Playing with fimo some more

Warmed up my old black fimo in the microwave (really briefly, a couple of seconds at a time) then mixed up some translucent + white sparkly fimo to make faux cameos and ammonite/snail things. Used a twist drill and wiregauge drill bit to drill the holes after baking.




Having recently been to a talk on Art & Food Through The Ages at the V&A, these now remind me of oreo cameos... Hmm...

LASERS! Etching my new laptop

(originally written 30 March, 2013)



So... I got a new laptop back in December. It has a black painted aluminimum lid. I have access to a laser cutter/etcher. What a perfect time to personalise my laptop.

Bronies will recognise the balloons - it's Pinkie Pie's cutie mark.

It took me hours of tweaking vectors and screaming & yelling at Inkscape. It took 17seconds to laser etch at 100% power, 100m/s speed. It was so fast there's no pictures of the process.

Close up:



I'd really like to etch the inside keyboard surround but I'd have to take it off the laptop first and I've not bothered to look up how to do that yet. Definitely requires more pony.

Cocktails...

Get invited to a cocktail party, make a cocktail tool roll out of faux leather and velvet ribbon. Take awful picture of it. Of course.



Spend next morning making weird flavoured syrups to go in cocktails:

Rhubarb & Vanilla syrup (recipe from here)


(take more bad photos)
Fresh Ginger Syrup, recipe I kinda made up. Syrup with slices of fresh ginger steeping, then added freshly grated ginger juice to the final syrup but it still wasn't as spicy and kicky as I'd like it to be.

Also made but not featured, a strange combination of sugar, vodka, Balvarian Cream flavouring & vintage aged homemade vanilla extract which was dubbed Silky Cupcake Vodka (in honour of my pony OC which has a cupcake and a cocktail as her cutie mark).

Dabbling in leatherwork

It's amazing what a scrap of leather, a scalpel and a bit of water can do. Yes it's suppose to be a calla lily shape. The edges are bevelled and making this helped me understand those calla lily sugarpaste cutters and how much you have to tightly roll it to make a calla lily shape.

Jewellery Making

I went to the Knitting and Stitching Show with a friend of mine... I went in thinking... eh, I can totally resist knitting and stitching. OH MY GOD THERE ARE SHINY THINGS! JEWELLERY STUFF! WAHH!
Went slightly mad buying supplies. I think I'm all set for gift making for quite a while now.

The best find for me were these unpolished hematite beads. I've gotten slightly obsessed with matte black finishes in recent years and these are amazing.


Combined with black waxed cord, they're rather unisex. Also I love waxed cord because it doesn't get tangled up in my hair so badly as chains do. I've been replacing all my pendants on chains with this cord. It's so stupidly cheap... £1.50 for 20 metres!

I also made this simple paper necklace. It's a kind of elegant version of these kids necklaces I found on the interwebs.


and another simple bracelet using those amazing hematite beads again

I love cubes, especially on the diagonal.

Tribute to Tekkit YogsCast

I like squids. I like minecraft. I like minecraft squids. I like the idea of a squid that wants to be a potato when it grows up.





Minecraft potatoes are hard to draw. These were done on shrinkle plastic. For size reference, in the first picture those are 1cm squares on the cutting mat.

Silly melty plastic beads

Hama beads, Perler Beads... Whatever you call it, they have a weird place in the world. Apparently for kids but taking a huge amount of patience to complete anything of recognisable shapes and requiring a hot iron to "set" and melt the beads together.

First attempt went pretty well...


Another random thing. Kind of a bunny face like ^.^


What I really want to do is to build panels and build things that look like Minecraft. I started to make a giant red mushroom shape but I soon realised I was running out of red beads and I've not got around to buying more yet.