It has been a grey and drizzly-wet weekend; not a lot of opportunity to do outside work like shovelling gravel. So I used it to advance a few projects:
- trialling etching of letters and leaves on heavy gauge aluminium for some panels for posts I'm working on;
- finishing the first design-assemblage phase of another series of Steampunk Lamps I'm working on; and
- finishing the Daily Leaf Words and Daily Words sets I started a couple of weeks ago.
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©2015 Fiona Dempster - Etched plate showing shellac as the resist. |
I got to trial the etching as Fiona had planned to do the etching of a cover for her
fragile gains artists book. The etching was done using the salt and copper sulphate method - a lot less toxic.
The leaves and letters turned out OK given I was using corroded old aluminium sheet for the trial. I think it will work well on new metal; and if I give it more time in the solution to bite deeper - good lessons learnt. The panels are going to be about 1.2m long and 100mm wide - the metal I tested the process on is 100mm wide.
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©2015 Fiona Dempster - Plate with etching reaction - pretty grungy? |
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©2015 Fiona Dempster - Etching grunge cleaned off in water |
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©2015 Barry Smith - Shellac resist removed - revealing the etched leaf |
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©2015 Barry Smith - Shellac resist removed - revealing the etched letter |
I managed to assemble the first phase of 5 table top Steampunk Lamps - now for the grinding, polishing and securing the fittings (globe holders and cords).
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©2015 Barry Smith - Five assemblages on the workbench - quite a bit of grinding and polishing to be done. |
And I did manage to finish the 10 bowls I started for the daily words sets.
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©2015 Barry Smith - Second round of hammering completed on 10 bowls |
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©2015 Barry Smith - Third round of hammering completed; and grinding and polishing done |
The Daily Leaf Words sets look beautiful.
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©2015 Barry Smith - Daily Leaf Words set - bowl and word leaves |
So all in all - a good indoor use of a wet weekend.