Beading first I think. Last week I posted a pattern and some pics of my "Diamond" Ring, and I mentioned that I thought this design would be fun in some gem colors. Well, it is!
Here you can see the original with a silver "diamond" as well as two variations. One red, one blue. Hmmmm, just realized that all together, these are red, white, and blue.... Below, you will see my favorite variation of this pattern. I switched the original, so now you have a silver band and a black "diamond"! I love how striking this one turned out. Definitely an attention getter!
On the resin front - when a co-worker found out I was into steampunk/gears she gave me a bag of old/non-working watches to take apart. As it turns out, none of them were old enough to actually have any metal gears inside, but some of them had really great bands/bezels. So, I decided that they would be cool to use with resin. My experiments this weekend were flawed, but I have lots more watches to play with!
Here are the watches before. The one with the leather band reminded me of a boat's porthole. The metal band seemed kind of 1970's futuristic.
The leather band watch became a porthole to an undersea world, with a lovely sticker fish. I think if I try to recreate this, I will go with more realistic stickers. Maybe even see if I can cut pictures from National Geographic or something. This turned out just a little more cartoony than my original vision.
For my futuristic band, I was so mad at this. I had some great planet stickers, and got the Earth in nicely. But, when putting in my sparkly black background, I got an air bubble. It was hiding behind the Earth, so I didn't see it. However, as the piece set curing, it moved and became visible just to the upper left of the planet. Grrrr.... However, I did find that if your watch bezel has scratches, you can paint a thin layer of resin on top and the scratches vanish! I will be redoing this one in another watch for sure!
Finally, with the leftover resin, I tinted it with some oil paints, added some pearlex in micropearl to make it sparkly and then poured it into star and heart molds. With July Fourth coming, these will be perfect! (They are much more sparkly in person, my lighting just sucks. This is what I get for taking pictures at 6 AM!)
