... on something achieved.

I live a ten minute drive from the Rocklea Flower Markets, and over the past months I've been treating myself every couple of weeks. I've bought freesias and banksias, Geraldton wax and proteas, and I've also found myself drawn to the greenery. A few times I've come home with a bucketful of waxy-leaved gum branches.

These macrocarpa gum flower buds were very enthusiastically received by Ollie, and after watching him chew speculatively on the dangling pod-like buds, I too was prompted to take action. Pinkysil action. It had been a while!

I shoved a thick wire into the trimmed end of each bud.

I then moulded a piece of plasticene around the wire so that when the silicone mix was poured, I would be left with a hole through which to pour the plaster when casting. This mould (and the others I've made like this) has been made upside-down.

I used a piece of PVC pipe (like the wired buds, it's pushed down into a base slab of plasticene) to contain the Pinkysil.

The Pinkysil doesn't take too long to cure - an hour later I was ready to try an initial plaster cast. The PVC pipe was removed (the very devil of a job!) and the original green buds taken out by making one clean cut with a very sharp scalpel down into the side of the mould. This mould is thick enough to be self-supporting when filled with wet plaster, and as long as I've taken care to close up the cuts accurately (the silicone tends to stick to itself a little) it doesn't leak.

Hey presto! You can see the cone-like shape at the top of the bud - that's where I moulded the plasticene around the wire. That part gets trimmed off, and I'm left with a complete plaster replica of the original bud.

It's now some days later, and the pods are fully dried out. I've been drilling, glueing, assembling and photographing a-plenty.

 Hello new plaster seedpod wall hanging!

... on an idea.

Ideas are funny, aren't they? You'll be minding your own business, maybe digging in the garden or peeling potatoes, not thinking about anything very much, when... WHAMMO! A thought will suddenly arrive, unbidden! into your head, leaving you thinking "Where did THAT come from?" and then, as experienced by me a week ago; "... and why haven't I thought of that BEFORE!?"

The thought was this. I'd finished drilling holes and glueing metal loops into the tops of a batch of my smaller plaster eggs. They were ready to be painted, and I was planning on undercoating and then layering up the acrylic colour coats on them in an array of rainbow hues. But I swear, I wasn't even thinking about them one morning last week when suddenly I thought watercolour. WHAMMO! I thought of my previous experiments of colouring my plaster letters by soaking them in ink, and wondered why on earth I've never thought of colouring the eggs in a similar way. I knew, from the letter colouring trials, that the plaster has various densities that absorb the pigments to different degrees - an effect I wasn't pleased with at the time. WHAMMO! I had a vision of a plaster egg soaked in watercolour paint, and it was all mottled and lovely, picking up the textures of the plaster; dark in places and light in others, any textural differences in the plaster highlighted... I had to try it straight away.

I couldn't believe my eyes! They turned out exactly as I'd imagined. I could see that less colour was absorbed where I'd sanded the eggs. At the bottoms, where the plaster is denser (I think the smaller particles naturally sink to the bottom when I bang the moulds to get the bubbles out) hardly any colour went on at all. Inbetween, the colour was really rich, and any surface textures were picked out with denser pigmentation. The result was, for want of a better description, really watercolour-y, and I was so surprised!

I speckled them all up with white paint, sealed them with several coats of varnish, and sat back to look at them. They look like galaxies!

There's rainbow craziness all over the table, and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. I've set out a couple of rainbow-song wall hangings (you know... "Red and yellow and pink and green!") which I'll have ready for the next BrisStyle Twilight Market in King George Square. First market for the year - less than three weeks to go now!

I know I said I was planning on retiring these eggs. I was wrong. They've evolved!

... on things in progress.

There's some things going on here this afternoon. Thought I'd share.

This is a freakishly tiny chook egg laid by my Ma's Old English Game hen, Major Hoolihan. I've made a Pinkysil mould of it to commemorate it forevermore.

Trimmings from some freshly-cast plaster bird's eggs.

Plaster bird's eggs trimmed, sanded and ready for finishing.

C, ever watchful whilst driving, spied this fabulous old coil of a thick green sisal-type twine lying by the side of the road some months ago. He pulled up and grabbed it, sure it would come in useful. I have since absconded with it because it's very very nice.

Unwound, it makes lovely long green fibres that I am experimenting with working into a nest shape. I'd like to paint these eggs the palest palest green and speckle them with white.

When we were kids, my bro and a friend shimmied up some old telephone poles (long disused!) near our house and gathered the sagging wires. The big roll of copper sat in our shed for at least twenty years before I... absconded with it.

I am using it, little by little, to make more of my little bird's nest sculptures. This one (with passionfruit-ish curlicue) is finished.

This one is in progress. It's interesting how, when I bend the wire to form the nest shape, the outer surface flakes off and reveals the clean pinkish copper beneath. Within a few days these fresh parts will start to oxidise and go green.

Hope you're having a productive afternoon too!

... on eggs. Lots and lots of eggs!

Well, they're ready! I've been making these eggs since the start of the year, and they're finally ready. I think I kept getting distracted by other new things - and in the end I was getting flustered because I had so many new things on the go and none of them were nearing finishment!

I've found a new use for my lovely old Airspeed fan. It goes really well, by the way, even though it makes a sound like a jet engine when it's on. I have to make sure everything's weighed down - it's been known to blow books off the table.

I've become a dab hand at this egg-speckling business - it's quite laborious, and I can only manage about three at a time before my thumbs give out! First I use a dry brush to flick on the fine specks, then go over again with a larger brush to be-blotch. Finished!

I've just spent the morning threading this delicious chocolatey ribbon through their loops, and taking photographs for some Etsy listings.

Now I'm feeling quite keen on the idea of making some blue-ish eggs. I also have a couple of little wall-hangings on the go - look out for them soon!

... on painting eggs.

Real quail egg.

Cast plaster quail egg, painted and be-speckled.

 Hurrah!

... on ampersand fun.

Over the past few weeks I've been having a bit of fun with a new ampersand project. Recently, on one stupidly hot and humid Brisbane day, I exiled myself to my Ma's air conditioning and spent a whole afternoon carving a new ampersand.

Here's how I carve something. I trace a template onto an ordinary piece of plasterboard sheeting, the sort that you use to line the walls of your home. I get busy with a scalpel and hey presto! A big mess!

I wanted this ampersand to be able to stand up by itself, so I carved two and glued them together, and then plastered over the join. 

I really like the swirly-curliness of this ampersand. I like how you can see the definite 'E' and 'T' that make up the form of it ('et' meaning 'and' in french, and I don't know why I assume this but I do... is that why ampersands sometimes say 'et'? Other times they're more like a plus sign, or a squiggle.) and that  it says 'et' in a really Austin Powers kind of way!

When it wasn't quite so hot, I got out the Pinkysil and made a mould. It was a bit of a close call though - it was still quite warm, and the silicone had started to go 'off' (or set) before I'd even finished mixing the two parts. Eeek!

It turned out okay though. I always feel quite nervous as I watch something I've spent hours carving disappear under the Pinkysil, because I know that once the silicone has set and I try to remove the original from the mould, I'll have to break it into a thousand pieces to get it out. But - then the fun starts... will the cast result be as nice as the original?

Hurrah! Yes - I don't miss the original one bit! In fact, I really like the bulk and heaviness of the cast result - the Gedeo Resin Plaster that I use is a superfine, weighty material, quite unlike the lightness of regular Plaster of Paris. I've made a couple of these now, and having had some practice at the finishing (they need quite a lot of hand sanding) I'm feeling that they're ready for my Etsy store. And guess what? They DO stand up by themselves!

... on light.

I've just learned a valuable lesson. Actually - I think I'd already learned this one, but forgotten it. I'm photographing a couple of new things for my Etsy store, and so, on autopilot, I pulled out this lamp I sometimes use that has a special photographic daylight bulb. I set everything up, turned on the lamp, took some shots, and then opened them up in Photoshop. I was pretty happy with them - until I tried to tweak the levels to get rid of the yellowish look to the white plaster seedpods.

No matter how much I fiddled I couldn't get it right - and the more I looked at it, the more purple the background seemed. What's more, none of the five photos I'd chosen for the listing looked like they belonged together - they all looked like they were taken on different days in different rooms under different lighting. Gah! I was so frustrated I had to walk away and go and play with the chooks for a bit.

When I'd calmed down, I tried again. I re-took all the photos, with no lamp. I opened up the blinds and doors, and just used the natural light - it's an overcast day here in Brisbane. What a difference!

A very moderate tweak to the levels and contrast, and already a much better result. All the pics look like they match. The pods aren't yellow. Thank goodness!

So - remember that, you. Just put that bloody lamp away and never use it again, will you!? Okay!

...on trying just one more idea!

I had another idea about how to colour the Gedeo resin plaster I use to cast my letters. I added a good whack of black acrylic paint to the mix, and things were looking promising until I'd waited three days for it to set and it still hadn't! So I gave it a week.In drying, the mix in the mould had shrunk a little, making the backs of these asterisks concave. However they did have an exquisite chalkiness which was pretty nice.

So chalky, in fact, that they just broke apart upon handling! What a shame.So. Concrete colourant it is. Watch this space!

... on trying something... and then something else.

I've had a few queries recently as to whether it was possible to colour my plaster letters. It is - they do pretty well with a coat of plain acrylic paint, in which case you can match them to your wall colour if you want.

However, one of the things I really like about casting these letters in white plaster is that the original letter I hand-carved was from white plaster. It had that lovely matte finish and the dry texture of the surface really appealed to me. So, in casting a letter that was originally in white plaster, with white plaster, I get a recreation of that beautiful original matte surface, which I love. Painting over it seems to be a shame, to me.

So, I looked at how I could colour the plaster mix itself - maybe I could retain the dry-looking matte surface?

Here, I tried adding black Indian ink to the water that I mix with the dry resin plaster. I used a very strong mix (one part ink to three parts water) and as a result the plaster took well over 24 hours to set hard - normally it's ready for demoulding in less than an hour. It also stuck pretty fiercely to the mould (even though I'd talc-ed it well beforehand) and left pieces of itself behind - not a success.

Then I thought 'well, if that's not going to work, perhaps I can soak a letter in the ink, neat.' and after a 24-hour bath, this was the result.

A grey, rather than black outcome. It has a great concrete-y industrial look that may work really nicely. However, in playing with the Indian ink, I noticed something a bit gross about it. It stinks. I mean, it reeks, and I'm afraid the vomity pong lingers in the cast result, even after a very good scrub and a long sit in the sun!

Then I tried a product that was designed to do approximately what I'm trying to achieve - concrete colourant. It's used to colour grout, too, so I figured it was bound to work. I did have to add way more water than usual to make the plaster wet enough to cast, so I don't really know the correct water/colourant ratio. It did set in a reasonable time though, but most importantly - it has that dry matte finish that I like so much. Hoorah!

The only downside I discovered was that in scrubbing off the talc under the tap after demoulding, I got black all over my hands, which means that the colourant isn't waterproof. This surprised me, as it's designed for grout, and surely it would be used in wet areas? This isn't really a problem as I don't recommend installing these plaster letters where they'll get wet - it's more of a production challenge.

What do you think? Should I try a production run?