Monday, January 28, 2013

Some new resin pieces and one finished irregular right angle weave project

This week in my new town we had freezing fog for two days. It ended up 'flocking' everything. Coming from Seattle, I've never seen this before, and it was beautiful. As the fog lifted, you could finally see the mountains to the west. That's the continental divide we get to look at every day, and according to the weather guy, that cloud your seeing is an inversion over the Condon Valley (I'm in the Mission Valley). This is hot chocolate time at it's best.

Meanwhile, the buttons I ordered for 4 of the 5 irregular right angle weave projects I talked about last week, still aren't here. That's what I get for ordering from overseas. It's been 14 days as of today since I ordered these buttons. Hopefully I get to talk about them next week.


Fusionbeads.com's packaga did come this week (yay) which containt the 10mm Swarovski Ravoli button I ordered to complete this one. The come in 15 colors (at least at Fusion) and aren't an arm and a leg, if you're interested, click  here.


In resin world this week:

I mentioned a last week that I got this new baking mold to make rings out of. Here's one of the things I've come up with so far (and completed):




After curing an extremely thin ring of color, I had another mold of nearly the same outside diameter that I set the cured ring into. After pouring more resin in and allowing it to cure, you have a great frame. In the finished example on the bottom I have a squiggly line on the ring, plus a final coat of resin, I left it clear in the middle.

I'll talk more about my experiments with resin and alcohol inks, one of my favorite ways to add a transparent color, as well as glitter, one of my all time most favorite way ever of adding color to resin, in later blogs. In the meantime, here's a bit of what I made this week. These are all made with the new 2" round mold, they're all undrilled because I have yet to decide which will be buttons and which will be pendants (you're welcome to offer suggestions)





 
Next week:
 
The other four finished irregular right angle weave projects (hopefully)
 
More resin
 
Cleaning houses for rich folks (one of the things I do in my spare time)
 
 


Monday, January 21, 2013

Irregular Right Angle Weave & New Molds for Resin

This week was irregular right angle weave week. I ended up coming up with a few pieces, all of which are still unfinished, you'll see the finished products next week after the buttons I ordered for them arrive.


I'm having a lot of fun with this stitch. It makes this wavy line that I chose to highlight in center of these two pieces:


Then in these pieces, it's used as a seperater between rows of 3mm bicone crystals. The one on the left is using regular Japanese rocailles with Swarovski's Silver Night crystal, I need to order more of those before I can finish. The one on the right is using delicas. I didn't think I was going to like the look of the delicas at first, but once I got to the fifth row, it started to take shape and I really liked it:


I also tried one with just metal beads (my personal favorite), but it's not as pliable as i want it, nor are the 'waves' as pronounced. It could be that there's not as much space between the 'waves' as there are in the other examples, or it could be that i used exlusively metal. It's the bracelet in the top pic on the far left. I'll see if I revisit that later. In the meantime, I have one other variety of irregular right angle weave that I'm working on right now, it'll be mentioned in next week's blog.

In the resin world, I received a couple of new molds this week, one was meant to replace my larger button molds, but they ended up being slightly smaller. Bummer. The ones I have, Wilton Silicon Large Muffin Bakeware, are just about out of service. I've searched for the, but they seem to making them different now. So until I can find a mold that matched my larger round size, I might just have this new size, approx 2" instead of 2 1/8".


I also received a new 'donut' style mold. It's for some sort of cake like mold that you put sugary subsance on one half and sandwich it in with another half. I've got one of these new cavitites filled with resin, and four of the cavitites with just a ring around the outside. It's curing now, I'll have some finished examples next week.

I ordered resin over a week ago, fully expecting it to get here last week. It did. It got here on Saturday. Unfortunately (and yet fortunately) I'm on rural delivery and our contracted mail person will not or can not (I'm unsure of which one) deliver mail that is marked for delivery confirmation. I got the notice from my mail person at 2pm on Saturday, our post office closes at noon on Saturdays. Then Monday (today) is a holiday. I've exhausted every drop of resin in my house, I'm having slight withdrawals.

Next week:

My finished irregular right angle weave projects

Resin

My dilema of the molds

Whatever else floats my fancy

In the meantime, here's Joan. She's a nine year old Australian cattle dog. She's just about the best cuddler you could ever have.

Monday, January 14, 2013

This Blog is Heading in a New Direction

I originally started this blog last year with the intention of logging each yarn shop that has purchased my buttons. Things have changed.

I was getting up to two new shops in one day while road tripping down the west coast early last year. I started out being very diligent about updating my blog, but as time went on, that wasn't happening. I also started out taking very detailed notes AND keeping track of those notes about each shop, that also didn't last long.

I realized, although people tell me I'm organized, it obviously only looks that way. So, one of two things need to happen: I need to be more realistic in what I set out to achieve, or I need to be more disciplined.

Maybe I can be a little of both?

In the meantime: This blog will remain "I Push My Own Buttons" (because I still do), but will now be about one or more of the following, up to and including but not limited to:

1. trying to start my business www.mgloden.com
2. living in a small town
3. what I made last week
4. what I'm working on this week
5. how my pets (2 dogs, 1 cat and 1 husband) are doing
6. whatever floats my fancy

Basically, it's all about me, and beads, and resin and shiny things. I'll include pictures, too!

So to start off, here's a picture of what happened this week:

Snow!

This tree is right outside my kitchen window. Some sort of a willow tree, the type is still being debated by all my friends. I use this window and counter for all my pictures, I have no light box (yet), and I've found this is the best spot in the house. It's facing west, which normally I would use a southern facing window, but the three of ours have big fir trees blocking them.

And here it is, my west facing window. Today is obviously not picture day, today is find-all-the-papers-in-your-house-and-put-them-on-the-counter day.



I'm also working on a few right-angle-weave (RAW) projects this week. I love that stitch! I've been stitching with the RAW stitch since I first saw a David Chatt piece over 20 years ago. Since then, most of the beading projects I design are based on that stitch. I just ordered the finishing touches on these new designs, hopefully they will be here before next week's blog.

Next week:
The RAW projects
Some buttons I'm making
And whatever floats my fancy

Until then, here's one of my family memebers, Gabby. She's around 2 years old, is a talker, and she came with the house we rented. We found her in one of the back sheds, she has since adopted us, so she'll come with us when we move.