Steampunk jewelry??? maybe

Every Wednesday night I go to my parents house to eat so last night my mom asks me if I'm still gonna make Steampunk stuff. She had a small jar with all this cool old antique furniture hardware...like key holes and drawer pulls. She had gotten them from my great grandmothers estate back in 1991 and hadn't done anything with them yet so she passed them on to me..
I've got all kinds of ideas for them. Now all I need some leather tools so I can make wrist cuffs and other things.. I've got plenty of leather.


I also raided my old jewelry drawer from high school.

Steampunk Swap

I meant to post these yesterday but things got busy around here. Here are the pictures of all the charms I made.


I still have to take pictures of all the charms I received.

Steampunk Charms are done

I finished my steampunk charms last night. I might still add a little bit more to each of them but the over all design is complete. That is a huge weight off my shoulders. Ya'll will have to wait until after the swap is complete to see all of the designs. My cats kept trying to help. Delilah sat and watched for a long time but as soon as she started messing with the charms she was removed from the desk top.
Chloe came to help while I was cleaning everything up so I took a few cute pictures of her.
I almost got a picture of her yawning but my camera wouldn't focus on her until right after the yawn. But little pink kitty tongues are cute too.. lol

Hopefully this weekend I'll be able to finish organizing my craft room.

Steampunk and Glass Beads

Last night I finally created a Steampunk charm that I love. What do ya'll think?



I haven't worked on my glass beads in over a week since I've been cleaning and making steampunk charms. These are the last set of beads I made... I don't really like any of them. The colors came out ugly..

Steampunk Charms in progress

I thought it would be really easy to put together a dozen Steampunk charms... boy was I wrong... There are too many decisions to make. I spent most of the evening yesterday disassembling watch gears and pins. (I finally figured out how to remove the pins in the center of all the gears) Those things are sharp. I don't know how many I've gotten stuck in my fingers so far. Handling watch parts is dirty.
I have all these ideas in my head of what to do but making it work in metal is difficult. I guess I need to figure out how to solder everything. I bought a wind up clock a while back at a yard sale and took it apart of all the gears and stuff. I'm worried that the charms might weigh too much.
I want to figure out some way to incorporate a couple of the 9mm shell casings I saved from my first time firing a gun.

Here is a sneak peek at some of my layouts so far. (I'm not really happy with them yet.)



The 3 plastic drawers on the right hand side of my desk are packed full of "steampunk stuff".

Craft Room Cleaning

I've been working on getting my craft room functional again. I worked on it all weekend. There still isn't enough space for all my craft stuff.
This is what it looked like back in March.




This is the progress I made by Sunday afternoon.



This is the $10 bookshelf I got at a yard sale a while back. I moved all my books off my wire shelf to this one.


My desk on Sunday.


This is what it looked like last night while I was working on Steampunk charms.

Aging Metal

I completely forgot that I had bought Blacken-It solution back in February.

I tested out all kinds of different metals to see how they turned out. Before is on the left after on the right.







I'm really happy with how they all turned out. I didn't age any of the watch parts because I want them to stand out against the blackened parts. I'll have to pick up some more E6000 glue because the tube I have has completely dried up.

Steampunk

I need help with aging metals. I have lots of new jewelry findings that I would like to look old. Does anybody know how to age them?
I've been trying to work on my Steampunk swap for http://ipokedabadgerwithaspoon.blogspot.com/
I have a bunch of these gears collected up to use..

I can't decide on the other elements of the charms. I haven't ever designed anything like this. I'm going to try to go to Michaels Crafts tonight to get some antiqued looking brass and copper materials to use.
Thank you Glenda at http://peppercornminis.blogspot.com/
for the tip about washing all the watch parts with soap and hot water. I wouldn't have thought of that and would have been really mad when the parts wouldn't stick with glue.