Resurrection/erection.

 OK! Resurrection- erection. Now it makes sense! I have a weekness for the redonk things kids say. Like niece Marcela (4yrs) asking newphew David (5yrs) if he wanted to marry her. Because she wants to have lots of babies and when she heard you need a mommy/daddy pair, she got concerned she hadn't found a daddy yet. Her first choice was her brother Carlos, but apparently that's not allowed.

The Queen of Time. 

I'm concerned the pearls dangling under this are too white. That I should dye them or gild them darker. Too lazy right now.

 A Joyful Song. 

These two pairs have some of the recent resins.

The Inheritors. 

 Here's these and those below with regular bezels and glass. And a buncha little bits.

A Quiet Love.
Tiny faces from a book about icons.
 A very mis-matched pair with bits from a Nicky Butler necklace.

Mother of the Moon.
I colored the medal with perfect pearls then sealed. And a tiny amethyst from Uruguay.

 Rain.
Simple blues. I love these round beads.

Pixies. 

And these little stacks of very special goodies. With antique goofy face beads.

Das all.

The continuing adventures of my steps-by-steps.

I'm so glad you guys enjoyed the steps! Tho I was hoping someone would have a magical fix for that last piece... But yeah, I'm constantly messing up and fixing and fiddling.

 So after a ton of sanding and edge-cutting these look like this. I did the sanding outside with coarse sandpaper and dremel. Resin powder flakes everywhere and my house is bad enough, as you know. Weird storms for several days in Chicago so it was all muggy and I was covered in tiny insects. Felt a tickle, looked down my shirt and found a fat spider wiggling on my boob.

Didn't even realize I had the right amount for two earring pairs here.I think I'll match the queen with the peacock and king with dragon. 

If not everyone's facing wrong and the colors don't combine.

I must've had this all planned when I cut these out ages ago before getting distracted by other shiny objects.

Yay, creative ADD. The shrines in tin, after all this sanding, need some oxing.

After that, another resin batch is stirred.... I should mention a note about that. You need to stir the crap out of resin, until all the silver threads that appear when you stir are no longer visible. This takes a long time. Also, it produces lots of bubbles. To get rid of bubbles I blast it with a heat gun. Thing is, that releases a lot of very dangerous gasses, so I make sure to do this outside and aim my face away.

After these cure it'll be time to buff them with polishing cloths to get rid of that glaring shine.

Mr. Devices is downstairs watching a "cult classic" (read: old and indescribably stupid) horror movie. The sounds reaching me are like a caricature of horror movie sounds. If you tried to produce sounds to make fun of horror movies you wouldn't go this shlocky. But then, that's also how I feel about his heavy metal. Ah, wedded bliss.

Can we stop now and turn to the comment Kimberly aka Numinosity Beads made?
"I love seeing your process along the lines of never give up on a piece and magically resurrect it.
Speaking of resurrection, it reminds me of something my son once said when he saw a religious sign on a lawn about the resurrection. He asked me what resurrection meant and I tried to tell him best I could and he then said "oh, I thought it meant boner" and wondered why it was posted on the neighbors lawn. He capped it off by saying the thought maybe it was a hooker house. He was 8 at the time."
...

*crickets chirp*

Next day, resin is all cured.

As I'm using 3M Polishing Paper (on ebay I found a pack of just the coarsest green sheets, which is what I use) I'm brining the un-oxed tin back up. So that'll need re-touching.

As you can see it's the edges and corners that give me most trouble.

Here's another. I fix this with regular sandpaper and paste wax.

The paste wax also smoothes out any over-zealous buffing and also de-shines the resin.

 If you apply it over non-buffed resin it tends to glob up. Here's the best pic I could get of that, though really you can't see it here and you're all gonna think I'm nuts. Believe me,  if I could skip the buffing I would. And do sometimes. Conversely, the wax can actually polish your un-buffed surface as well. So there's that.

Here's a comparison before and after de-shining.

Quite a difference.

So this one has both issues. Over-zealous buffing in center, high and shiny edges. I sanded the edges and globed on some wax. Removed excess with regular cloth. In fact I use some of my scrap lace and such that will later be incorporated into something. Cuz a little dirtying with wax and whatnot builds character. 

Logically, I should have an after picture of the shrine above, but instead here's my dremel tip making holes.

  Added wire for bails but don't know yet if these will include a bead or be attached to a closed circle, so I haven't finished them.  The king in space can be mounted on a piece of tin with some cheaty wire prongs since it's just on paper. The royal angel mutants at the bottom center might make an earring pair too. Some of these might even be hung from a pin as a brooch. Many options to consider...

But all this would be so much easier if I could just wait for the resin to thicken up before pouring. I'm going to focus on that next time.

Turning now to further developments in owl-petting news.

My step-by-steps.

Build a Fire.
New stack. Red and white. Obviously. Can I share the quote I chose for it?
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
-Terry Pratchett

I made some new faux mercury glass and thought I'd take some pix as I did so. We all love these step-by-step photos, they're just a pain to take.

 Supplies on wax paper. OUTSIDE. I Ordered these beveled triangles thinking they were about a third of this size. Cuz even us pros forget to check the size sometimes. Well, I've decided to go for it and see what happens.

 Here's everything spritzed with water.

 And over that, sprayed with the silver stuff.

 I've decided that it's when you try to blot with tissue/napkin that you ruin the cool bubbly effects.

Though in the case of this little slide I did rub off a lot of the silver after it dried because the ephemera I'm using is interesting enough not to need much more.

See? Now I'm thinking I shouldn't have done anything to the glass at all. Damnit. Oh, what you see here is some gilder's on the tin as a failed experiment. (And photos taken under dining room lighting, very weird yellow glow.)

Anyblerg, here's some locket lids.

And a close-up on one of the the triangle glasses.

Here's the wire and tin.

The bottom corner was fine, but the size of the tin and my stupidity made the top two look like so~

So I thought I'd secure and camouflage with some wire wrapping.

Like such.

 Better?

And then had to do the bottom to match. After oxing it all, it will look much better.

Meanwhile I also did a ton of resin.

Here's some lined up shrine-shaped cut-outs glued on to thin tin.

 After turning up the edges I used regular old tape to keep the resin in.

After curing and pulling off the tape and cutting down the tin edges some. It's still going to need the edges to be taken down further and maybe another resin layer to dome the top.

These I did using tin foil and tape for the edges. As you can see, it needs a lot of trimming and sanding before the shape will make any sense.

Here's this one with it's little foil house.

I have to get in the habit of just using tape, the foil is completely resined on.

Here's as much as I was able to get off with my hands, next comes scissors, exacto knife and lots of sand paper.

My best by far was this one because a few hours after the resin had started to set, I scooped some out of a little shrine on to this. It was partially cured, thus much more viscus and could stay on this without pouring right off. No need for foil or tape housing, no need now for trimming and sanding or a further layer to dome the top.

Which I will need to do to all these. Though it's a very satisfying process and I don't really mind. I can't believe I even said that, I'm usually in such a rush.

Did a couple tin bezels.

Basically I realized the glass I have is WAY too thin to withstand the pressure applied by my pliers as I shape the tin around it.  (by the way, once I sand and oxidize the tin it will look much better.)

So here I added a thin layer of resin over the top to sort of heal and protect the crack. Worked Ok.

Did the same here. As you see, the resin made its happy way under the glass and produced a massive air bubble.

The only way to save this I can imagine is to thy to get resin under the glass to completely fill that bubble. Even if that were possible, now the tin is resined in place... ....So fuck.

I think it took longer to take and (sort of) edit the photos and write this post than it did to do any of the work described. Also Dad-in-Law came into town last night so there was a whole cleaning and cooking extravaganza. (Full disclosure, Mom did all the cooking. I mean, please. I was busy covering up the fact that we live in a pile of dog hair.)

Meanwhile in owl news.