Thursday, March 24, 2011

These were tough to photograph!

I finally finished the butterfly wing post earrings and they turned out lovely! They glow and flash when the light hits them the right way. I am really pleased with them!


They were extremely difficult to photograph as are all of my butterfly wings but I hope the photos show how jewel-like these wings become when magnified with the resin.

They are not tiny post earrings either. They are around 9mm in diameter so they are small enough to wear daily but not too small to be noticed. I only have three pairs of these in the shop so far but will probably be offering these indefinitely in my shop along with other resin items I may work on in the future if I can find enough time!

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Butterflies and Resin

I just wanted to take a moment and show what I have been slowly developing over the past few months. These are real blue morpho wings that I have set in handmade ( by me) bezels that are going to hopefully become stud earrings. I originally wanted to do stacker rings but it seemed like so much work to make the ring and then pour the resin only to mess it up at some point. Also I would be using more sterling in a ring as opposed to an earring.



The first picture here shows the bezels with the wings in it without the resin. I have sealed the wing circles so that the wings don't change into a weird color from the resin. Oh and do you  know how hard it is to cut tiny circles out of a butterfly wing? Very tough but I figured out how to do it without ripping them to smithereens.




Here I've poured the resin and it magnifies the color of the butterfly beautifully! I'm using Ice Resin here which is a dream to work with compared to the Envirotex lite which is what I started with.



So since I had to mix up a full ounce of this resin and I barely used any for the earrings  I decided to make up a ring real quick and use a piece of an embossed binding from an antique leather bound book as the focal of the ring.

I love how this looks and hopefully it turns out well because I made this in my size. :)

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Painting With Fire ( Learning how to torch fire enamel)

I received my Painting With Fire torch enameling kit in the mail yesterday and had so much fun learning the immersion technique to add color to my metals. Here are a few pics of the results. I am still getting the hang of it so most of these are mess-ups in one way or another.

Group shot of some of the beads that the kit came with. I think they are lovely despite the flaws!




I had these bead caps already and they were so tough to get the enamel to adhere. They were an antique brass finish and it took forever to get them to this point.  Maybe it was the fake antique brass finish that made them so hard to enamel.





This is a simple copper disc that I stamped with a bird and then enameled with the transparent enamel that the kit came with. I love the sheen of blue that combines with the deep red of the copper. When you tilt the disc at certain angles it looks iridescent. What a totally unique color surprise! I hope I can do it again. I stamped the bird to see if i could see it well enough through the transparent enamel. It shows up nicely here but is not quite as noticeable in real life. I am very happy with the evenness of the enamel on this one.



And then I made a pair of enameled copper earrings in the robin's egg blue opaque enamel. I love the coloring of these. It is unfortunate that the one on the left had the enamel burned a bit by putting it too far down in the flame. I did this while re-heating the piece trying to get the disc off the mandrel. It is not as noticeable as the pictures shows so I will keep these for myself and start on a new pair for the shop.

Friday, March 4, 2011

It's been one of those days...

but I really mean one of those months. It just been a horrible month for me. I've been sick with a terrible flu and it seems right when I start feeling better some other cold comes along to knock me out again. I've been busy catching up on my orders for etsy and thank goodness for the patience of my customers! Hopefully I have gotten over the worst of it and can re-focus on orders and trying out new techniques.

I bought a torch fire enameling kit and I can't wait to try it out! I have loved the look of enamel for a long time. Many times I put all the supplies into my cart at Rio only to remove them, thinking that I don't need to start on something new when I am so busy with something else but I need to fuel my creativity a little bit and make some new pieces for the shop. I hope the kit comes in today. Maybe tomorrow I will be posting my results. Hopefully all goes well!