Etchalicious!

aka Fun with Ferric Chloride (well, it is still 'F' fortnight, just)

A few months ago now, I signed up for a charm swap on the UKStampers forum - I have to make 14 charms up in total.

I started in plenty of time, and made up 4 or 5 day-of-the-dead themed charms a few weeks ago, with the intention of finishing them off at a later date (the deadline for this one isn't until the end of April).

As time went on, though, I became less and less sure about my plan of action - for a start, some of the other swap participants started posting pics of their finished charms on their blogs, and they were all really dainty and pretty, and I thought my big scary skull charms would look a bit out of place. And also, I had started reading up on copper etching, and had a real urge to give it a go, figuring that the charm swap would be a great way to practice the technique and try out a few different patterns and designs.

So I dumped the skulls, and hot footed it round to Maplins to buy some etchant - ferric chloride - which is what electronics whizzes use to make custom circuit boards, apparently.

It's basically a simple process, but it does involve rather nasty chemicals that give off stinky (and harmful) fumes, so I did everything upstairs in my en suite bathroom well away from children, with the windows wide open.

I even wore these rather fetching safety glasses :)

So, how does it work?

You need some copper or brass blanks to start (I got mine from Fred Aldous online, but had I not been so lazy, I could have cut blank shapes from copper sheet).

Then you simply draw the design to be etched straight onto the copper using a black Sharpie (you can alternatively use nail varnish, rub ons, rubber stamped images with Stazon ink, photocopy tansfers etc, pretty much anything waterproof).

You also need to Sharpie around the sides and back of the blank.

Then you stick the charms to one side of a piece of double sided tape, and stick the other side of the tape to a lump of styrofoam:



Next you mix the ferric chloride granules with tap-hot water, according to the instructions on the pack, in a plastic container, and then float that in the sink, in a few inches of more tap-hot water (which you should refresh regularly during the etching process to keep the etchant solution warm). Nasty looking stuff isn't it....

And then you simply pop the styrofoam in the tub of manky stuff, with the charms facing down, so that they are kind of floating on the top of the solution:


That's basically it for an hour or so, every now and then, refresh the hot water in the sink that the tub is floating in, and agitate the tub a little (without splashing the solution everywhere!) - as warmth and a bit of movement help the etching process.

After an hour or so, take the styrofoam out of the solution, and if the etching looks like it is finished to a good depth, take the tape off of the styrofoam, dunk it in the sink, and then give the charms a good scrub with bicarbonate of soda using an old toothbrush - this neutralises the acid which could otherwise keep etching away at the metal.

This is what the etched charms should look like, once they have been rinsed, dried, and the black sharpie marks have been scrubbed off (I used wire wool):

Cool, huh?

To finish off my charms, I gave each one a little bit of a domed shape using a wooden dapping block:

And then I added a jump ring and a moss agate bead dangle to the front of each.

The final step was to oxidise all the charms using liver of sulphur, and give them a final buff and polish.

And here they are all finished:


I'm pleased with how they turned out, hopefully the other swap participants will like them too.

Little birdie #1 of 2

It's UKStampers CJ time again, and it's the turn of Moria's book which came with this sweet bird stamp.

When this book turned up in the post a couple of weeks ago, Creative Director Jay and I brainstormed through all the bird ideas.... a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush....a little bird told me....free as a bird....feather your nest....birds of a feather flock together....the early bird catches the worm....kill two birds with one stone....etc etc.

I finally settled on Bird's Eye View, and got to work making my little collaged cityscapes.


A couple of days later, the next book in this circle turned up - and it was another bird stamp! And someone had already done Bird's Eye View in the second book, mutter mutter.

I considered scrapping my half finished entry in Birdie CJ #1, but decided to go ahead with it in the end as my execution of the phrase was sufficiently different fom the one in the other book, that hopefully it won't look like either of us copied the other.

And our big brainstorm won't go to waste, as I now have tons of bird-related ideas for the next CJ.

Anyway - here's my entry. I hope the bird doesn't mind me chopping off his legs, at least I gave him an extra wing :)

This hasn't photographed particularly well, especially the bird (he's more glossy and less blocky/stripy in real life, and altogether nicer than he looks in that pic). But never mind, you get the jist.

Here's the sign in bit at the back:


A quick supplies list:

The cityscape is a Riff Raff Designs chipboard thingummy, which I covered with various collage papers

The background is pearlescent acrylic paint (blue mixed with pearl) on watercolour paper

The clouds were handcut from some sparkly paper I got in the Range yonks ago

The cute little puffy stickers of cars and planes and helicopters were from Paperchase

The bird is stamped with a Kaleidacolor rainbow inkpad on glossy paper, and his body is raised up on foam tape ahead of his back wing

And the title on the manilla shipping tag is made with K&Co "Letters to Go" over a stamped distress ink background

I think that's everything....

bring on the next lil' feathered fella (it's still F fortnight :))

the Den O' Craftiness has a grand makeover

So....last Friday I decided it was time that my craft area had a major tidy up.... this is what it looked like before. Ouch!

Things were piled upon things upon things, if I tried to take something out, there was a good chance of an avalanche....





...and I couldn't close any of my drawers because they were so full, sigh.



So, I think you'll agree, that it needed a bit of work.

But I had no idea how MUCH work!

With Jay's help, we worked on the room solidly all last weekend. I got everything out, covering my work table, all the kitchen worktops, and the living room floor:





Jay put together a cool TV unit we found in Range that fitted the top of my Artbin cupboards perfectly:



And by the end of the weekend, I was gazing adoringly at the new unit (as yet unpopulated), and my beautifully colour sorted and not at all cluttered cardstock shelves :)



There was still a ton of work to be done, though, and so I spent at least 3 hours every night last week plodding on...

I sorted through every single drawer and unit, making sure none were over filled (local Freecylcing crafters will be in luck next week :)), and got everything labelled up to make it easy for me to find stuff going forward.

And well, without further ado, here is the end result, finally finished this evening.

I'm so chuffed with it!!!!



Well worth all the hours of hard slog, I just hope I can keep it this tidy :)



Look, all my drawers close :)





Now I am just itching to get in there and make stuff, I've not been able to do anything during the makeover as it was all in chaos.

A to Z year : February 26th-March 11th : the letter E

I've got to admit, this has been the first letter we have found more than a little challenging...heaven help us when we get to Q :)

Still, not to worry, we managed to have more E-flavoured adventures than we expected to by the end of the fortnight.

We kicked off the two weeks with something educational but still very enjoyable - experiments! The credit for this one goes to my bessie mate Alison who heard me struggling for ideas as E approached, and rushed me a chemistry set in the post :)


Cool, huh? And we managed to avoid actually blowing anything up, which is always a good thing.

Later the same day we decided to do something about our economical situation. We tipped all the small change we have been saving for years out of its big plastic bottle in the kitchen, and took it to Tescos where they have a coinstar machine. We made £96!! result! Easy money indeed :)


I gave the kids £10 each, which got spent in approximately half a millisecond, and we used the rest to fund the rest of the weekend's fun.

For dinner that day? what else but Enchiladas :) Well, mine were more like fajitas (I'm never sure of the difference, to be honest) - but we made it with Old El Paso Enchilada sauce (yes, out of a jar I'm afraid, I'm certainly not the domestic goddess unlike many of my fellow A-Zers who put me to shame with their home-cooked masterpieces :))

They were blinking lovely, whatever they were :) Or should I say they were exquisitely edible :)

The following day, our pals Tracy and Michelle and family came round to play. We had each bought a pack of Sculpey Eraser Clay, and were itching to play. Everyone had a go, well except the two hockey-buds who sat and watched Sky Sports instead :).

This stuff is ace, it's just like polymer clay, in as much as you model with it while it is soft, and then bake it in the oven to "set" it - but instead of setting into a hard model, it makes rubbers! (for the sake of any non English people reading, that's what we call erasers here....and yes, I know it means something else entirely over the pond but let's not go there :))

I must admit they don't actually rub out all that brilliantly, but maybe I overcooked them?


We didn't mind though, they were fun to make, and they look cute :)

After all the fun of having their pals round, it was time for the boys to settle down and do their homework - English literature no less :) Yay for educational e-related photo opportunities :)



In the week, Connor's school put on an art exhibition, which they conveniently called Art Explosion, which we went along to.

It was really good, I especially loved the magazine mosaic one of the older kiddies had made of an orca (top left on the collage below, click on the picture for a closer look)


Connor's class had contributed animal masks, and with E fortnight in mind he chose to make an elephant (along with pretty much every other kiddie in the class, by the look of the display lol).

He got to bring it home after the show - here's a close up (and yes, it's a sock)







On the way home from the exhibition, we saw this lovely weathervane, which I took a picture of purely because it has an E for East on it (clutching at straws? moi?)- but I'm glad I did because I really love how the photo turned out - what a beautiful blue sky we had that day.



Also during the week was a football friendly - England vs Egypt. At the point that I took this photo, we were struggling and a goal down - but I'm glad to say that, thanks to some clever substitutions at the start of the second half, England came back to win this one 3-1. I actually really enjoyed watching the game - it's rare for me to watch sport other than hockey nowadays.

The following weekend, we had a great E to celebrate - Reece's eleventh birthday :) He chose swimming over in Stroud for his birthday treat, nothing e-related there, and no photos to share (they don't take kindly to people taking pics of other peoples children in swimwear nowadays :)) - but I can assure you we all had fun.

When we got home, it was time for cake (well, swimming really works up an appetite, you know!).

E for Eleven:



After cake, we went shopping as Reece's birthday money was burning a hole in his pocket, you know the way it does. He couldn't find anything he fancied in the toy department at TK Maxx, but I found this lovely wooden E in homewares ^


The next day, we went on an expedition in the woods, or exploring, if you will :) OK, actually we went geocaching, but as we haven't got to G yet, I need to call it something else :)

It was Reece & Jay's first time (which means I haven't been out caching in over a year! Bad geocacher!) - they both really enjoyed it though (what's not to love about a treasure hunt?) so I'm sure we'll be doing this some more over the year.


We found the first cache pretty quickly, and did start out on a second one, but it started to get really cold so we left the second one for another day.

The first cache was hidden close to an amazing iron sculpture called the Wish Hounds. This is what I love about caching - this sculpture is less than 2 miles from my house, but I never would have known it was there.

We both took loads of piccies of the sculpture, not sure if this is one of mine or one of Jay's, but I love it either way:



The name of the sculpture is set into the ground a few feet away, and further up the path we also found the words "Iron Ore" and "Earth" set into the grass in the same way.

What letter does Earth begin with again? Ah yes - get the camera out! :)



Here are a couple more pics from our walk in the woods that turned out nicely...

The boys having a well deserved rest after a LOT of walking:



Love the sun flare on this one:



Such a gorgeous sunset over the water:



My very last E for this fortnight was an expensive one!

My car got a flat ---->

And I needed it fixed in a hurry, so had to call the emergency fitters out to get it sorted. And pay their exorbitant fee.

That's all for now - see you in a fortnight for F...

I'm in for the long haul....

COIF UPDATE 1 of god knows how many....

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed a new item popping up recently in my “works in progress” section over there on the left <--------

(if anyone actually has noticed, I’m incredibly impressed, and you win a prize :))

The new item is Darby’s coif….and today, finally, I got to update it from 0% to 1%, whoop!

So, with the refrain of “60 rings down, only 5,940 to go” echoing around my brain, this seems like a good time to start documenting what is likely to be my longest-running project ever.

Darby is my 18 year old son, and for some reason I flippantly said, just before Christmas, that I could make him a coif (ie that metal balaclava thingy the dude is wearing in that there photo) for his Christmas present, as 1) he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted, 2) we had been talking about going to a medieval re-enactment fair thingy in the summer and 3) I thought they looked like they would be fun to make.

To my surprise, he said yes please….and so it began….

The first challenge was actually finding the rings I needed – 6,000 stainless steel rings of a particular wire size and diameter….not easy! Getting the raw wire would have been easier, and a lot cheaper, and people on various forums were suggesting I make the rings myself from scratch ...but I just don’t have the tools, the time or the energy for that, frankly, so I wanted to buy them in ring form.

There is one armour supply company in the UK that sells them, but ouch! The price!

In the end it was cheapest to order them in from Canada, even with the £22 customs charge I managed to get stung with.

They arrived last month, at least the advance guard did, I only had the first couple of bags sent Airmail, just to get me started, the rest are on a slow ship somewhere halfway across the ocean as I type.

So - here are the rings:

Look pretty unassuming, don't they?

Well, they're not!

The first time I tried to open a ring to join it to another one (which, in a nutshell, is how you make chainmaille), with my normal pliers, it just sat there and laughed at me.

So - new, chunkier pliers were my next investment (this is turning into a blinking expensive present - it would have been cheaper for me to just BUY him a coif :))

Here they are, next to the lil' dainty ones I use for chainmaille jewellery, bit of a difference :D


Armed with my new pliers, I started joining the rings into European 4-in-1 fivelets at work one lunchtime a couple of weeks ago....this is a fivelet:

Now remember that there will be 6,000 rings in the completed coif. Each of these fivelets contains five rings - plus you need one more ring to join it to the next fivelet - so I need to make 1,000 of these little buggers.

In a full lunch hour, I managed to make the grand total of....

.
.
.
.
.

FOUR!

and my hands were sore and my arms felt like I'd been pumping iron (instead of small amounts of stainless steel...)

oh dear.

I can't deny that I found my first attempt a little discouraging, when I thought I'd be whipping this coif together as quickly as I can a bracelet.

The retailer in Canada that I bought the rings from - The Ring Lord has a forum, so I asked on there that night whether it would get easier, or whether I am just too weak for stainless steel and should give up now. The response was mixed, nobody said give up, but a few said variations on "no it won't get any easier, just suck it up, soldier".

So - that's what I've decided to do.

Today I tried another lunch hour stint....and guess what....I now have over 70 rings joined, making a jolly good start towards what will eventually be the headband of the coif.

Here's how it looks so far:

It's only the first wobbly step, but it was enough for me to be able to update my W.I.P. bar to 1%, which was a nice feeling, and it was also much much easier on my arms than the first attempt.

At this rate of improvement, I'll be weaving armour like a pro in no time :) I'll update regularly on the project's progress so you can see it taking shape.

I'm Excited and Enthusiastic about this project again now - pity we just left 'E' fortnight behind yesterday! How about, I think it's going to be Fun and Fulfilling?

---

And, on a completely different subject, although it still involves making stuff out of metal, I made my first ring last night and I'm well chuffed with it.

(as it was after midnight, I'm claiming that F for First as an official 'F' :) )

Technically, it's actually only my first successful ring, as the initial attempt, also last night, ended up in the bin. And before that I did try to make a chainmaille ring, but that went all wrong too.

This one is made from 1mm copper wire, wound round a ring mandrel, twisted into a spiral, and then oxidised with Liver of Sulphur (good GOD that stuff STINKS!).

It was really easy to make, it can't have taken me more than 20 minutes from start to finish, if that.

I'm wearing it now, it's dead comfy and I love how it looks on, dainty but not too girly girly, I might make a similar one out of silver wire next...

Oh I do love making stuff :)

A to Z year : February 12th-25th : the letter D

D is for.... dead tired!

We certainly were by the end of this fortnight, as we did loads - so this is going to be a loooooong blog post, get yourself comfortable :)

I started the D fortnight with a few days off work, which was nice, I didn't have anything in particular to do with them, I just needed to use up some holiday time before the end of the financial year. But it was nice to have time to do things I can't usually fit in to my stupidly busy schedule, like dying my hair (picture to follow...)

Also, thanks to the wonders of Freecycle, I had a massive de-clutter over the two days that I was at home but Connor was in school. I got rid of tons of stuff that's been taking over my home, and it felt gooooood! My hallway actually looks like the entrance to a house now, not a timber yard :)

Once the weekend arrived, our first day out was to be a deer spotting expedition....or that was the plan :)

We struggled out of bed on the Saturday morning (just :)), and jumped in the car and headed towards Bath, where we were due to meet Michelle, Tracy & co at Dyrham Park:

The others already been up and out adventuring for hours, they put us to shame, but then again we do enjoy our lie ins at the weekend :) When we were just approaching Dyrham, they gave us a call with some bad news...Michelle had been chatting to the park keeper, and his assessment of our chances of seeing a deer was "less than zero". Oops. Apparently they don't come out in the cold weather. Pah. I thought that was tortoises!

But what the hey, we were nearly there, so like the stubborn mules we are, we decided to have a mooch around the grounds anyway, and see if we could spot a rare winter loving deer or two...

We saw empty field ...


...after empty field ....

....after empty field

....and we were just about to give up when Michelle called out excitedly, "I've found one!"

"Look! it's just over this wall!"

And she was right!
.
.
.
just over that wall.....
.
.
.
.
was Bambi!
.
.
.
.
.


OK...OK...that's not quite how it went :)

In reality, the park ranger dude was spot on, and we saw diddly squat.

Oh well, at least we tried.

We left the rather badly named deer park dejected....it was a long way to drive to look at empty fields.

Finding a little cake shop nearby helped lighten our moods - sadly it didn't seem to sell anything at all beginning with D, but it was still in the village of Dyrham, so hopefully that counts. The lack of the magic letter certainly didn't stop us stocking up on delicious treats - plain and caramel shortbread and chocolate brownies, yum!

Then as we came out of the bakery, Tracy spotted our redemption - just across the road - dirt bike races!!!

Perfect :) We all went over to watch for an hour or so....and to be honest, the bikes were a lot more fun to photograph than the deer probably would have been:



Out in the fresh air, it was also my first opportunity to get someone to take a photo of my new hair colour, so here's that picture I promised you:

After all that excitement and fresh air we all needed a bit of a sit down :)

So we headed back to T&M's place to chill out for the afternoon, and play a bit of DJ Hero

It was so much fun :)


It's basically just the same as Guitar Hero, which in turn was just like a dance mat game really, but you hit the coloured buttons with your fingers not your feet. About as much like playing with real decks as Guitar Hero is like real guitar playing, though, according to our resident superstar DJ, ie not much :)

The following day, we had a decadent lie in, and then a nice lazy rest of the day (it's got to be done from time to time). The boys were in the mood for some arts and crafts, so they made some funky dragons, with card, paint, paper fasteners and drinking straws.


The design was Reece's idea, based on something he did in school a year or two ago. They turned out great!



The following day, Monday, was one of those very welcome rarities - a day off in the week for both me and Connor at the same time :) I let him choose what we would do on our just-mummy-and-Connor day out, and his first choice was to go back to Cosmo, the Chinese buffet, for lunch.

In the spirit of 'D' fortnight he tried duck in a pancake for the first time:







After lunch we went to Butterfly World at Blooms garden centre (about a month too late! :)), and had a good look for things beginning with D, but all we found was a bearded dragon and some ducks (I resisted the urge to point out he had just eaten one of their relatives):


All was not lost, though, as we had a brilliant time there anyway, if largely letter-D free. Connor particularly enjoyed having a snake draped around his neck (do you think that counts? :)). He also had the privelege of hand feeding Iggy the iguana, who, according to the keeper there, has never accepted food from anyone before who doesn't work there. So that was pretty special.



I'm pleased to say that we redeemed ourselves on the alphabet front by going to the Paint your Own Pottery shop – and I know you’re thinking we’ve mistaken our Ps for our Ds, but no, we were still on track, because Connor painted a dragon, and I did a dinosaur, so there :P :)



And then after all our hard work painting, we had a delicious dairy treat - blackberry ice cream, yummmmmmmmm

Our next letter D? Connor having a lesson on Jay's decks - maybe he'll be a superstar DJ too one day :) He really enjoyed his session - he learned how to slow down and speed up the records, how to fade from one deck to the other, and even how to scratch. I was too chicken to try it myself, in case I broke something :)



One week down, another to go, are you still with me? :)

So....the following Saturday we had another fairly lazy day....our partners in A-Z crime were down in London seeing the sights, but we weren't due to join them until the following day.

The boys were getting cabin fever by the afternoon, though, so in an effort to economise we took them to the local reptile shop. It's like a free zoo :) It has a crocodile and snakes galore and all sorts of lizards.

And most importantly, they had a huge tank with about 10 bearded dragon babies. Oh they were so beautiful! This little fella in particular was really friendly. Jay had to physically drag me from the shop to stop me buying him and taking him home :)

I called him Joey Beard after the Swindon Wildcats #15

On the picture below, you can see Joey's brothers and sisters bottom left, and also, nowt to do with the letter D, a very cool Australian Water Monitor called Elvis who is allowed free run around the shop, and a suicidal cricket who kept taunting a tarantula.


Our only other D-related activity for this day was trying, and largely failing, to get the family to pose for photographs in a dreadlock wig:

At least I had fun, so much fun in fact that I didn't want to take it off :)

The boys preferred the coloured wigs, less itchy apparently.

I love the way that Reece, in the purple wig, inadvertently looks just like Connor's monster money box :)


The following day, the Sunday, was our big day out to the big city.

We got up at dawn – well about 7am – which is horrendously early for us :) - and drove down to London.

The plan was to park up at the park-and-ride out in Osterley and get the tube to the Natural History Museum, but I somehow overshot, and we ended up just driving directly to the museum, where we were lucky enough to find a space on one of the free parking meters, right outside the building.


And a very impressive building it is too, I never fail to just stand there and admire it for a while before going inside (not that we stood and admired for TOO long this time, as it was raining cats and dogs and we didn’t want to end up looking like drowned rats)

Once inside, we had no trouble discovering tons of stuff beginning with D:


(to explain the two rather dubious inclusions – bottom left is me and “dem bones” , and at the top right is a display of tiny stuffed hummingbirds. You can’t see it for toffee in that tiny photo, but trust me it was amazing)

We also had a look round the brand new, and very impressive, Darwin centre, which is a huge exhibit devoted to bio-diversity. There were interactive exhibits for the children and lots of interest to the adults too. Unfortunately we didn't have time to go down to the vaults where they have preserved specimens of something like 17 million species of animals/insects, and 3 million species of plants. That would have been fascinating, another time...

We had a late (and expensive - one could almost call it daylight robbery ;) ) lunch in the museum cafe, and then caught the tube to Chinatown, in the (fruitless as it turned out) hope of bumping into Michelle, Tracy and family.

Why Chinatown, in D fortnight? Well, they were having their annual new year celebrations today....and what does that mean? Yes - Dragon Dancing!....









and decorations all over the streets....










and, ummm, crispy duck :)



It was really crowded, but the atmosphere around Chinatown was electric, well worth a visit when the new year celebrations are in full swing.

Here are a couple more pictures, as you can see by the blue sky and all the bright colours, by this afternoon the rain had stopped and it was really sunny (if still a little chilly):



None of the rest of today's activities were really anything to do with the letter D, but just for completeness, this is what we did next:

We managed to get hold of M&T on the phone, who by now were hanging around Covent Garden hoping to see somebody famous as it was the Bafta awards weekend, and arranged to meet them down by the London Eye.

We were going to get the tube there, but as we walked from Trafalgar Square (where we had been watching some traditional Chinese dancing, and posing for pics outside the Canadian High Commission, like the true hockey fans we are) to the tube station, we saw Big Ben in the not too distant distance:

So we decided to walk down Whitehall instead as it was a lovely evening for a stroll (the kids didn't agree, but to be fair we had been walking constantly since 10am, only sitting down once to eat)

We fancied doing a night flight on the Eye, but when we got there it was still fairly light.











So we ducked into the London Aquarium to pass an hour until it got properly dark, and that's where we finally bumped into our pals.


We were particularly pleased to see a replica Easter Island statue in one of the big tanks, as anyone who has seen and enjoyed the movie Night At The Museum knows he is called Dum Dum, which begins with D :)

When we emerged from the aquarium it was suitably dark, and we thoroughly enjoyed our night flight:


And here's a rare piccie of the whole gang together, taken by a kind fellow tourist:



After all that excitement, there was nothing left to do but limp back to the tube station, collect the car from outside the (now beautifully floodlit) museum, and drive home to collapse exhausted in our beds. What a great day that was!

There was even more excitement the following day - as it was a Teacher Development day at Connor's school and so we had another trip out, to the fantastic @Bristol science museum, but it was fairly devoid of Ds....we did animation (too late), went to the planetarium (too early), and all sorts of other wrong-lettered activities:


But never mind, it was fun anyway :)

So that's my D fortnight all wrapped up....E next (which so far we have found pretty tricky, so you can expect a shorter blog post next time :D)