Faux Bone Leaves

Pictured, leaf forms made from 1/16" Faux Bone with half-drilled Swarovski crystal pearls.  Colored with Ranger Adirondack alcohol inks.  I used five different ink colors, plus tiny, random dabs of gold mixative.  Applied with the generally used standard dauber for this brand of ink.  According to conventional wisdom, one should not reuse the dauber.  I found this to not be true, at least in applying
ink on these and several leaves which are in the process of completion.  The same application of ink is used on the reverse side.  One leaf is made as a pendant, the other as a brooch.

Next post, more Faux Bone, new project.

Segmented Faux Bone Pendant and a Bail

This pendant presented a host of problems.  There were some trial and error pieces before the above came about.

I put two pieces of Faux Bone together with double-sided tape and sanded the top side and bottom to remove the shiny surface,  (the top is 1/16" and the bottom is 1/8"). I turned the bottom side up and using a circle template, and a 5 mm lead pencil, I drew the outer circle and then the inner one, making a washer shape. Then I roughly divided the washer into uneven thirds.  I wanted the end result to have three segments of unequal size in length.

To keep from smearing the drawing during sawing, I sprayed it with PYM II.

I sawed out the outer circle, filed away the saw marks, keeping the sides straight up and down, and then separated the two pieces.

I drilled an access hole for the saw blade into the inner circle and sawed this out.  Then I sawed out the segments.  I wanted a gap between each segment, so these had to have a bit sawn off one end.  Then removed the saw marks and sanded the top of the segments. I roughly reassembled the segments and colored them with different colored alcohol inks.  The inner edges were colored gold using a gold leaf pen.  I also colored the inside of the bottom disc and drilled a hole in the center with a No.67 drill bit for the 20 gauge wire which will form the post for the half-drilled Swarovski pearl.

The bail.  Previously, I had to figure out how to make a bail for the pendant.  After fiddling around with this and that,  here is what I came up with:

A short, bent piece of 1/8" outside diameter copper tube held by two 20 gauge wire staples, ends riveted on the other side.

Now to assemble the pendant.  Each segment piece was attached, one at time, with 20 gauge wire rivets, done on at a time.  To hold a segment in place while drilling and riveting, I used the Speetog plier/clamp.  These can be hard to find, but anyone can make a serviceable plier by purchasing a mini vise-grip or similar plier and padding the jaws with strips of leather held on with super glue.

Once the segments were attached, the pearl was placed on its post with one small drop of super glue.  Oops!  I'm not supposed to say "g__e." I'm supposed to say something like "Industrial Strength Adhesive."

Then, lastly the outer edge was colored as the inner edges were.

Something a little different coming next weekend.  Still more Faux Bone and Alcohol inks and half-drilled Swarovski pearls.  Stay tuned.

OLIO

As promised, I'm back, first week in August.

I see new followers.  Welcome to the blog!

Olio.  What's with this?  It is a word that means an eclectic collection of art or writings.  There are several other meanings, such as a hodge-podge of items.  The word is used by crossword constructors because of the number of vowels.  Here, I'm using it to indicate this blog entry contains a bunch of different things.

HOT, HOT, HOT! and DRY, here.  Although not quite as hot as some other nearby places.  We need disparately something to break this persistent high pressure dome that is sitting over the middle part of the country.

I've been experimenting with alcohol inks.

Here's a snap of a couple colors.  There's a slew of differ colors available.  You might look a a bottle and say, "Gee, only .5 fluid ounce?"  Ha, ha, these are INTENSE inks, and a little, very little, goes a loooong way!

The above pic shows using common Q-Tips to apply the ink, daubing it on.  The colors are sailboat blue and denim.  Guess what?  I can reactivate the ink on the Q-tips with either Adirondak's Alcohol

Blending Solution, or 91% Isopropyl Alcohol.  You can use regular 70% Rubbing Alcohol, but the 91% is much better.

A pic of the brush used to make drk clouds on a piece called "Witchy Moon."  20/0 is close to the finest you can get. There are finer ones available.

Here's another example:

The three tiny dots of black on the upper left are supposed to simulate birds.  Not very great art!

So what's the material is the ink applied?  Faux bone.  A bit less than 7/8 inch in diameter, 1/8 inch thick.  The finding at the top is 20 gauge copper, patinated with Patina Gel (liver of sulfur) from Cool Tools. This is good stuff.  Recommend it highly.

Made the wrapped loops with Wubbers new looping plier.  Works quite well.  The non-looped end of the wire was screwed into a hole drilled into the faux bone.  If you do something like this, remember to drill the hole prior to shaping the edges.  I used a tiny setting bur to make a little divot for starting the drill.  Otherwise the regular twist drill bit will skate around on the curved edge.  I also use a flex shaft in a drill press and a bit just slightly smaller than normal No. 67 one would use for 20 gauge wire.

After drilling all the holes, the pieces were filed, rounding the edges, with No. 00 and No. 1 half round Hablis files.  Then sanded with the usual schedule of sandpaper  grits, 320, 400, 600.  Wet, always wet sandpaper.  To facilitate sanding the flat front and back of the pieces, I place tabs of tape on one side of a piece to grip it better, and the sandpaper grit side up on a small piece of plexi-glass.  The wet paper will stick to the plastic.  Saves sanding  the fingers. Ouch!

Also, made a small improvement on the bench pin by putting a small bevel on the front edge and corners.

Back first part of September.  Thanks for stopping by!

Another Pendant

Amazing! Two posts in one day!

Anyway, as sort of promised, a photo of a faux bone creation.  Wonder if I'll ever get good at this?

Three inches overall height by one and one half wide. Sterling silver wire and beads, plain, old, ordinary craft store seed beads and one goldstone bead.

Two Pendants

These are not the ones I had intended to post.  The one on the right is from left over scrap from another project which is currently unfinished.  It sort of resembles an ancient pottery shard.  This piece has no shaping from filing.  I am showing this to illustrate that depending on what the end results you want the piece to be, you don't have to shape the material with a file.  All the shaping was done with the saw, and a triangular scraper.  And the standard sanding sequence. Markings with an X-acto knife blade and a awl.  In addition to the burnt sienna paint, I used a bit of pyrrole orange.

The piece on the left uses Robert Dancik's brass rivets, available from Crackerdog Designs.

Both will eventually be strung with Greek leather cord.

Bone Wars Continue

There's only about 14 or so inches of snow that will need to be removed from around the car and driveway!  This NW Arkansas!  We aren't supposed to get this kind of snow!  So, I guess I will be shoveling snow instead of trying to do some jewelry work.

Believe it or not, I have managed to get something in the works.  I have four faux bone pieces in varying stages of completion.

First mistake.  Working too small.  Faux bone works much better for larger pieces.  If you ever want to try using this material, think big.  Two inches and up.  In other words be BOLD!  This is not to say that smaller pieces couldn't be done.  For me anyway, the smaller pieces are more difficult to hold onto.  Even larger pieces can be troublesome.  To facilitate holding the material when filing, I resort to using a ring clamp.  If you have strong hands and fingers, you wouldn't necessarily need a clamp.  Another reason to think big.

A common double cut, 8", half-round file or rasp, plus one single cut half-round file, and Robert's shaping tool, are all you need for shaping the material after sawing.  If your design shape has a more complex concave curve, then you might need a small 4", No. 1 cut, half-round hand file.  I doubt if you would ever need to use any needle files.

Then there's the sanding.  A necessary chore which you really need to do in order to remove the shiny surface of the material.  I'm not a big fan of this, but it pays off in the end.

To incise lines in the surface, all you need is a sharp pointed awl and an ordinary craft knife, such as an X-acto or similar.  Of course, there are endless surface treatments which can be done by stamping, heating the faux bone and pressing in any of a myriad of texturing sources.

Anyway, I'm beginning to win the war.

Rio Grande

Rio Grande is having a huge sale with hundreds of items at reduced prices. Instead of working on jewelry making, I've been spending a lot of time going through page after page of sale items trying to find things that would be nice to have. I make a long list of things and then begin to ask myself, "Do I really need that?" It becomes a little agonizing at times trying to pare down the list to something manageable budget wise. I did put in an order for some items. Then later, after placing the order, I discover that I missed ordering a couple things that I really did need. Ah, me!

Anyway, I did do a little more experimenting with faux bone. If you want to try the material out, you will need Robert's special saw blade and some kind of tool to trim off the crumbs left from sawing. Robert has a special tool for that. You can get by with a sharp triangular scraper. I've found that a coarse cut file works well as a preliminary tool to clean up the sides of any straight edge piece. A belt sander also works well. When the material is cut, filed or sanded, it does create a lot of crumbs. Not so much dust as crumbs. You need an old tooth brush, or something similar, to clean out the teeth on files. A vacuum cleaner attached to the belt sander is helpful or you'll have crumbs flying everywhere. Keeping a waste basket nearby to clean files over, or under, between your knees when sawing will help keep the crumb horde under control.

The material is easy to drill, and will take a center punch divot quite well. As with metal, the drill bit can skate around, so make the divot before drilling.

Ice, Snow and struggles.

We had a fairly significant ice and snow event here in NW Arkansas. But, nothing like other parts of the country.

The struggle doesn't refer to the weather, but to my working with the faux bone material. They say, whomever, "they" are, that the third time is the charm in getting something right, or winning. Well, I am now on the fifth charm. No idea how many I have left! Anyway, the fifth attempt is looking far better than any of the previous ones. In lieu of the recommended swivel head cutter (a tool actually meant for wax carving), I have found a triangular scraper works pretty well. One has to be careful using it, as it will dig in, and then you may have a boo-boo on your hands. So, a light touch is needed. Also, I still learning about using the special saw blade. It's getting easier to use it, but for some reason, I'm still having problems keeping the saw from wandering, even though I'm going slow and easy and certainly not trying to force the blade to follow the line. I really didn't expect taking this long to do a simple task.