permalink
haha, I’m talking about myself! I’m bringing my science nerdiness into my experimentation with metal. I bought a book a couple weeks ago that had a couple recipes for some home made patinas. I have to admit the patinas are actually one of the stronger aspects of metal that is drawing me in. I like the fact that some chemical reactions can affect the color of the metal. I think it’s really cool that something as bright as copper can get some crazy blues mixed into it. I know this is the nerdy part. Last night I went and did a little shopping to get the materials need for the patinas. I set up three, one with potato chips and water, one with pine shavings and vinegar, and another that has the metal floating over a container of ammonia. I set it up early evening and by bed time every piece of metal had turned color! I left them all in there because I want to start and see the effects of 24 hours in the patina. They’ll need to air dry tonight, and then I’ll take pictures and show how each patina worked.
After my little science experiment I was lazy for the rest of the night. I did string up some beads that will go toward finishing a half done flower that’s been laying around. I finally found just the right color for it. Chris and I did some celebrating b/c he finished a song he’s been working on. I’ll post more on that once he uploads it. Then I made up a dry rub marinade for some pulled pork I plan on making on Friday. It said to give it 24hrs to marinate so it’s getting 36! should be tastey.
Tonight I plan on making up some homemade salsa with all the tomatoes that were given to me. I don’t think I’ve shared this a few Saturday’s ago I woke up walked out to our deck and looked out to the back of the yard. And there was this fat little ground hog sitting on his back haunches picking every single tomato that was even remotely beginning to ripen and feasting on them. Once again this year I’m a tomato moocher from all my gardening friends at work!
Posted by crymson at 06:47 AM on Thursday, August 16, 2007
Permalink
Today I finally brought out the saw and sheet metal that I purchased back in June. I was so excited when I received that shipment that I started working with the wire immediately and the sheet metal got buried. I’ve been doing a lot of surfing and reading on the net to try and figure out what I want to do with the sheet metal. Now I have some really cool ideas for some very different centers for flowers. So today I finally dug out the rest of that shipment and set up my bench pin. I set up my saw and read up on how to saw, then I tried it out. At first it was very hard and tended to stick, I know it is metal what’d I expect? Actually that is what I expected, what surprised me was after I found a groove the sawing motion became very smooth and even. The book I’m reading was definitely right, the less you think about it the easier it was. I cut out four rectangles of both brass and copper. They are my experimenting chips for a couple of patinas I want to try out. I’m hoping to set up the patinas tomorrow and then maybe by this weekend I’ll cut something out that could actually become part of a flower.
Posted by crymson at 09:11 PM on Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Permalink
Page 63 of 68 pages « First < 61 62 63 64 65 > Last »
