Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Before I get to posting the other things I wanted to post like my recent TSA experiences, I wanted to share with you the ring I made this morning, and I’m going to do it by simply having the rest of this entry be pasted in from my Etsy entry on it. This is a very special ring!!! I’d wager you will never find something like this at any other jeweller. Here’s a link to the item directly where you can see the pictures at higher quality: https://www.etsy.com/listing/98949917/skull-ring-with-libyan-desert-glass

I began this ring by sculpting a master skull ring design out of polymer clay by hand, based on a real human skull that I have here as a model. From this I made a two part silicone mold, into which I cast a tin/bismuth metal alloy (ie. a type of pewter). The ring was then removed from the mold and finished by hand, including drilling out the eye sockets to prepare them for the stones.

The greenish stones that you see in the eyes are where this ring gets especially special. I carved these cabochons by hand out of Libyan Desert Glass — also known as “great sand sea glass” — which is a gorgeous green glass found only in parts of the Libyan desert. It is about 26 million years old and was used by prehistoric man for tools, and later as jewelry, for example being found in the form of a scarab beetle that is the centrepiece for Tutankhamun’s pectoral jewelry. The glass is a specific type of tektite, formed by meteoric burtsts and impacts, that is, the great heat of a meteor from outer space striking the desert causes the sand to liquify into this new form, so in addition to the earthly elements from the sand, there are bits of the meteor as well which have travelled across the depths of space to be a part of this skull ring’s eyes. As far as I understand it, it gets its colour from melted zircon, which also shows that the stone was formed under colossal pressure and temperature. It is quite similar to Darwin glass or Moldavites if you are more familiar with those — they are all quite similar but source from different impact sites.

Anyway, after grinding these meteoric bits of glass into rough domes to fit the eye sockets, I mounted them from the inside of the ring and then welded the inside of the ring back together to trap the tektites inside the eyes. Then I ground the inside of the ring smooth again and polished the whole thing. The final step was to treat the ring with an antique patina, which blackens the metal and brings out the detail, especially after I gave it one last polish to accentuate the highlights.

The ring is currently sized to a 10 ¼ but by request I can increase the size to as large as a 12. If you need me to do that please specify it on the check-out.

Item link: https://www.etsy.com/listing/98949917/skull-ring-with-libyan-desert-glass

As an artist, it’s important for me to not just pay my bills, but also to make sure that people who appreciate what I’m creating are able to own it for themselves. The payment part is a necessity, but it’s seeing someone enjoy your art that is the gratifying part. I also come from a shareware software background (remember PC-SIG?), where the concept was that if you create something worthwhile, people will gladly pay you for it after appreciating its value to them. Now, unlike software, I can’t give rings away for free and then hope to be paid, because there is a raw materials and time cost per item, but I am going to try what I think is the next best thing — allowing people to discount the price of any item by as much as 50%, with them choosing the amount.

I have created a bunch of new coupon codes for my Etsy shop. You enter them at checkout if you want to use one (obviously I am very happy if you are able to afford to pay the regular full price). They are:

 5PERCENTOFF — Save 5%        10PERCENTOFF — Save 10%
15PERCENTOFF — Save 15%       20PERCENTOFF — Save 20%
25PERCENTOFF — Save 25%       30PERCENTOFF — Save 30%
35PERCENTOFF — Save 35%       40PERCENTOFF — Save 40%
45PERCENTOFF — Save 45%       50PERCENTOFF — Save 50%

If every single person chooses the maximum coupon I will probably reconsider the wisdom of this idea, but I will be truly surprised if that happens. I believe people will continue to support the shop fairly, but that it will mean that more people will be able to have access (so don’t feel bad if you do choose 50% off — I wouldn’t have included it if I didn’t want people to use it). I will report back in the future on how this idea works. Thanks again to everyone who has supported the shop so far.

Now, I also wanted to share what I made today, and I have to give credit to Caitlin who gave me the idea after seeing the last heterochromia ring I made — she told me I should make a David Bowie Ziggy Stardust inspired ring. So I present to you Ziggy Skulldust… or… Deaddy Stardust… or something…

You can click the pic to jump to my store and snag it before anyone else or just look at higher res pictures. It’s currently a size 7.5 so it fits smaller hands, and has two slightly different coloured gemstones. The inset lightning bolt is coloured with a permanent epoxy that I baked in place.

We carry a harpoon*?

I got the latest session of tattooing by Shane Faulkner done yesterday, the fill over the sky. Boy oh boy oh boy did it hurt over the knee. We actually did less than I’d hoped to because it was just too awful. But I do have an excuse which I will explain in a moment, but first, check it out. Be sure to zoom it in. I swear it gets better and better every single session. I’m so happy with how it’s turning out.

DO NOT RESIST ZOOMING IT IN!

So anyway. Yesterday morning I got a text from Shane asking me if I was ready to get tattooed, and I replied, “well, my tattoo appointment isn’t until tomorrow but if you want I can do today instead, I’m not busy” and he was like, “no, you’re booked for today and I have a client coming from Italy tomorrow so it’s today or we re-book…” I don’t know if I wrote it down wrong or if he did, but either way, when I’d walked out of his studio last time, I wrote down one date in my phone’d schedule and he wrote down a different one in his tattoo appointment book. But no big deal, I didn’t have anything pressing that day anyway.

Problem was, the night before when I was reading before bed, I noticed a couple times that I had stopped breathing. I don’t normally have apnea problems when I’m awake, but that night I was. Because it’s brain-related, not blockage-related, when I stop breathing, I just lose the “impulse” to breathe because my brain doesn’t notice the CO2 building up in my blood for some reason. I do start to feel faint or dizzy after a while but there’s no urge to inhale whatsoever. So I notice it, take a deep breathe, and there’s a certain sense of relief from the faintness, but it doesn’t come with the same “oh, thank you oxygen” rush that you might get after your first breathe after holding it for a while. Just nothing at all. It’s more than a little disconcerting, but it’s not as scary as I imagine it is to have some kinds of asthma or an allergic reaction where your throat closes or something else where you really want to breathe but can’t. Logically I know that I have to breathe to live, but there’s absolutely no subconscious desire or need to breathe. Anyway, I was scared that if I went to sleep that I wasn’t going to wake up, so I decided it might be best to just stay up all night and let it pass.

Problem with that is that I was incredibly tired when I went to get tattooed, which meant that none of my normal psychological pain coping mechanisms worked and parts of the tattoo, specifically the area around the knee, were brutally painful. We tried using spray and wipe anesthetics, which is basically lidocaine that soaks into the outline and numbs the surrounding skin, but because most of what we were doing was big filled areas with almost no outline, they didn’t really work. I feel bad because I wanted to do so much more — and I know that Shane wanted to do more as well — but I just wasn’t up to it and we quit after a bit over three hours of tattooing. That said, I am asbolutely thrilled with what we did do. Filling in the sky has made the tattoo feel so much bigger, so expansive, and given it a real feeling of depth and scale. Like I said, every single tattoo session I feel like this tattoo takes a big step forward and just keeps improving every single time. I don’t want to say it’s my favorite tattoo, because I really do love almost all my tattoos and think they are top notch pieces of art, but this one is definitely vying for the top of the podium.

Also in personal body modification news, I hand-machined a couple of test pieces of jewelry for my leg pocketings. I made one in a microdermal style (sort of like what I posted a blueprint for recently) and the other in a pocketing style, which is essentially a metal version of what I’m currently wearing in silicone. Here they are:

I tried popping in the pocketing one and to my great surprise it was immediately obvious that it was not going to be easy to do so without a fair amount of tissue trauma. The fisutla opening was not willing to casually stretch to accept to footing’s diameter, even though it’s actually smaller than what I’m currently wearing. The silicone that I’m using in my current jewelry is of a 20 Shore durometer, so that’s about the same as a soft squishy gel bicycle seat. A bit softer than the rubber in a rubber band. Anyway, it’s great for this you can make a relatively large footing, but when you’re inserting it, it squishes down completely and does not require the entrance hole to expand to accept it like you would for metal or glass or just about any other jewelery. To say nothing of the other advantages like impact resistance and weight. So to be honest, right now I am leaning toward continuing to use the silicone jewelry. I may however machine some nice metal decorative caps for it out of aluminum (which is extremely bio-inert even though you rarely see it in the body jewelry world).

Finally, I mentioned above that we tried anesthetic on my tattoo today and perhaps that perked up some ears, since I know that a lot of people would love a painless tattoo, even if they might be afraid to admit it out loud — I think there’s a real stigma against it. Anyway, a while back I got a handful of different tattoo anesthetics, and every time I’ve been tattooed we’ve tried different ones. Some have been junk and some have been extremely effective. Some time in the nearby future I will write a review of all the ones I’ve tried and share what I’ve discovered and my feelings on the subject.