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Showing posts from November, 2007

i love polyester plates!

. I love polyester plates! Oh, yeah, I said that already. They are so flippin' useful! The photo shows some of the hanging copper whachamacallits that we (our friend Glenn Bigelow and I) etched today for the wind chimes that I'm making for the Santa Fe Recycle show coming up this weekend. (they are supposed to look "distressed", just in case you wondered). We printed the plates with the words on a laser printer, inked them up with oil-based ink, printed them on the copper, embossed them and then put them in ferric chloride to etch them. After 1.5 hours (!) I removed them from the mordant and scrubbed off the resist, heated them on the stove to give them a patina, rubbed black shoe polish into the etched word and ta-dah (a la Katie, little fists raised to the sky) etched-dangle-doo-dads for the wind chimes.

before and after

. My husband is convinced I'm nuts but for some reason he still supports me in almost every crazy thing I involve myself in. It is far more than, "sure sweetie, go ahead." His support comes with a friendly, amused, helpful attitude most of the time and he gets in there and ends up working harder than me if that's what is required. Amazing. (Although, he has put his foot down about ever getting involved in the food service industry again and he did make me quit loading glass on the trailer before I'd gotten all the free glass the Freecycle folks were offering.) Above on the left you can see my latest insanity and there's about three times as much under the tarp. That's glass, just in case it is unidentifiable. On the right is the first thing I've made from it -- wind chimes (just in case they also cannot be identified). My friend Yvonne is ball-of-fire, production-mode artist. She can crank out more great art faster than anyone I know. And just about an