I went through my scrap bag of tatting pieces and pulled out a simple one to use. For this, it's the inner motif to Frivole's Quatrain pattern. It was tatted using Yarnplayer's Celery thread size 80. I also incorporated some random seed beads that I thought would enhance the piece. I did not have any regular molds to use. I just emptied out a section of one of my bead holders and used
that as a template to start this. I did allow it to cure long enough to be able to pull the base out but it did have some texture transfer from the plastic casing. The amount used in layering varied because, well frankly, I don't know what I'm doing. Trial and error at work here.This is the second layer where I placed the actual tatting in it. You can see where the texture transfer over in the bottom right hand corner. This will be fixed later on.
Now I was not working on a level work surface so one side became fully coated while the other only partially.
I wanted to include the side views so you can see how thin the layers of resin are as they cure. I let in sit in full sunlight for roughly 5 minutes between layering. One thing I want to point out, light colors do not do well with this. The tend to go clear as well. In the thread there is a section where the light green is almost white. As you can see below, the pale green went completely transparent as well and the core thread, which just happens to be darker, shows through. That is not a bare thread. The double stitches can barely be made out. This is where I added a few beads. 
I should have made sure they were all the same size to reduce the layers I would have to add later. That glittering effect is still the texture transfer from the bead box. One other thing is that I did not catch all the air bubbles. I did get alot of them, but I think that it was completely my fault. After I was done squeezing the bottle I let some air be sucked back in. Naturally when you squeeze again that air is going to come out as well. I simply pushed the bubbles to the side and popped them there in future layers.
You can see where it is thicker on the bottom than the top. This is what happens when you don't have a level work surface! But this little problem was self correcting in the next step. I flipped it over and wanted to take care of the texturing from before. I only added a small bit of the liquid and it spread it self out. Self leveling and filling in the grooves. I liked that part of it. I only had a few bubbles this time, as I learned to not squeeze so hard on the bottle by now.
I did have to go and push some of the liquid out to the sides to make sure the thinner section received the majority of it to level it out a little bit. The above shot was taken indoors out of the sunlight so you can better see the transparency effect this gloss has on lighter threads.
At layer 7 it looks like ice melting a bit doesn't it? Now the website from the manufacturer stated that this can be drilled, sanded, baked, and so on. I'm going to put that to the test. I'm going to first sand the sides off to give it a bit of a smoother finish with some 100 grit sandpaper. Then I will go back and depended on the final shape I get, drill a small hole into it so I can add a jump ring. I could have probably added the ring in layer 4 or 5, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead at the time. I really wish I could have found my rotatory tool (Dremel) because hand sanding sucks for me. I went ahead and scratched the back surface to give a contrast. The small green beads did not show up too well. Total time making this: 3 hours including sanding time. I'm not going to attempt to drill a hole until I can locate my dremel tool.
In case you are wondering, yes it does dry to a hard plastic. The center was a bit gel-ly feeling but that it turns out is because previous layers still had a bit of curing to do. No problem, I just left it exposed to sunlight longer, and it turned hard pretty quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment