Thing-a-day.com

So, my wife and I exchange hand-made valentines as our tradition.  For the past three years, she’s given me a mosaic piece that are all tied together through an encrypted message that I have yet to figure out.  It’s like “Happy V-day…dummy!”  :)  Anyway, because she’s making the final of these connected valentine mosaics, and mosaics are big projects, she’s way behind.  So we haven’t done our exchange yet.  So I’m still fiddling away at elements of my gift to her.  Today, I made a copper valentine.  It’s about three inches across.  I cut it out of thin copper sheet with tin snips, rubbed a texture into it using a form below and a sharpened dowel above, rubbed ink in, dried it, and then adhered UTEE (plastic granules) with Versamark ink pad to the raised bits of the texture and melted the UTEE with my heat gun.  Once that was done, I rubbed bright-pink colored mica dust into the raised plastic design.  The idea was that it would fall to the low areas, but it did the opposite and stuck to the plastic parts.  Then I remelted it to set the color/texture combination.  Oh, and I punched holes for later application before I started coloring.  I was rushed, but I quite like it.

Title: Hearts of glass
Description: Green glass hearts necklace & earrings with copper accents
Inspiration: Today is Valentine’s Day; the music of Blondie (Deborah Harry)

Today I messed around with making rings out of hookup wire. I need to get used to evenly pounding copper flat without making it too brittle.

Day three found me at a flea market (dud) and a thrift store (score!).  More of a Puppy Bowl kind of girl than a Super Bowl chick.  Besides the purchases for future creativity I also pulled out my reclaimed electrical copper wire and started fiddling.  Despite being just a test run, I am trying to embrace the imperfect in life.

So I was going to finish the Rachmaninoff piece, but instead I had the urge to make this.

It’s an ametrine; ametrine’s pretty rare, as far as gems go, because there’s only one mine in all the world (that’s been discovered) where you can get it. It’s actually made up of both amythest and citrine. Because they’re sort of marbled together, no two pieces are alike. It’s supposed to have certain metaphysical properties too, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I made it for a friend, along with customizing a little jewelry box, and I’m making a note for it later, too. But all of that’s a bit personal to share; you guys just get the pendant. I’m quite proud of it, as I’m new to this whole wire-wrapping thing; I usually just make chain.