weekend trials

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. 

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