Making flower vines

I was going to have this as part of another post but decided this is better as a stand alone tutorial as there are many potential uses for this technique.  The next post will show you how I used the flower vine I made here.

To make the vine, estimate how long you want your vine to be.  The main wire should be about 2.5X this length.  I went with about 50 cm long.  Using something about the right width (a pen or pencil are ideal), create a series of loops roughly evenly spaced along the wire.

Each of these loops will become leaves, so now shape them as you wish.  The easiest way to get a leaf shape is to gently pinch the top.  Of course if you are a botanist, feel free to go and google the species you wish to mimic and shape your leaves accordingly.

Now use your medium of choice to fill in the shapes.  I went with Mod Podge Dimension Magic but in this post I investigate several different materials you can use.

Let this dry and (if you used a transparent filler as I did) use a permament to colour in the leaves.  The layer may be very thin- be careful not to make holes, but if you do (or if you feel it is too thin anyway), add another layer of medium.

Flowers are made in a similar way to leaves.  It is best to make each flower from a separate piece of wire (about 20 cm is a good length).  I used a slightly smaller diameter stick to make four loops very close to each other for the petals and sometimes also added a leaf or two to the remaining length

Now to put it all together.  Take the main length of leaves and double them over.  Start at the bottom and gently twist them together.  At intervals, add the flower wires and incorporate them into the main stem as you twist.

Continue the length of the main wire.

You can trim any stray bits of wire if you wish.  You may also want to wrap florist tape around the 'stem' to hide the wires and make it a bit more natural looking.  This is also a good idea if you plan on using this length of wire as jewellery or a hair decoration as those little ends of wire may try to poke the wearer otherwise!

I love the transparent effect you get using permanent markers.  The depth of colour can be increased by using multiple layers of your clear filling material (a good idea for strength anyway) and colouring each layer as you go.  Or get fancy with a fine tipped pen for further detail, similar to the painting on stained glass windows in old churches.

Somewhere in the distant future I plan on playing with this more to make some jewellery but if you beat me to the punch, I'd love to see!  Leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Happy Easter everyone!

Happy Easter everyone!  This is another post I've had to sit on until Easter because I wanted to keep it a surprise from my family (particularly my Mum, who is one of the few readers of this blog- hi Mum!).

I finally got myself organised at the end of the first week of holidays to get my Easter eggs bought.  I went with a few little assorted eggs, partly because the large packs you can find are often very expensive for very little chocolate, and partly because the chocolate inside is often rather boring, as printing on cardboard is cheaper to make than making fancy eggs.

But how to hold these eggs?  There are cute little baskets around but they are often very expensive for something that is used only long enough to hold the chocolate and then disposed of.  So, since I am currently on a bit of a crochet kick, and since crochet is a fast craft (at least compared to knitting), I googled for crochet baskets to see what I could come up with.

I ended up making my baskets based on this pattern, that I found on Crochet Spot.  Scrounging through my wool pile, I found the left over balls of acrylic yarn I had from making Noel the Gnome.  Changing colours every other row or so means that they kind of sort of have the look of half Easter eggs.  That's the logic I'm going with, anyway.  By the fourth basket I had run out of a few colours, but I am happy enough with the results.

I've been able to fill them with a nice amount of chocolate (with a bit of quality testing as I worked- I can't give my family bad chocolate, after all!). If I was feeling more energetic or evil, a fun idea would be to then crochet up further to A) make an egg shape and B) make it really hard to get the eggs out.  But that would be mean.  Besides, I ran out of yarn. :P

Happy Easter!

Nail Polish flowers- technique and material testing

Every now and then I like to take a browse through Pintrest.  I find that it can be interesting to find ideas, but the big downside is that you see a lot of things repeatedly, find things listed in the wrong category (cooking recipies do NOT belong in the DIY and Craft category!) or are things that you could not pay me to would have to pay me a great deal of money to do and even more money to have me keep it in my house!

But some things are truely lovely and I do end up pinning them to my own boards.  One that has been regularly on my list of things to try is this lovely nail polish flower bracelet/necklace?

NB, as far as I can tell, this is the original web page plus it has instructions.  Downside is that it is a russian page, but thanks to the excellent pictures and google translate, is understandable.

I've a little project on the go that I thought might work with this technique but I faced a problem.  While fine wire is simple to get, I am not a big nail polish plan.  I only have five bottles of the stuff and only one of them is something in a 'flower/plant' shade.  Going out and buying some would get very expensive, very fast as well as being a waste.  So I started thinking, is there anything else out there that would work?

So what else is one to do but put some things to the test?  Going through my supplies I settled on a short list of the most likely alternatives.  In addition to some nail polish as a control, I used some paint on glass paint that I had left over from a kit; Mod Podge Dimensional Magic; Lisa Pavelka Magic-Glos, a resin that sets when exposed to UV light; PVA glue (aka white glue); and clear craft glue.  To test each one, I make equal sized loops using a Bic ballpoint pen, out of some fine wire (28 or 32 gauge I'm guessing as it was not labelled).

For all these materials, I have either painted using a brush or 'dipped' the loop into a small pool of the material in whatever method worked best to form a film in the wire loop.

Nail Polish

One layer of nail polish

Brushing this on directly didn't work, as I could not form a film without it popping.  However, dipping the loop carefully into a small puddle worked well.  The finished effect was a lovely transparent loop, like stained glass.  It was very thin however, and careful poking with a finger showed that it would not hold up to any wear.  When I tried to do a second layer, it seemed to 'melt' the already present layer.

Glass Paint

Glass paint when still wet

Initially this looked promising.  The paint went on beautifully using a paint brush and a nice thick layer formed.  However, while it also had a lovely translucent look, it also somehow dried with a small hole.

Once dry, one layer of the glass paint dried with a hole or crack

A second coat closed the hole and made a more uniform appearance but does make the loop more opaque.

Mod Podge Dimension Magic

This is another material I had to apply by dipping it into a small pool.  However, this was the easiest of all the materials that needed this method to do as it's slightly thicker consistency meant that the film formed first time.  One layer also appeared to be much more durable than nail polish, although if I was to use this for jewellery, I would plan on using a few more layers.  The layer was also very uniform in thickness so there are no 'blobs' left over.

The other great advantage of this material is that it is transparent.  Once it has set, a sharpie or similar would allow any colour (or design) to be applied.

When wet, Dimension Magic has a whitish appearance, but dries clear.

Lisa Pavelka Magic-Glos

I had the highest hopes for this stuff as I have played with it before and it makes a lovely solid layer when dry.  However, in the past I used it with wire shapes stuck temporarily to a sticky tape background while the gloss set.  When trying to use it directly, without a backing film, it was an unmitigated disaster.  Straight out of the bottle it is almost as viscous as water.  Every tried to dip a bubble wand in straight water?  Hard to make a film, isn't it?

Aha, I thought though.  I'll let it partly cure (it was morning so light was coming through the window enough to set it), then it will be thick and work well.

Yeah, not so much.

PVA glue

PVA can be very different in thicknesses depending on brand and age of the bottle.  My PVA was a little runny so it took several attempts to get it onto the loop.  Once there, it took a bit of careful rotation for a minute for it to dry enough without a thin spot that would turn into a hole.  

When dry, it was mostly clear but with a slight white fog to it.  Not a big deal if you want to colour it anyway but might be a factor if you want it to be perfectly transparent.

Craft glue

This glue was easy to put into the wire loop but it was very bubbly!  If working with some of these materials, a little blow torch is a good tool to pop bubbles (it also works with varnish).  However, DO NOT TRY THIS WITH THIS GLUE.  Fire will not pop the bubbles, it will happily set the whole thing on fire.  Yes I did test this under very carefully controlled conditions (aka, I didn't set the house on fire). Yes it did catch fire. This is generally not a good idea!  As I've never been able to use this glue without a few bubbles here and there, it's best to be used only if you want the bubbles as a feature.

Summary

Rating of different materials to fill in wire loops

Sorry the table is a bit dodgy- Blogger doesn't do tables so I had to improvise

Each category rated out of three.  +++ is the best, + the worst or - for things that didn't work.

What is the best product to use?  Well it will depend a lot on your budget, patience, and the final use of the loops or flowers you make.  For all materials, if you don't want to mess with a temporary backing material like tape, your loops need to be small.  Mine were about 1 cm in diameter and I feel it is about as big as can be managed.

If you had an addiction to nail polish already and so have many many bottles in a rainbow of colours, then go for it!  Modern nail polish reportedly was first derived from car body paints, so it is not terribly surprising that it's a fairly durable product.  The only possible catch is that you may need to buy colours that work for your project and you may find a limited selection of some shades- few people generally wear green or brown nail polish for instance.

If you are on a budget and don't already have nail polish then I would say PVA  glue is best, followed by Dimension Magic -about AUD$8 a bottle but that will go a long way with the amount needed.  Because these can be coloured with markers, it gives you the greatest range of colour flexibility.

If you are after durability, then I would suggest Magic-glos but with a proviso that this assumes you back every wire loop with tape until it sets. Multiple layers of nail polish and glass paint are also options, or Dimension Magic are also possible.  Craft glue also works, provided you are OK with the bubble factor.

And for the scientifically inclined, no, I didn't have replicates.  This was a small preliminary study and these results will be shown in a subsequent report... (or, comment or otherwise leave some feedback to encourage me and I might go and do some more testing!).  

What will I use?  Stay tuned for a future post to find out!
Plus I have not decided yet

Click here to see one use I put these too to make flower vines.