Got my crystal mold from Etsy in the mail yesterday and immediately started to experiment. The pigment I used is metallic shimmery so the end result is more…grainy? than I’d like. Next attempt will be completely flat color. SOON I will have smoke and magic embedded in crystals, soooooooon
Craft nerds! I have a question! I want a sewing machine. In your experience, are there any brands/models of cheapish (<$150) sewing machine that are particularly good or that I should avoid like the plague? Never mind! Turns out my mom has an old one!
Have any of you set snaps before? I bought a kit at the craft store to make a bracelet (see below) and you put the things on either side of the leather, put the little anvil at the bottom, set the chisel thing into the sticky up bit, and hit the top with a mallet. The sticky up bit is supposed to split and set the whole thing but nothing seems to be happening and i am v frustrate. Halp?
I haven't done snaps, but I've done rivets, which use a similar miniature anvil. You don't give it a big whack, you tap it repeatedly with considerable-but-not-massive force (maybe a foot of hammer travel?) while the cylinder rolls up into itself to make the fastener stay there. Usually took me twenty or thirty good taps to get it to work.
Going to be making a plushie at some point in the next couple of weeks if I can get the mats, will post my finished result c:
Got my yarn in from knitpicks. 10/10 would recommend, good quality, inexpensive (with the sale I think it was something like $35 for 24 balls?) and most importantly, the online color palette is 100% accurate.
What are you talking about, those are gorgeous. I love them. I KNOW I'M LATE BUT everything I've read says that if you're going to be sewing for anything more than a hobby, you should actually look to invest in an old machine, rather than buying a modern one. I'm talking like 80s or older here, antique shop shit. Those fuckers are damn near industrial and can go through a heck of a lot more than hobby/modern machines can.
Tidying up my fabrics, yarns and half-finished sewing projects. There's a lot of "what was I thinking when I bought 2 meters of this mediocre print cotton??" "what the hell did I think I was gonna do with this one TINY skein of really weird string??" "whoa, this was poorly thought out". Which actually makes me really happy, especially how horrible the half-finished sewing projects are. It reminds me how much I've learned! ... but seriously, why do I have two huge skeins of purple pom pom yarn that looks absolutely dreadful u_u
So, I made a skype group for the purrpose of chatting to each other while crafting. Basically a sewing circle. Maybe one person could volunteer to read something aloud for the rest of us sometimes. If you want vadded, PM or skype me.
I finally finished this ski mask for my brother!!! I've been working on it all summer and it's been soooo frustrating. I've wanted to frog it like three or four times. But I didn't. so there are a lot of mistakes, but honestly, my brother won't care, so I kept going. And now it's done! =3 I'll edit this with pictures once I get my old comp back and can make them small enough. Next big thing I want to work on is one of those mermaid blankets that I've seen going around. trying to pick one design is hard though. xD
I got to work with glass today for the first time in years, and with boro for the first time in ever! I made some awesome marbles I will definitely be posting here when I pick them up from annealing.
YOU JUST LIKE FUCKING JAM IT INTO THE HEART OF THE FLAME AND GO. I think I may have flinched instinctively the first time the instructor did that. It's also kind of ludicrously stiff. Like you can have a glob of glass like an inch diameter on the end of a rod and it will just chill there. Maybe droop a bit. And you need to use pliers for what you use tweezers for in soft glass. Also, you need to keep your metal tools way away from the flame, so it doesn't fucking incinerate them. It's a hell of a lot hotter, too. At one point the entire class went and stood out on the black tarmac to cool down (not as bad as glory hole work though, apparently). Like, the metal of the table under my torch got so hot it melted the rubber grip of my pliers a bit. The instructor also had a bunch of samples sweet silver striking and reducing colors for us to fuck around with. We also did a bit with blowing tubing (to the non-glass people in the audience, this is not really the same as blown glass in the way you're thinking of. Instead of dipping a fuckhuge pipe into glass and blowing air into that blow, you're taking a premade hollow tube, connecting it to another hollow tube with a mouth-hose on, and then softening the glass of the tube so you can inflate it or stretch it or whatnot.) which was... annoying. I like solid sculptural stuff better aesthetically, anyways. It's fun stuff, but I think I still like soft glass better. Hopefully I also get a chance to do some beads this summer.
Both, purrfurably. I got the idea because I was sewing and bored, and thought talking to someone with mouth noises might be nice. But there´s no reason the chat can´t be used for chatting.
I knew boro was hotter by a LOT and that it resisted heat shock a lot better, but jesus. Yeah I'd have freaked a little at just shoving it in the flame too. That's kind of terrifying. Blowing tubing is my jam, though. Though I don't intend to blow that way, it's mostly for "but the entire rest of the tube could be used!" reasons. (I actually have a super small metal pipe for miniature more-traditional gather-blowing. That's where I'm looking to accomplish things and stuff.) Blown is way more my jam than solid most of the time. I'm down for the non-vocal part, I'm just hilariously bad at skype calling. Sound Problems. Also I'm not sure if this laptop has a mike and should probably get someone to test that with here soon.
You actually do use the rest of the tube. Once you've pinched it off, you just need to melt one end and the expanding air will pop the tube open so you can reattach it to your blow pipe and blow something else. Unless you mean something else?
When you have a hose you can use it that way yeah. but a lot of the time I've seen people blowing straight down the tube? Idk. Boroculture seems to be very different from softglass culture. More stoners, fewer beadfolk.
