Things I've learned the hard way

the big diamond
Originally uploaded by Zoeowyn

2 weeks ago I took a wire wrapping with Dale Cougar Armstrong. We made sculpted wrapped pendants. During break I found this great oversized "diamond" and decided that it was perfectly ostentatious and needed to be wrapped in brass --gold would have been, well too costly and frankly just not tacky enough. After all this diamond is a paper weight and over 2 inches in the round.
Well I wrapped it up . It sucked. I went too fast. I need to learn to slow down ad be more controlled and precises with my work. Tihis is an on going lesson I seem to constantly need to learn and re-learn.
So I pulled it apart and rewrapped the loverly stone. I used loads of wire. A also learned do NOT mix your wire wire hardnesses.
This is wrapped using square and round wire. It makes for a visual difference in texture--ok subtle but its there. But the problem in the round wire was deaad soft and the square half hard. Man this was a bit*h to wrap. First of all DAle did warn us against doing this in half hard wire, but then I had to go and mix my hardnesses.
what a control issue that was
not again
or if again I at least KNOW what Im setting my self up for right?

Anothe lesson I learned the hard way was not to cure dimentional objects in my little toaster over, that i used exclusively for polymer clay.
I fired the head off of a dragon box.
Ruined.
Poor beastie, no head.
Fortunately I was able to give him a new head.
Its one of the few dragon boxes i've ever sold.


I also discovered after quite a bit of work on this one bottle, that the cobalt blue glass bottles from Micheals are in fact not blue glass but plastic coated glass. No wonder when i was washing and wiping this dragon down with alchohol the bottle color looked like it was changing. It was! (no more blue bottles for me)