... on sale!

In honour of all things new... a new year! a new banner! some new products in the pipeline! I am having a samples and seconds sale over in my Etsy store. There you'll find some of the test items I've been sharing with you recently, such as...

A black plaster ampersand 

Three plaster asterisk brooches - heavy! For coats only!

Four plaster asterisks

Hello newness! 

I've had such fun with this! Do drop over for a look. Happy New Year!

... on more christmassing!

There has been quite a lot of christmas action happening around here.

 There has been the making of cards and the sprinkling of glitter.

 There has been much construction of lunch-paper pompoms to adorn presents and bonbon hats.

There has been the acquisition of a casuarina for our family christmas tree, undertaken with a certain degree of stealth, at dusk. (Thinned from the side of the road down near the creek... since the bushfire two years ago they've grown up so thickly they can't all survive!)

There has been the cutting of my Ma's christmas cake.

There has been a daily inspection by the chooks about how things are going inside the house. "Get out, Boyd!"

... and there has been some degree of craftiness going on. It's time to clean up! Wrap those last presents! Crack open a bottle of Rekorderlig Strawberry and Lime cider and... "ahhhh!"

... on the christmas tree.

That christmassy feeling has come early for me this year. I mean, I was as disgusted as the next person when I heard the first twinklings of 'Jingle Bells' down at the supermarket at the end of October. (Funnily enough the staff must have felt the same - they were back to elevatoresque for at least another month after that!)  No... this year I was inspired by a visit to a dear friend up at the Sunshine Coast, last week. Her tree was up and her house was bursting with advent calendars and decorations... I came home and immediately pulled out my two boxes of christmasnessiness.

Now, I know in the past I have been guilty of the too-stylish christmas tree sin. It's all those years working as a window-dresser! This year, my theme is 'all or nothing', meaning that I crammed every decoration I could find onto the dead stick which, rather embarrassingly, has been adorning my house since I used it for christmas last year! You know how you amass a collection of odd decorations that people have given you? Blue holographic sequins! Mirrored raised-trunk elephants! CRAM THEM ALL ON!

Rummaging through the boxes was a lovely reminiscence, too. "Here's a lovely handmade bird given to me by a work friend last year!" "Look at this little rooster that I bought from that Christmas Shoppe on the High Street in Edinburgh, in June!" I found the pink shiny cardboard stars that I'd made for a tree when I lived with my friend Sarah, about ten years ago. 

I do like to add to the collection every year. Inspired by the pink stars, I found some fabric scraps and experimented with some fabric baubling.

No more colour-coordinated trees for me... it's like a festival going on over there in the corner!

So. Time to sort out my christmas cards. Time to stock up on festive bubbles at the bottle shop. Time to read Margaret Mahy's 'The Tricksters', an annual event for me because her descriptions of a wonderfully chaotic beachy pine-treey New Zealand family christmas are just fab! and never fail to put me in the mood.

Hello Christmas!

...on a bath full of ink.

I thought I'd give this ink bath thing another go, as I'd really liked the grey concrete-y outcome. In a previous post I'd mentioned that the indian ink had a real pong to it. I am pleased to report that after about three weeks the reek from my initial testing has faded!

This time I thought I'd try a whole word to see the effect. So, in went some plaster letters for a 24-hour bath.

A rinse...

 ... and a scrub with an old toothbrush.

Dry.

Too smelly for my Etsy store? I'm not sure! I like it, though!

... on a weekful of Beasties.

Monday.
Tuesday.
Wednesday.
Thursday.
Friday. On my list last week: "Make a Beastie every day." All to be seen in my Etsy store shortly!

...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?