Laser cut rings and Plastic Weld

Apparently back in October I forgot to write about some laser cut rings I made.



A friend happened to be in the space after I made these and gave me some tips since they're a bit melted. Need to use less power and multiple passes next time.

More recently I learned of Plastic Weld which is a solvent that you use to "glue" (chemically melt & fuse) acrylic together. Just tried it out on a random 5mm mirrored perspex dot I've been keeping around since the prototype for the Infinity Box.



So awesome. So easy. Just hold the pieces in place with one hand, use a small brush to brush the Plastic Weld into the join and it wicks along by capillary action. Done in seconds. This basically means I can make boxes... or whole cases like those in galleries! This is exciting news, especially as I'm too lazy to design boxes with all those tabs or little slots for bolts & nuts (as in the design for the Ice Tube Clock).

Shrinky Plastic Fun :D

Kate is a bad influence on me. Or a good one, I'm not sure which anymore... She made me discover many My Little Pony merchandise, like colouring books. One of the things she used the colouring books for was to transfer pony designs to shrinky plastic (known as Shrinkles in the UK and Shrinky Dinks in the US).
Lately I've seen a lot of MLP jewellery designs using the shrink plastic so I wanted to give it a try. What can be better than infinite pony fan art?

First, I tried to trace a really big Fluttershy... The instructions said it shrinks 7 times smaller. So I measured before

(look at those impressive tracing, colouring and cutting skills!)
And after

And found it really only shrinks down by 2.5 times or so (thanks to Kimball for using MATHS to work this out for me because my brain was slow and addled by plastic fumes).

I realised after making the Fluttershy that ponies don't have black outlines, so I made this Pinkie Pie

I really love her expression in this one. From the original I traced, her head was more down and she was much more shy looking but this is still lovely and I'll probably make it into a necklace for myself soon.

Figured to try something a bit smaller... Gummy! Pinkie Pie's pet toothless alligator.

Would have been a little better if it was a little bigger so you can see he's hanging onto something by his mouth.

and even smaller...

Copied from a mini colouring book, it was a sort of illumination on a games page. Still the most pretty tiny thing ever.

I'm sure I could come up with more ideas for this stuff and I bought quite a bit of shrinkles too. One idea that has come to mind is possibly ... mouse-sized butterfly wings. Combining the mouse taxidermy with the Rarity's wings from Sonic Rainboom MLP... Might be interesting. Or just pretty and weird. Either way it's good.

A Just for Shiny

I remembered having a velvet choker as a teenager and i felt the need to have another... so this is a homage to that one. Pretty much the same construction but I made this one rather than bought it. Obviously needed to be done since all the other 90s fashions are coming back it seems... skater dresses and leggings... I even saw bodysuits (! those were painful...)

Knot Jewellery

The recent warm weather here forced me to wear shorts for the first time in years. Actually the shortest shorts I've ever owned which isn't very short but still slightly worrying to me.
For some reason this reminded me that I used to make and wear anklets made from embroidery floss. So on my way into London Hackspace for an evening I decided to grab a few skeins of embroidery floss and get to work.

I really didn't expect it to go so fast. I've not made these in probably 13+ years but I just remembered how to make all the right loops rapidly. I nearly finished the whole anklet just on my half an hour journey.

I've now started a full necklace too. Wondering if I should put the copper squid pendant on it since I made it a little too thick for a normal jumper ring. We'll see.

Copper Squid Pendant

Made from Copper Art Clay, torch fired for 10 minutes, pickled in citric acid + hot water.

I think I could get used to this metal clay stuff...