kerravonsen | More Pendanty Experimentation

Just one thing tonight, well sort of two things, since one was a precursor to the other.

Tonight I made some origami boxes, for which I searched out tutorials, and settled on this one, because it fit two criteria: (a) it didn't have flaps or paper-ends on the inside of the box, and (b) it used A4 paper. Why was I making origami boxes? I mean, I could have been just doing it for the fun of it, but I did actually have a purpose.

When I was doing the faux enamel with the embossing powder, I was pouring the powder over silicone cupcake "tins", in the hope that they would be good containers for catching the powder and pouring it back into the jars of powder. They were good in one way, because they could be easily bent into a pouring shape. They were terrible in another, because the powder clung to the surface of the silicone. I had to wash it off in the end, and that was wasteful, which I didn't want at all. The usual method of catching embossing powder (the one that I was told, anyway) is to use a piece of paper with one crease in it, so that the powder will catch in the fold, and you can use that to tip it back into the jar. That was how I did it when I was doing "wet embossing" (I just found that term yesterday) when I was a teenager. I didn't want to use that method again, because of the risk of spilling the powder and the awkwardness of trying to use singly-folded paper as a funnel. Hence the silicone cupcake things.

So, trying to think of a better method; pondering paper cupcake liners, aluminium foil folded into a bowl... or perhaps origami boxes. But it needed to be a design that didn't have paper ends inside the box, or the powder might be caught underneath. So I looked around, and found the design I mentioned above, and tried it... and it worked beautifully. The embossing powder didn't spill, and it poured out easily out one corner of the box, and the powder didn't cling!

So what did I make? This:

Another hammered copper pendant; this time I tried the permanent ink colouring again, though instead of using steel wool to highlight the higher parts, I used an emery-board-thing (actually a block, not a flat thing) and that worked nicely (without poking myself with random ends of steel wool, too). Then, rather than using proper embossing ink for the powder to stick to, I tried yet another experiment. I'd come across a link about how to make your own embossing ink. They had two recipes: one was petroleum jelly + vegetable oil + rubbing alcohol; the other was glycerine + water. I tried the latter because (a) it seemed less messy, and (b) the oil is apparently bad for rubber stamps. So I tried the glycerine mixture, and it wasn't that satisfactory. It didn't give an even coverage, the powder only stuck in some places, I'm not sure why. So I had to do the clear embossing powder more than once. Still, it seemed to turn out okay.

And I'm not going to throw away the glycerine mixture, because I can use it for when I deliberately don't want an even coverage, as a design choice; adding randomosity.