Yet another month over in the blink of an eye!
May's theme was chosen by the wonderful and very talented Lesley Watt and was Tide Pools or Rock Pools as we call them over here.
When I think of rock pools I always think of sea anemones, I have never seen any in the wild, only ever in the sea life centre, but thats where my mind heads straight to.
While searching through my stash (as often I do while looking for inspiration) our wonderful Jen's Lampwork headpins kept screaming out "I look like a sea anemone caught in a water bubble what more do you want?" the original idea was a wide band ring with the head pin at the middle surrounded with silver rocks, but some how I got distracted and the idea transformed into a pendent....
I tend to be easily distracted! The main stone has a hole drilled through the centre and the headpin (which is set in a 9ct gold bezel) and "rocks" (which are all soldered together as one piece) have been set as you would set a stone on stone. The actual stone has then been set in a very thick sterling silver prong setting.
I then had another idea I wanted to make a rock pool, not an actual rock pool but a tiny little metal ring dish inspired by rock pools....
May's theme was chosen by the wonderful and very talented Lesley Watt and was Tide Pools or Rock Pools as we call them over here.
When I think of rock pools I always think of sea anemones, I have never seen any in the wild, only ever in the sea life centre, but thats where my mind heads straight to.
While searching through my stash (as often I do while looking for inspiration) our wonderful Jen's Lampwork headpins kept screaming out "I look like a sea anemone caught in a water bubble what more do you want?" the original idea was a wide band ring with the head pin at the middle surrounded with silver rocks, but some how I got distracted and the idea transformed into a pendent....
I then had another idea I wanted to make a rock pool, not an actual rock pool but a tiny little metal ring dish inspired by rock pools....
I started off by gathering some of my sea stones, shells and sea glass that had interesting patterns on it and then I added in a few tiny fossils (I'm thinking rock pool in the Jurassic Coast, in Devon a place that is on my bucket list to visit) I then made a fimo texture plate with these pieces and tested it on the fimo before breaking open the metal clay.
Unfortunately I have not gotten around to firing the metal clay pieces yet, but I did experiment more with the fimo pieces (why dose spell check keep correcting fimo to limo? what even is limo?) pieces and I was really pleased with how they came out....
These are the little cabs I had made, these have each had several layers of water colour paint and one of them has even had a layer of resin, which I plan to do to all of them, but I ran out as I used the last of my resin on my little ring dish....
I really love this piece and it turned out much better then I expected, again it is coloured with many layers of water colour paint that pooled into the recesses, a few coats of matt varnish and then a thick coat of resin.
I love how much it looks like ceramic and am planing to make a little metal stand for it, possibly out of a domed coin with three soldered rocks for legs!
I had so much fun this month, Thank you Leslie for inspiring us!
I hope you will all join me in hopping around the other blogs....