Took the plunge

Well, I finally took the plunge and opened a shop on the Handmade Artists site.  My little shop is named Amorphous Designs and so far features 5 pairs of handmade earrings. 

I plan to list several more earrings over the next week or so.  I'm trying to stretch out the listings as new listings hit the front page of the site, and get more views that way.

Here is what is currently listed:

the photography part is still pretty challenging and I need to spice up the descriptions more. 

So far, I'm really liking the Handmade Artist venue, unlike Etsy, this site ONLY has handmade and not importers and resellers masquerading as handmade or "collectives", which is Etsy speak for big businesses.    The people who run the site are very friendly and make a real effort to welcome newcomers and help them promote their stuff. So, stop on by and check out all the cool stuff made by creative, crafty people all over the world.  Oh yeah, and check out my shop too while you're there.

Making Friends with Anemone

An absolutely perfect day to visit Moss Beach tide pools, aka the Fitzgerald Marine Preserve.

Although it was very windy and quite cold when we arrived at 8am, it warmed up a bit in the bright sun. 
Our normally intrepid little explorer was a bit daunted by the cold and mostly watched from the beach, although even he could not entirely resist the lure of the exposed rocks and critters.

a meeting of the limpets

somethings fishy in this pool

I wonder what critters that make these kinds of marks in the rocks

very interesting pattern on the underside of a limpet shell

sea snails

oh how I love thee Wikipedia! It took <1 minute to identify this creature, the Acanthadoris lutea (aka "Orange-peel doris"), lounging about among the spiny sea urchins

cool Chiton (aka "sea cradle")

and finally, is it a friend? No, it's anemone!

 but we're going to make friends with it

Patina Party

Last weekend I invited a wonderful lady and jewelry artist over for a "Patina Play Day" .  Laura Bracken has been making beautiful jewelry for the last 15 years, really great stuff, check it out at http://www.brackendesigns.com/servlet/StoreFront.

I was delighted when she accepted my invitation to try out some different "recipes" for creating a patina on metal. Patina is just a fancy name for tarnish and oxidation.  It will happen naturally on metals as they are exposed to oxygen in the air, a common example is the Statue of Liberty that has the classic green copper/bronze patina.  Many people who work with metals prefer to speed up the process and by using different combinations of chemicals, heat and time can create varied and really beautiful finishes.

Sulfurated Potash (mostly potassium sulfide), commonly called Liver of Sulfur (LOS) is used by many jewelry makers as it is readily available, simple to use, fast and produces a nice brown to black patina on copper containing metals such as sterling silver, bronze and brass.  There are many additions and variations to the simple LOS bath that I found searching the Internet and many of the variants use common household chemicals.  Additionally, both Laura and I independently came across this collection of chemical recipes for patinas on the The Science Company website. We narrowed the options down to a few recipes we could do at home with reasonable safety. 

We tried out 3 variations on the LOS recipes and a couple of Science Company chemical recipes. Details and more pictures can be found on Laura's blog.

On most of the flat pieces we also made marks with a black Sharpie to test it's ability to act as a resist to create a pattern in the patina.


1. Dilute LOS gel in hot water with a shot of vinegar: 

 

observation: seemed to punch up the red/purple/blues

2. dilute LOS gel in hot water with a shot of ammonia:

 observation: seemed to punch up the blue/greens

3. dilute LOS get substituting hot coffee for the hot water:

observation: we both liked the warm brown tone this produced.

Then we moved our operation out to the garage for the more laboratory type recipes.

don't panic, actually these chemicals are pretty safe, but they all had lots of CYA verbiage on the website and containers, so we made sure we were adequately prepared.  Also, we were heating these up and didn't want to breathe any powders or fumes.


4. LOS patina, followed by dips in Ferric Nitrate and Cupric Nitrate:

observation: somewhat disappointing for round one, but further research makes me think this would work better by heating the piece then brushing or spraying and allowing the patina to form on the surface, built up in layers.

5. Ammonia fume (hanging the metal piece over ammonia solution in a sealed container:

observation: the first round was a major disappointment, we did get a nice yellowish green on the bronze wire in the first 15 minutes, which I quite like and may try to duplicate later.

6. Round 2 with Ammonia fumes, this time I bathed the pieces in vinegar and sprinkled salt on one side:

observation: I could see the reaction starting in 15 minutes, but it took at least an hour to get the nice blues.  The above pictures are after sealing the pieces with Renaissance wax, which did remove a little and dull the colors slightly, but I think is necessary for long term preservation.  Also, I think it might be better to try to dry the pieces as much as possible before starting the fuming.



Lessons learned:

• LOS variants are easy and safe, I will probably stick to them for the majority of my work
• Ammonia fume produces a really nice yellowish green on the bronze wire in the beginning stages, I might try this if I make another wire tree.
• The recipes that produce the thicker green/blue patinas worked much better on the flat copper pieces than the round bronze wire.  I'm not sure if that is due to the layers not adhering as well to the round surface or the lower copper content of bronze vs pure copper.
• The Ammonia Chloride, Ferric Nitrate, Cupric Nitrate recipes would probably work much better with a micro-torch and spray bottle technique.
• I want to play with Laura again, she is fun, knowledgeable and really easy to talk with. 

HodgePodge Update

good afternoon Faithful readers (all 5 of you, thank you, truly),

today's update is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous stuff, starting with Hairless Helen!

For those of you who remember Manny the Mannequin, you know he's no slouch in the modeling department; however, there are some tasks he just can't measure up to, literally, like modeling life size jewelry.  Enter the lovely Helen, a recent immigrant from the Eastern United States.  Helen arrived ready to work with camera-ready makeup and pierced ears, however she forgot to pack her hair, thus our first photo session is somewhat evocative of a young Sinead O'Connor.

 As soon as she gets properly settled in, we will be shopping for a nice wig.  She is thinking about medium length, wavy brown hair, I agree.

Onto: Another successful Treasure Hunt (aka Geo-caching)
We took advantage of the mild weather today to go treasure hunting around the Winters area.  The first one was a major disappointment.  The cache container was opened and empty on the ground, clearly it had been "muggled", bummer. 

The next 2 were easy to find (perfect for the little guy) and the last one had a super cool treasure that we swapped for.   This made me think of the Doomsday Preppers, it's a solar or hand crank operated radio/flashlight. 

Aidan had a nice, albeit one-sided, conversation with the AM radio weather station.

Next Up: Thinking of Spring Trees

I also put some of this long weekend time to good crafty use.  I am really thrilled with how this turned out.  The leaves are made of glass melted directly on the ends of the 22gauge bronze wire.  Then all the wires are wrapped together to form a little tree with roots clinging to the rock.

Now I'm practicing making teeny, tiny blossoms on the end of some 26 gauge wire.  It's possible, but this is really pushing it for me, vision-wise,  to even see what the heck I'm doing. I do like the idea of working with the lighter gauge wire, though, as the 22gauge was really hard to twist with all 50 strands together for the trunk.

random and cuteness
Aidan's wire tree.  He is very proud of this and made sure a good photo was taken, personally supervising the whole process and then carefully selecting the perfect spot on the mantle for display.

Pretty blossoms under the bike bridge over Putah Creek.  The creek side looks great now as the city just finished a huge renovation effort to break down an old dam, restore the floodplain and add walking paths.  I am looking forward to seeing all the new, native trees start to grow.

The first buttercup I've seen this year.

 One happy little camper with his Cars sheets, Cars pajamas and Cars slippers (on the floor).

 Bath time fun with googly eyes!

And last, but not least, simply the Most Fun Planter "Box" ever seen, San Francisco!

New Year, New Resolutions

ha, fooled ya with the title, there will be no resolutions this year, unless we count my resolution to not make myself (or others) crazy worrying about stuff I cannot change.  Last year was kind of tough and we all hope this year will be better!


So instead of resolutions, here is a list of lessons learned:

• I am continually surprised by the heart's capacity for love and kindness.
• a child giggling is the best medicine in the world for body and soul
• "be nice, courteous and grateful" is a good daily mantra
• even when family drives you completely batty, you will still go to bat for them
• tough love is really tough no matter which side you're on
• I would be much less than half without my other half, he is the bedrock of my life.

Ok, nuff of that mushy stuff, onward to shiny stuff.  Starting the year off with some bling (yeah I know most it's from last year, but hey cut me a break, I still want to show it off).

and some little critters

 and another attempt at herringbone wrap, it looks a little rough as I didn't realize until the last bead that I was wrapping them in an overly difficult way, Next time I hope it's easier.

TGIF

Thank God it's Friday!  It's been a rough couple of weeks.  Major family drama at home and lots of RAFO (running around and freaking out) at work.  It's finally starting to calm down, and I'm praying for a nice, quiet, drama-free weekend.

Aidan just started speech therapy.  He goes twice a week and LOVES it!  Craig has to trick, bribe or simply wrestle the boy out of the classroom when it's time to go.   I think he might have a little crush on the lovely Ms. J.  What's pretty ironic is the first really clear word he now says is "No" with the cutest little upward inflection.  I'm pretty sure this wasn't on the "first sounds" worksheet, LOL.

In the world of hot, melty glass I've been practicing making sculptural type beads.  Here are some little worms.  These are supposed to be suitable for children.  The first one I gave to Aidan didn't last a day, so I changed them up a little to make sure the head is more firmly melted to the body.  So far, the second one (made with the batch below) is holding up to the abuse a 3 year old boy can dish out!  These have a little secret, the blue dots glow in the dark.  What a fun surprise that will be for the kiddies.

 

this little guy appears to be worried about the Early Bird who gets the you know what...

 

and then some fish showed up in the kiln, maybe sniffing around for those tasty worms.

In the spirit of Halloween this little guy was supposed to be a Zombie Fish with crazy murrini eyes, but the one pink center murrini matches so well, that the other green eye side just looks like a weird mistake.

and then, my personal favorite of the bunch, a Tiger Fish