Landmarks Rushing By. . . Domestic Stuff - Who Do We Think We Are? . . ;-) Cats, and of course, Beads/Drops/Thingies

I only noticed the other day, quite by chance, that I had reached an interesting landmark. It was four years ago on the 3rd of October, that I made my first bead sale on Etsy. (and probably about six months before that, that I had encountered my first bit of polymer clay) The beads in the pic were the ones I sold, and the buyer (from the West Coast USA) rejoiced in the rather wonderful surname of Carefree Buffalo. . . Not the sort of surname you get in the UK ;-) 

It only occurred to me later that this might be a native american name, but the image of a carefree buffalo skipping over the prairie, probably wearing my beads, still makes me smile.

Well, my Etsy shop is still chugging along four years later, on about 1200 sales now, and making beads has become a important part of my life, from being something it would never have occurred to me to get involved in. . . Life huh? ;-) 

Well, I've long ceased to worry about how I got Here from There. 

Embrace the randomness is what I say!

On the domestic front, I have been planning our living room makeover for a while. We are going for some fancy wood panelling on the wall round the fireplace, complete with some fancy wooden corbels and bits. 

The trouble is that even when you know the dimensions of the things you are ordering, it still comes as a surprise just how flippin big they are sometimes. The wonderfully ornate one in the middle is 10 inches by 11-1/2, which is pretty impressive. It will look amazing, if somewhat over the top. 

Still, us pretentious arty types with high falutin ideas aren't afraid of going over the top on occasion. . . It's going to be at the faux baronial end of the Georgian scale, if you get my drift, All dark wood and knotty grain. . .

Still on the domestic front, it's a big front. . . Here is what we did to the bathroom. 

The tiles were made by me with my heat press etc. The image is a copy of a William De Morgan tile design that my wife painted very large. I photographed it, sorted it all out on Photoshop to result in a three by three, nine tile design with single tile width edging. The tiles even have a crackle glaze effect, done in photoshop using a photo of a crackled dish of my wife's superimposed over the individual tile images. 

And I did the tiling too. . . I impress myself sometimes! Not too often, mind.

Staying with the bathroom for a further moment, here is my digital fractal based shower tile design. It's a continuous image representing water in an abstract way. That was another learning curve. 

Before I actually got round to tiling the shower we made do with bubble wrap stapled to the plasterboard wall. . . nice. . .

Boudicca or Boodie or Boo

Cats -

The three cats we adopted as kittens about a year and a quarter ago are in fine fettle. Now the weather has started to get a bit colder and wetter (we don't half need the rain! It's chucking it down as I write) they spend a lot more time indoors. I sometimes think they are too confident and well adjusted. There are three chairs round the kitchen table and the selfish little beasties are far too relaxed to worry about where I'm going to sit, fah! 

Actually they are joy. Happy, affectionate cats. We love 'em to bits ;-)

Cleopatra, or Cloppy or Clops

Hereward, or Hairy Boy or Himself

OK, the bit you have been waiting for, maybe. .  the Beads/Drops/Dangles/Thingies. . .

Two big turned look beads with a couple of resistors

My supply of unemployed beads is still going strong, although I am looking forward to the day when I start making some new polymer clay things instead of sparking ideas off already existent ones. I'm still experimenting and learning, and people still like what I am making, so I am happy.

A pair of textured charms with shaped wire bails

Wiggly wire is a new departure

Image tiles and looped wire 'flowers' is another

With it's subtle variations

Distressed image transfer beads with wiggly wire

My last pair of 'shards'

And the idea of hanging shapes from bent wire constructions was another one I liked.

So, as you see, life potters along in an enjoyable and satisfactory way. What could be nicer? ;-)

Until next time,

Jon x

Image Transfer mutterings vol 300. . - So much for Dye Sub

Well, after meaning to get round to trying out my dye sublimation heatpress on baked polymer clay for ages, I finally tried it out today. 'Disappointing' is the word. For a start, the poly clay stuck to the top 'platen' of the heat press and had to be hurriedly scraped off. Then the paper stuck to the clay during the dye sub process and had to be soaked off. And once everything had dried out from that it all looked extremely dull and uninteresting.

I tried Renaissance wax on top but that wasn't much better. I tried fine sandpaper, to see if I could sand down to something stronger, as the image would be part of the clay, but it was only fractionally better.

The left hand one is sanded and waxed and buffed. It's sort of OK, but not really worth the effort.

I was perplexed because on the right substrate, in this case an mdf coaster coated in a special pvc related substance, the image is bright and pretty clear. Polymer clay should have the right chemical make up to take dye sub inks. . .

So, forget dye sub, says I. I might try cutting up an mdf coaster and dye subbing onto the bits in order to make small image tile things, but that feels a bit like cheating, as I wanted to find ways of getting better images onto Polymer Clay. . .

Oh well. . .

At least the mice in the garden were on my side. Look what they left for me to find under the damson tree. These would be fun to incorporate into some kind of jewellery I think.

And these, they left were left under the cherry tree.

Thanks mice ;-)

About time I posted something - Apologies - Various updates

Just a pretty pic without much relevance to this post, but at least it's something new. Image trans bead with some rustic spacers as a possible earring. A bit too derivative in style though maybe (?) and there is a lot of it about. . . Not entirely comfortable with it.

Shop stuff - Well, I'm still getting my head round SEO and Relevancy. . I've attacked about half my shop's content and 'optimised' it, to my understanding anyway, which may be flawed so I might have just wasted my time. .
It seems to be working. I get about 40% more views, which is nice. And the keywords in my stats now resemble the ones in my listings. Still F all from Google though. hmmm.
Was that boring? sorry. . . sigh. . . What is happening to me? ;-)

Image trans beads as described below, antiqued up. Maybe good for stud/post earrings, or rings. I need to get some blanks to play with. The learning curve steepens. . .

Image trans stuff - I refined one of the techniques I use a little bit more. You can get a slightly dull, not ever so sharp but perfectly usable (for my purposes) image transfer from lazer copy paper by laying the image onto the polymer clay and leaving it for at least an hour, (less might work fine) until the image is visible through the back of the paper, like the paper has soaked up the oils from the clay somewhat. Then bake for the normal time and peel off the paper. A slightly crisper image can be obtained if you coat the clay with a thin layer of clear liquid clay first and lay the image onto that.
It's less work than rubbing the paper away with water and your finger, and it doesn't distort the clay, but then it's not raw clay anymore so you can't wrap it round anything.

I'm going to try cutting up a dye sub tile blank if I can, into small squares and transferring onto them, to get a really crisp image. Or smashing a tile into shards and transferring onto them. . . and then seeing how I could 'antique' them.

I need to get back to making some texture sheets and textured dangle beads and stuff, SEO and image trans has been engrossing me and I need a break.

Onwards and upwards.  . or at least, not downwards.
J x

Oh yeah, and I'm on Instagram, in a tentative way  @jonburgessdesign
Not quite sure what to do with it yet.

An Experiment. . . .

Glass coasters from my Etsy shop

As you may or may not be aware, I have been making and selling framed tiles and glass coasters of my digital designs for a while now. To do this I use a process known as Dye Sublimation to transfer the

printed images onto the tiles or coasters. This involves using heat and pressure via a special heat press, specially coated tiles etc, and special printer paper and inks.

OK, Dye sublimation likes certain kinds of plastics and I was pretty sure that Polymer clay was likely to take a dye sub image pretty well. 

I decided to experiment as I had my specially set up printer and loads of paper, so I printed out a sheet of small images to mess around with. 

What I decided to do was use a disk of unbaked clay to apply the image to, but put a thin coating of liquid clay onto the image so that it stuck to the image and to the clay. The reason I wanted to stick the image to the clay was that I was intending to use a heat gun to 'bake' the liquid clay and transfer the image to it. If the image wasn't stuck down it would end up getting blown away. (I'm too impatient to bake them in the oven, and I wanted to do one at a time to see the results quicker)

So I tried that. I gave the image about one minute with the heat gun on medium. ( my heat gun has a heat intensity dial, which is very useful - Wickes sell that model ) I was careful not to burn it. The image became visible through the paper quite quickly but I kept heating it just to be sure it had transferred. 

I then wetted the back of the image and rubbed the paper off. You can soak it in a bowl of water if you wish, same difference. The clay disks weren't properly baked so I baked them in the oven for about 15 mins or so to cure the clay. The results were very clean and clear.

More or less un-messed with image transfer disks. Just a bot of Alcohol ink round the rim.

Too clean and clear for me ;-) having established that my method worked I decided to get stuck into some surface treatment on some of them. I tried my usual various combinations of alcohol inks, inca gold and gilder's wax in various colours, sanding it off a bit and then adding more, and so on and so on.

They looked nice, but there was no way of stringing them if I wanted to use them, so I made them into the front layer of some circular hollow beads, using the Claire Maunsell method with different sized cutters. This of course required the whole thing to be baked. . .

The trouble was that baking would melt the gilder's wax and disperse or otherwise mess up the alcohol inks intensity. Oh well, couldn't be helped. They came out solidly baked but a bit muzzy and fuzzy. So I used the same alcohol inks that I was painting the back and sides with to paint round the 'frame' of the front image. The resulting beads looked seriously beat up but cool all the same. Like something dug up from some archaeological site, on another planet. . . Which is fine by me.

But not as beat up as my attempts at transferring black and white images onto already baked clay disks. The image didn't stick to the clay as nicely as with raw clay and kept peeling off in an annoying way. I used some 'heat tape' that I use for dye sub stuff to hold it down but that wasn't always successful. I did the same as the beads above, giving them the surface treatment, then deciding to make them into usable beads by sticking another disk of clay behind them and then baking.

These ones look like they've been dug up from an ancient site, thrown off a cliff and then run over repeatedly by a chieftain tank. I like them though.

Next time I shall do things in the right order, but I shall still go for the messed up look ;-)
I might even do a proper tutorial in due course.
Jon x