Lost Wax Casting: Floral Ring

Here is the last jewellery project I designed from my model making course which ended in January.  It was my first real project where I had to do a lot of tiny intricate carving.  The cuff bracelets I made were easier to work with because I had more surface area and the designs weren't detailed, although of course it took much longer to finish each bracelet.  I definitely saw an improvement in my carving from when I started to when I finished this ring, and in fact what I'm showing off below is the nicer side :)  The floral stems flow much more smoothly on this side than the other.

Ring in sterling silver prior to polishing

It took a number of weeks before I decided to finally cast the ring.  There are several casting houses downtown but none seem to be open on the weekends and they're usually closed by the time I get home from work. I ended up taking it back to Shao's studio (where I got my floral cuff bracelet cast).  Then I rented 2 hrs of studio time there to clean it up nice and shiny.  I darkened the recessed areas to bring out the details of the carving and couldn't be happier with the results!

Final wax model 

Ring after polishing and oxidization

Lily's New Dress

Mike and I have so many new babies to visit this year that I'm almost starting to lose track of which months they're each arriving in!  I was in Fabricland the other day looking at some of the patterns for infants and toddlers because we have a number of friends and family who are expecting over the next few weeks.  I'd love to be able to give something handmade to each of those babies but there just aren't enough hours in the day.  I did think this one friend Kelly would particularly appreciate a handmade gift though since she is one of the craftiest people I know (in a good way!).  Her blog Done-Well was featured on CityLine and shows off her amazing talents in the areas of sewing, cooking, gardening....you name it, she can do it.

Anyway she and her husband Dustin are expecting a baby girl so I  thought I'd take a look at the patterns for baby dresses.  I chose this cute design and sized it for a 3-6 month-old so hopefully the baby can fit into it by the summer.  The dress ended up taking less time to make than I had anticipated, and I managed to learn a few neat tricks from it as well.

I wasn't sure how best to photograph this tiny thing so here I have it draped around the body of our living room lamp.  It looks kind of comical but I thought it was a decent way of showing off how the dress would sit :)

LUG Flipper Clutch

Guess what?  LUG's new Flipper Clutch came out online this week and one of the photos features three pieces of my jewellery!  How did I manage to swing that, you ask?  Well my sister-in-law Freda works at LUG and helped to set up the photo shoot back in November.  She needed some props for the photos...random items you might find in a woman's purse, I suppose.  I handed her a whole collection of things hoping that something might get featured in one of the photos...and it worked out!

In the photo below my chandelier watchlet is peeking out of one of the zipper pockets, while the silver leaf bracelet I have on my beadmarket website is in the detached pouch.  There is also a beaded necklace with pearls in the pocket on the left side.  I know I know, there's no mention of beadmarket and no one would ever really notice these things but I certainly did :)

LUG Flipper Clutch photo from website

Ruth's Elephant

Recognize the fabric?  Yep, this is from my crimson summer dress I made last year.  I had a fair amount still lying around so I used it to make another stuffed elephant for my friend Peggy who gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby girl last summer.  Shamefully I had not been out to visit in months and so when we finally settled on a date two weeks ago I was able to give baby Ruth this gift.  She seemed as content to play with it as she was with the plastic wrap from her rice crackers but that's perfectly fine with me :)

Elouise & Elmore project.

Scottish Piping

Okay, so from the title of this post you might think I'm going to blog about the Scottish bagpipes but what I'm actually referring to is Scottish wool and red piping!  I finally gathered up the courage to cut into this beautiful blue Scottish wool that my mother-in-law gave me last year.  There wasn't quite enough to make the full design of this dress (which should have a collar and dainty short sleeves) but I made the most of it.  In fact the piece of fabric was not quite long enough for this dress so I had to add a 3-inch strip to the hem.  Luckily I remembered to keep enough length in the red piping so that the extra hem line in the wool looks more like a detail that was put there intentionally.  It took two painful attempts before the "invisible zipper" at the back of the dress was no longer glaringly visible but it was well worth the effort.

This flattering dress pattern is definitely one that I will use again since it typically takes several iterations before I can get something to fit right.  Now that I have the proper measurements it should be much easier to get through the next variation of this design.

Lost Wax Casting: Floral Bracelet (cont'd)

Over the holidays I read about an easy way to add a dark patina to your sterling silver with just a container and some hard-boiled eggs.  The sulfur released from the eggs reacts with the metal the same way that the Liver of Sulfur chemical does, only much slower.  After boiling one egg I peeled the shell, cut it into quarters, and put the sections into a clear container with the bracelet while the egg was still hot.  The clear container keeps the sulfur in while allowing you to monitor your silver piece (which was still tricky due to the condensation).  After about an hour I was satisfied with the colour and took out the bracelet.  This is what it looked like!

I used a silver-cleaning polishing pad to remove the dark patina from the high points of the bracelet and voila!  Here is a photo of the finished product (with my first bracelet in the background).

Lost Wax Casting: Floral Bracelet (cont'd)

I ended up giving my wax model to my casting instructor from last term to cast into sterling silver.  I picked up the bracelet this week and got right down to business polishing it so I can wear it during the holiday season.  Here are pictures just after I sawed off the sprues.  My instructor said he made two of them to ensure that the molten silver would flow evenly to the rest of the bracelet and pick up all the details of the wax model.

It took about an hour to polish the bracelet using a combination of emery paper, small polishing brushes, and finally the polishing wheel at George Brown.  The bracelet looks and feels great on my wrist - I'm definitely going to show this off during the holiday celebrations!

Green Wool Skirt

Mike's grandmother Joan (who donated her Singer Featherweight to us) has been supplying me with all sorts of fantastic sewing supplies including fabric.  She started a beautiful long wool skirt for herself many many years ago but never quite finished it.  Since then she has given up sewing and passed on some of her unfinished projects to me in case I wanted to re-use the fabric for something new.

I had been holding onto her wool skirt for a number of months not knowing quite what to do with it when I finally decided to try it on recently and was amazed at how well it fit around the waist!  In fact it felt like it had been created just for me.  Instead of taking the skirt apart, which would have been a definite shame, I was inspired to update the look so that it would be, well, more modern I suppose.

I shortened the hem which originally went down to about mid-calf on me (lower on Joan) so it now sits just above my knees. I also added black binding and ribbon to create roses and some detailing around the lapels to give the skirt a more chic look.  Finally I replaced the brown buttons on the lapels with black ones to match the ribbon and detailing.

Showing off the modified skirt to Joan

I've worn this skirt a few times to work now and have gotten plenty of compliments on it.  Joan was delighted to see that I had been able to make use of her abandoned project and I'm always excited to show her what I'm working on since she was the one who inspired my sewing hobby by putting that Featherweight into my hands.

Lost Wax Casting: Floral Bracelet

Here is my second bracelet project and I am determined to make it more wearable than my previous one.  I found a neat flower stencil online and put together a design with four flowers in a row with room for filler in between.  I actually started carving most of the flower design before coming up with the pattern that connects them. My instructor had various sizes of cup burs which allowed me to create the tiny circles without too much trouble.

To help ensure this bracelet is lighter and more comfortable to wear I drilled out a number of holes in the flowers designed it so that much of the border material is cut away.

Here is my bracelet after several hours thinning out the bracelet and removing the border material.  I think the irregular shape makes this piece much more interesting than a cuff that is the same width all around.  I'm excited to see it in metal but this time around I will not be casting it myself since I no longer have access to the equipment.  I'll have to seek out some casting houses downtown or talk to my instructors about it. We'll see.

Sara's Felt Mobile

I just completed a felt mobile for some friends who are expecting their second baby at the end of the month.  I think that they are going to name the baby Sara so hopefully it is in fact a girl and I don't have to rush to change out the huge 'S' at the last minute!

I saw some really adorable felt mobiles just searching through Google images and replicated the elephant, giraffe, and owl from similar ones online.  The hippo and turtle were creations of my own and arguably less cute.  Well...ok, maybe not the turtle, that guy is pretty darn cute.

A friend at work used the machine shop to help me drill holes into the 'S' because I wasn't too confident I could keep a hand-drill steady enough to go through the centre of the letter (where the blue rod is inserted).  I should have waited until the wood pieces were all assembled before painting them but I thought I would be *smart* and paint each piece separately to keep things clean.  Instead I ended up putting on enough coats of paint that the rods couldn't fit properly into the holes anymore!  Anyway after more trouble than was necessary, I got everything assembled and managed to deliver the gift in one piece with minimal tangling!

Lost Wax Casting: Butterfly Ring

In my model-making course last year I didn't put much focus on rings aside from the mandatory projects that were aimed at teaching us the basic measuring and filing skills.  I mostly worked on pendants and my koi cuff bracelet because they don't require the level of symmetry that rings do.  This year I need to try a few rings to improve my skills though, so here is my first project - a butterfly ring.

My vision for this ring was to have a huge butterfly wrap around my middle finger and then carve lots of details into the wing.  Well it didn't quite turn out as planned.  The ring didn't start out as long of a tube as it should have so the butterfly had to be drawn much smaller than I had initially wanted.  That left little room to carve details into the wing so I kept it relatively simple.    

It didn't take much silver to cast this ring.  In fact I was able to reuse most of the sterling that was recovered from my koi cuff bracelet.  I'm debating whether or not to solder on some silver wire for antennas as the last bit of detail but I'm not in love with the ring so I haven't been inspired yet.  To be honest I already have my next bracelet project in mind and am eager to move onto it!

Lost Wax Casting: Koi Cuff Bracelet (final)

Remember that koi cuff bracelet I finished back at the beginning of the year?  Well I had cast it in silver after finishing my final wax model-making course with Pawel so he never got to see the final product.  This month I started the level two course for model-making and brought this bracelet in to show him.  He was pretty impressed with the final product and said it would look even better if I brought out the details using Liver of Sulphur.  It's a strong liquid chemical that coats on clear but turns the silver black in a matter of seconds.  You can then put the bracelet through the polishing wheel once more to remove the black patina from the high points on the surface.  The blackspace and grooves are left dark and definitely highlights all the details from my carving.  I love it!

Crochet Headband

Check out my new head gear!  Brigitte crocheted this awesome headband and gave it to me today, a tad bit [fashionably] late for my birthday, but no matter...I wouldn't have had much use for it in July anyways :)  Several years ago we were at the One of a Kind show at the Ex and I saw a cute stand where they were selling just this sort of thing.  I thought they were so fabulous and really convenient because I often keep my hair in a ponytail and then have trouble stuffing it into a hat.  I didn't end up getting one mainly because I had a bunch of other winter headware at the time but I guess Brigitte always kept it in mind.  Well I'm glad she did and definitely plan on wearing it this winter.  Thank-you!

Teardrop Leaves

Here's another top that I ended up doing some surgery on because the striped cotton was starting to look pretty worn out. I wanted to preserve the white embroidery detailing so I replaced the torso using scrap fabrics I had on hand.

Original Top

The leaves are actually the final remnants of the fabric I used for the cloth book and elephant projects that I posted about below.  The top turned out nicely but if I were to do it all again I would have bought nicer fabric for the cream torso. Instead the scrap cotton I used is on the thin side and wrinkles too easily which is no good for dress-length tops!  

Pinning on the pattern

En Francais!

This is a cloth book that I made for my friend's son Caleb who recently celebrated his first birthday. It's the same little boy who I made Elouise & Elmore for, and as you can see I used the same fabric here that I used for the two stuffed elephants.

A little info about the inspiration behind this book:

While sorting through some of my husband's boxes of old treasures we came across this short story he wrote en francais back in the fourth grade (shown above behind the cloth book). It's really quite adorable, typewritten carefully with the French accents added in pencil by hand. Although the pencil-crayon elephant and crocodile drawings are very cute I decided to re-illustrate the story for the reproduction of the book. I can't take full credit for the drawings since they were based on doodles I liked from the internet, however I did draw everything myself using just my index finger and the touchpad of my laptop! Yes...yes...there are easier ways (I've been meaning to get a tablet for years).



It worked out perfectly that I had enough material left over for all of the pages. Too bad I was about an inch short of brown ribbon but I filled in the gap along the border by sewing in a white button! It was a lot of fun putting together this project.


Anyway I think my friend will get a real kick out of this sewing project because of the added personal touch, and hopefully there aren't any glaring grammar mistakes in there! We wouldn't want her son picking up bad habits before he starts attending his French daycare this winter.