Well it was there last time I looked. . .

The other day somebody bought one of my cufflink sets on Etsy.

'Hooray!' I said and trundled over to the shelf where I keep my jewelry stuff and pulled out the most likely box.
Nope, not in that one. No worries, it will be in the box with my other cufflinks. . .
Nope. . . OK, well it should have been in that box, maybe I put it somewhere else, though I can't think why. .

Yeah well, you can see where this is going. The cufflinks weren't anywhere they ought to have been or anywhere they didn't ought to have been, and I still haven't a clue what happened to them. I looked everywhere. . About six times. . . Grrrr. . .

I shamefacedly contacted the buyer, apologised profusely and explained. I suggested I could try to make a replacement set, send a photo to see whether she thought the replacement was adequate, and if not give a refund. She said that was a good idea, so I set to.

As I set up the necessary bits and pieces, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to document the process as I hadn't tried that before, so I took shots of the various stages of my image transfer and nasty aging process and montaged them into a series of jpgs for your amusement. I hope you're easily amused. It's almost a tut, but would need work to make it coherent enough for that. It's more of an experiment. I might try documenting stuff again but with more care and a better set up.

1- cut out images from laser print/photocopy sheet.
2- cut out squares of polymer clay, thickest setting on the pasta machine.
3- trimmed images and squares.

4- place the images face down on the squares and rub gently with your finger to ensure contact.
5- add water and let it sit for a minute.
6- gently rub away the paper with your finger in a circular motion, adding water from time to time. Go easy as it can start to smudge after a while.
7- the image/soft clay will probably distort a bit if you aren't careful enough. I wasn't.

8- don't do what I did and forget to place the squares on a small tile to start with. I had to lift them off my work tile with a blade, which also distorts the shape. Not a big issue this time as I wanted a slightly irregular shape.
9- put small tile in oven. I did 25 mins at usual temperature.
10- baked squares. The camera angle makes them look more distorted than they were.
11- selectively attack with medium sandpaper.

12- results of selective sandpaper attack.
13- I painted the surface with greyish alcohol ink diluted with isopropyl - ratio 1 ink 2 iso p.
14- gently added renaissance wax, but rubbed it in too hard. see top right of left square, the blue has come off leaving purple/magenta where blue should be. Ren wax will take the image off if you aren't careful.
15- buffed with dremel thingy after ren wax had dried for ten mins or so.

16 - the final result. Overdid it, so I made another less messed up version.

This is a pic of the second, less messed up version I made. These made it to the stage of cufflinks. Check the pic below of the 'lost' original ones and see if I got close. The originals weren't quite as brown in real life as in the photo btw.

Let's hope the buyer gives the OK. ;-)

Jon x