I spent the afternoon getting tattooed, completely going over the big Schutzstaffel zombie (inspired by one of the characters in Dead Snow, although Shane has given him a new face). If you look at Shane Faulkner’s facebook page in the next day or two he took some nice pictures of it when we finished the session, and I’ll post some as well when I’ve unwrapped it and it looks nice again. I don’t think I got enough sleep last night so it hurt a lot, but nonetheless, I really do love everything about tattooing, including the experience.
Before leaving though I poured some quick soap in the new molds I cured last night — a skull soap, and a Zentastic promo soap. I will put some of these in the shop in the next couple days ($5 seems to be the going rate for hobby soap, so I guess that seems like a reasonable place to price it, although it might end up being less), but I think I’m going to put them into orders by regular customers and large orders for free as a thank-you gift. Here are the two bars that I made, cast in a goats milk soap with slight peppermint scent.
In addition to the goats milk, I also cast them in a clear soap (also peppermint):
Per Caitlin’s suggestion I’ll do some experiments with speckling in red blood in various ways. We’re debating whether it’s better to drip the “blood” (which will just be a deep red tinted soap) when it’s all liquid (Caitlin’s thought), or to splatter it into the mold first (my thought), then let it harden (maybe even freeze it to make it resilient) and then pour the bone colour on second. Both will be tried.
Other than that we have temporarily adopted a sparrow that broke its wing. We’re not sure if it’s beyond saving but we are doing our best. Assuming the horrible cat does not figure out a way to eat it in the night I will report more tomorrow on our little friend.
I realize that with the opening and closing teasers, it is apparent to everyone that I have posted pictures of the least interesting part of my day. I’m sorry, but for now it’s the only part that I’ve photographed. I will amend it tomorrow. Tomorrow will not be an entry containing only a picture of me going to the post office, even though I am planning the ammunition for that.
Years ago I read a great many Dr. Seuss books to my daughter a great many times. I think that they moved me even more than they moved her, “Oh The Places You’ll Go” and “The Lorax” most of all. I am both embarrassed and not ashamed at all that there were times reading these to her that I was not-completely-successfully holding back the tears from how deeply they affected me. “Oh The Places You’ll Go” surely had a guiding effect on my life, and I’ve tried to go out and live — and create — the most-often-but-not-always wonderful kaleidoscope world it imagines. Whether you’re a fan of the story or whether you are simply a fan of such a rainbow existence, I’m sure you will enjoy this beautiful Burning Man-themed edit of Dr. Seuss’s poetry.
Fullscreen is the best.
Also if you’re in the watching mood, I’ve been enjoying the videos on TommyEdisonXP’s YouTube channel which document his life as a blind man — ever wonder how a blind person cooks food? Uses an ATM? Sets up a DVD player? There aren’t a ton of videos but hopefully he’ll make more. The cooking one is especially good.
Yesterday Caitlin and I walked down to Kensington Market to have a Big Fat Burrito which was delicious as always. The walk was about 8km in all, which while a decent length walk for anyone, seems to be about my upper limit these days, down from almost double that a month ago. I don’t know if that’s because of the damage I did climbing all the zip line towers in Mexico, or if it’s just part of the normal decay and destruction. I feel like I had a couple months where I was feeling alright, but now I’m back to pretty much constant unbearable pain. Tomorrow I start a new pain treatment program that I have mixed feelings about, and they’re supposed to stick me in a CT scanner soon to see how the brain damage aspect of the disease is progressing. I’ve actually been doing a ton of programming lately (as in software development) to try and keep myself from going nuts from the pain — doing data processing and analysis and simple AI work seems to pull me out of the physical and keep my mind broadly occupied better than just about anything else I’ve found.
Back to nice stuff. As I said, I’ve had lots of people with dainty fingers asking me to do a skull ring that’s appropriately sized for them. So I have been making roughs for a potential new skull ring or two. The ones in the picture are size 6 and 7, and can be up-sized to a 9. I’m also making them all with gem-set eyes, which is why the eyes are hollow. I like the way the gem-set eyes look so much that in this run they’ll be that way by default. I hope to have the molds made for these in the next few days, and I just got shipping notice that I’ll have some new cabochons later in the week in addition to the gems I already have here.
Finally, I wanted to share with you a little experiment I did the other day for making quick one-offs. I discovered that the “melting point” of plastecine is high enough that you can actually pour liquid pewter into it. The pewter that I use melts at the incredibly low temperature of 138 degrees Celsius — not much more than boiling water amazingly! I found that you can take your positive (in this case a little fairy figuring wearing goggles) and press it into the plasticine to make your mold. I also put in a little graphite to reduce air bubbles, although I didn’t do enough tests to be sure how big a difference it makes. The pewter then, melted stove top, is poured right into the depression in the plasticine and allowed to harden there. To my surprise, it works perfectly. For applications like making one-off coins or medals for a kid’s party and things like that, this seems like an ideal zero-cost method. The pewter can be bought for around $20 a pound (or you can just melt down broken pewter cups from a used/junk shop), and that’s the only special item you need!
Perhaps I will write a tutorial some time.
Other than that Caitlin and I have been watching the “Face Off” SyFy reality show which is pretty fun. It’s one of those “Top Chef”/”Project Runway” type contest reality shows, but it’s about theatrical and special effects makeup. The second season starts soon, so we grabbed the entire first season to watch over a couple days and have just one episode left. There’s a lot in the show that overlaps with the sort of jewelry work I do because of all the mold making, so it’s interesting to me on a first-hand level.
A customer asked me to order them some custom stones for a recent order, and along with their request I got some others in stock. Most of these will be in the shop soon, and I always like making custom stuff for people so please let me know if something you see strikes your fancy. Anyway, this first one is a pair of 8mm orange CZ. It’s insane how bright they are. That’s in part because of the stone and the cut, but also because it’s such a tall stone that I had to mount the eyes very high in the socket (otherwise the backs would poke the finger) and they really glitter.
These next ones are 8mm rainbow topaz and are also quite intense — they are iridescent across various blue, green, and turquoise tones that are hard to capture in a still photo.
These blue or deep cyan stones are a pair of 8mm simulated blue zircon.
Next is the actual stone that was ordered, a pair of 8mm black spinels. Totally black and opaque.
Also in black, I ordered a bunch of 8mm high dome black onyx round cabochons, which are basically half spheres. I got these largely as an experiment as I’ve never worked with them before, and wow, do I ever love them. They really look incredible. I made a couple of rings using them as eyes that’ll go into the shop in the next day or two.
In addition, I have started mounting cabochon’s on the backs of these rings whenever possible, inside my “signature” tattoo logo. It’s a very beautiful touch, and I feel like my work is getting better and better with time.
I have some more cabochons on order, so in a week or so I hope to do some more experiments. I have some really neat looking pyrite ones, some blood red almandine garnets, some green malachite, some very psychedelic glittering opal, some turquoise chrysocolla that looks like a planet, some pearly moonstone, and some stunning lab-grown star sapphires. Finally, because I have had so many requests to do a version of this skull ring but in a smaller women’s size, I’m beginning work today on a new skull ring that should fit sizes 6 through 9 (the rings about are size 10 through 13).
Well, the big sale is over and I probably won’t run one for a while again. However, I do have some pretty nice new stuff to post since I finally got around to taking photos.
The Meteorite Jewelry Section in my Etsy shop has sat empty for a while but I’ve just posted six new rings to it. Each of these is built around a Nantan iron meteorite (more details in the entries) with a one-off sculpted body around it, generally with a UFO of some type — Haunebu (WWII Nazi UFOs) or Vril Discs (the more occult end of UFOs) are my favorites so you’ll see those most often. There’s also a big winged one that turned out amazing, and another that’s inspired by planned missions to mine the asteroids. Each of these pictures can be clicked on to jump to the store page for close up photos or to snag them. As I said these are one-offs and when they are gone they’ll never return.
So this is the last of the pictures I’m going to post, at least for now, so I haven’t presented you with everything — I’m omitting many fun things, like the “giant Mexican hamsters” (little capybaras basically) and monkeys that were all over the resort, or the other tours we did.
But I really have to include what was the highlight of the trip for me, a rafting trip and then a long swim through a couple kilometers of incredible natural underground river. Last time we were in Mexico we had a great time at Xel-Ha, and this time Nefarious and I went to sister resort XPLOR (and the Caitlin and her went to also linked xcaret the next day which sounds amazing as well). Later in the day we did a ton of zip lining which as I said was the death of me, although tons of fun, but we began by exploring the underground rivers.
The entire peninsula is a mix of limestone and coral which was originally under the ocean, which is why it’s so flat. 65 million years ago there was a huge asteroid strike in the Gulf of Mexico (the same one that significantly contributed to the end of the dinosaur era) that raised it up out of the ocean. This violent even also caused a myriad of caves to form, many of which became underground rivers. The entire area is essentially hollow. Anyway, we began by taking a small two person raft that we paddled by hand, and then finished the second half of the journey in life jackets without the raft. Because we were there so early in the day (a rainy day, not that this matters underground) it was completely deserted and it was just us in the cave adding to the wonder of the spectacle.
The caves were incredible — I’ve never seen anything like it. Stalactites and stalagmites everywhere. Not the sort of thing you’d think you could ever experience so easily. I can’t recommend it highly enough. There are lots more pictures after the break.
