We had glorious weather this weekend. It was wonderful. We were pretty busy doing fun things all weekend, that really just included Chris and I. It had been a while since we spent a whole weekend together that didn’t involve long car rides. Friday night we rented a movie and relaxed. I went to bed early and got 10 hours of sleep that night. I guess I needed it b/c I felt great Saturday morning. Saturday we went out for a walk and then I made waffles for breakfast. I’m totally hooked on home made waffles now, they are amazing with some fresh fruit on top. Then we ran about a million errands, including picking up Jamaican Sun from the Art Guild. It’s been a while since it’s been home, and it’s nice to have it back. We also stopped and bought a new router, and Sunday I hooked it up with the help of the Dude. I had an urge to bake some cookies so we also stopped at the store and picked up some chocolate and peanut butter mixed chips and I made cookies. mmmmmmmmm, I ate a lot of dough. and then I took a nap! What a great day. That night our friends stopped by and we went to BWWs to watch the Bears play another preseason game.
Sunday started off lazy too, but we decided it was so nice out to go for a jog. yes, a jog. I hate jogging, I hate anything to do with running. I don’t know what possessed me but I jogged. =0) We came home and relaxed a bit. He played Madden, and I worked on some flowers. Then we headed downtown to the Irish Festival that was going on. What a perfect day for a festival. Lots of Irish music coming from several tents. There were several areas where people were selling Irish themed shirts and jewelry, or you could get your coat of arms printed on a shirt. Several beer tents were around and lots of greasy fair food. They were also having the annual duck race on the Illinois River this weekend. You could buy a duck and proceeds went to preventing abuse, and Sunday afternoon they raced the ducks on the river. The first 26 ducks across the finish line won different prizes. We watched the end of the race when a large group of ducks made a break for it and floated very quickly down river. Some kids were cheering on the ducks as they evaded the nets to catch them. I’m pretty sure they’re are some ducks down in New Orleans right about now. 
This morning the electrician came and fixed our outlet. He completely replaced it and said that it was wired wrong. Kinda scary. He also replaced the breaker to our dryer. So our dryer is working now too. Things seemed to be going right until my car’s breaks were rattling this morning. and last night the shelf and pole in our closet that holds all our clothes crashed to the floor. I guess next weekend we’re going to have to get out our tool belts and do some work.
Posted by crymson at 03:21 PM on Monday, August 27, 2007
Permalink
The day after my last post I got home from work and found that our internet was down. I live in the Midwest and we’ve had TONS of storms coming through lately so I waited a while before giving the internet company a call. I’m glad I didn’t wait too long, b/c surprise surprise the problem is on my end. After some troubleshooting with the cable guy we narrowed it down to my router being weirded out. For some reason the thing thinks there’s 4 computers hooked up to it, and so it won’t let either of the two that use it to work. I attempted to reset it but that didn’t work, and so I was left with the advice to call the company for help. UGH, I’m not a computer person and I really dread calling a company for troubleshooting, so I’ve been putting off fixing this problem until the weekend.
On that same day we also met a new neighbor of ours. I’m not sure how long he’ll be living by us, but it was quite the surprise to see him. We stepped out of the house that evening and I stepped on something. I kicked what I stepped on and looked down, and there was a small snake. It was quite angry with me and coiled up in the I’ll-bite-you-if-you-make-me pose. The angry little guy then proceeded to slither into a crack that is in our front stoop, so I don’t know if that’s his home or just his get-a-away hiding spot. After some research yesterday we’re pretty sure it as a Western Fox snake. They eat mice, frogs, and birds. They’re a constrictor snake and nonpoisonous. This one was just a baby, it hadn’t even developed its full coloring yet.
After last weekend’s wire-fest with Mom I’ve been ready to work on some flowers all week. Last night was the first night all week that I felt in the mood to work on some flowers. Of course I didn’t get into a really good groove until about 930 at night when I had to put everything away. I’m hoping when I get home from work today I can jump right back into that groove. I have a definite plan for one flower. I’m playing around with two ideas for two other flowers. I have a flower that has the petals done, just needs some leaves and lacing. And I have a small bouquet that I have a good idea of how to finish. I haven’t posted pics of flowers up for a while, but they aren’t far from my mind. I’m hoping to have a few more finished flowers to post up in the next week or so.
Posted by crymson at 08:46 AM on Friday, August 24, 2007
Permalink
Tonight Chris and I are watching the preseason Bears vs Colts football game. They made a big deal out of the game b/c its basically a rematch from last season’s superbowl. I’m not much of a football person, but Chris is, so we went out and got me a Bears shirt and some wine and I get to rip on Grossman all I want so I’m having fun. It’s been quite a day. Last night Chris found that an unused outlet at our house was sparking by itself. Not a good thing, so we flipped the breaker and I called an electrician this morning. Apparently everyone else is having electrical probs too b/c he couldn’t get here until Monday. We get home I start laundry, jeans, I go to put the jeans in the dryer and now my dryer doesn’t work. figures…I’m not sure if the outlet is fried or the motor in the dryer. I think it might be electrical though. sucks b/c i can’t even troubleshoot the problem b/c it runs off an industrial outlet and it is the only thing in the house that will run on that. i guess thats the joys of home ownership. it makes the wine taste that much better.
Posted by crymson at 08:44 PM on Monday, August 20, 2007
Permalink
Here are the results of my patina experiments. I wish the picture had turned out a little better. The middle pieces of metal are a very deep royal blue. Very pretty. There’s a lot of flexibility with this patina because salt added to the metal can cause different shades of the blues and apparently can cause some swirling. I didn’t get any swirling but I think I added too much salt anyway.
The pine and the potato chips both turned the metals green. According to the book the potato chips should have turned them blackish so not really sure what happened there. There are subtle differences though, the two made different patterns on the metal. Where the pine shavings touched the metal there was not a color change, this caused a cool contrast in the colors. In the picture its a little hard to see this, this is b/c the metals were left out overnight to air dry and it was foggy, well the fog condensed on the metal which smeared the patina a bit. The potato chip patina is does not have much of a pattern to it, more like splashes of green. The cool thing about this patina is that its sparkly, if you look closely it looks like little bits of glitter attached to it.
I guess I should have mentioned this first, but at the bottom of the pic are pieces of the brass and metal before any patinas are applied. Also the B indicates the metal is Brass, and the C stands for Copper. They reacted very similarly.
Now the tricky part of patinas is getting them to stay on. Patinas are achieved by oxidizing the metal, this is a natural chemical reaction sped up by me. Because all metal is slowly oxidizing based on it’s environment it’s near impossible to stop the process. It is possible to slow down the process, so that will be the next step to research.
Posted by crymson at 08:12 PM on Monday, August 20, 2007
Permalink
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
Page 64 of 70 pages « First < 62 63 64 65 66 > Last »
