Showing posts with label pendant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pendant. Show all posts

Friday, January 29, 2010

Letter pendant

I got my order from Paper Wishes a couple of days ago, and prodded by that, I finally got around to trying the Amazing Glaze I bought from Ornamentea before Christmas. The result wasn't perfect but it came out pretty cute, so I'm happy with it as a first try!


The picture is a little out of focus but at least you can get the idea. This is a pendant made by Nunn Designs - it's heavier and deeper than a lot of the bezels you see, and I really like them. This piece is about 3/4" so it's small enough that you could put it on a charm bracelet, if you wanted, but I'm thinking I'm going to wear it as a pendant.

This is what I did: first I cut a piece of background paper and glued it into the bottom - but then I eventually covered that up completely and I don't think it ended up being visible at all. The initial is one of these - I glued it down, too, and then I put more glue on top and on the sides of the paper initial and poured some Delicas in (mostly brown with a few pale ones) and pushed them towards the outside edge. I didn't worry too much about which way the Delicas fell - some have the hole visible and some don't, I just tried to get them distributed more or less evenly around the edges. But I didn't try to make everything perfectly even, either. All of that moving stuff around, and the wetness from the glue, ended up distressing the initial a little bit, but that was fine with me. After I gave the glue a while to dry, I started pouring in Amazing Glaze - it's a powder, like really, really fine grains of sand. I baked it for about 10 minutes at 275F, until the powder had melted completely. (I didn't set the timer, I just checked it every couple of minutes.) The glaze wasn't deep enough on the first try, but I put more in and tried again, and second time I mounded it up a good bit and it came out just about even with the top of the bezel, once it was melted, and I decided that was fine. There's one tiny little bubble over the bottom of the letter but I can live with that. I probably wasn't careful enough with how I added things. Anyway, it's cute and it was awfully easy, so I call that a definite win!


(Looking at the website, apparently Nunn Designs is the same as what's called Patera jewelry - I wasn't sure.)

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Things that might be for sale

I have four, count 'em, four Etsy items up now. I don't know why that makes me feel so much more like I have a legitimate store than I did a couple of days ago when there were only two items, but it does. I have a 5th item (the onyx wirework piece) ready to go as soon as I can get decent pictures of it. I think I'm going to have to have daylight - the onyx is so reflective that photographing under Ott-lights like I've been doing just doesn't work well at all. You get a piece of onyx and the reflection of the light bulb - it's very odd-looking. Here's an example:


 
(That's actually the back.) Come to think of it, I guess item #6 (the aqua beaded necklace) will be ready to go as soon as I find or make some copper jumprings and make an extender for it - right now it's not quite 16" and that's too short. And actually I was thinking about putting the bracelet I made in my last class up, too - I don't think I've posted a picture of that one yet:



So that would make 7 items. (I think I need to start putting one of those "your monitor settings may vary" disclaimers on my listings, because it's so darn hard to get colors right. I don't know that these colors are wrong, but the green beads look a lot more neon-green here than I think they are in real life.) Although I haven't quite decided about the bracelet, for sure. I'm waffling.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Classwork



Here's the piece I made in class last week - this was Annette Kinslow's intermediate wire class at Bead Boutique. This is probably the most labor-intensive thing I've done yet, but I have to say the results were worth it.