Thursday, August 19, 2010

+.The.hand.that.feeds.+

Okayyyyyy well another constructive day! But.. I'll get the irritating part over with first. Basically I have these dowel rods I use to help with my bows to keep them nice and rounded when the stiffener spray is drying.. but the problem was they were a little 'rough', they were not smooth or finished at all (made of wood).. So today I sanded them down and sprayed with some wood gloss and I don't think it came out very well. It wasn't 100% dry yet but it felt like they were more "grainy" than it was before, which is what was creating the problem with the ribbon fraying on it and getting stuck and making a huge mess of the bows.. I'll see what I can do but I might just try to find something else, preferably plastic or metal or something already "finished".

Anyway on to the awesomeness part of my day.. I made more beads! 2 more shank-back pumpkin beads, 4 star beads and 2 halloween color design beads. The pumpkins came out awesome and the halloween ones are decent, the stars are so-so. I had this plastic stencil thing from soo many years ago, it came in a Lisa Frank set of something or other that I don't remember now. It's been sitting in my scrapbooking cases for ever and never used. Anyway, it has some shapes in it and I knew I wanted to attempt to make some star beads, but I didn't know what to do to get a good straight shape. I thought about this stencil and grabbed it and basically what I did was I just rolled up a little ball of clay and set it on my flat surface and then I placed the star stencil on top and pressed down slowly. It created like a star tube of sorts, hard to really explain until you see the photo. It make it have height so it would be ok to pierce for the bead hole. It came out a bit sloppy but I'm not entirely sure what to do better here. Basically it got so sloppy in the hole piercing process. I don't have to jam the stick in there or anything but the clay is just so soft..

As for the pumpkin ones I just did the same thing as I did last time only this time I did sand down the fingerprints a bit and some of the raised parts that came from scraping the detail lines in and stuff. The halloween beads were just made by making a cylinder shape and then I pierced them with the bead stick thingy and while left on the stick I used the end of one of my paint brushes to make little circle indents around in a alternating pattern. Once it was baked I painted it all black and then put orange inside the indents!

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