and make it even weirder! New semesters always start out in such a way... Right off the bat we've got an alternative materials project. I was expecting it to be a full project, and thus designed a big old piece for it:
It's this thing right here1
But it turned out that we were to be given a mystery packet of materials to use for the project, and it would be due next class (in two days) and all we had to do was make some sort of body adornment, no rings.
I wound up with this foam stuff and thought it would be alright until I tried to scrunch the red sheet into an abstract flower. It was too thick to do it so I wound up cutting petals and sewing it together. That wasnt enough so I added a yellow center out of some other foam I had, and a greenish plastic flower I found on the ground somewhere. There still wasn't enough pouf to it so after flying to the craft store,
I got some ridiculous(ly expensive) green mesh ribbon to make it completly obnoxious. The piece is about a foot or so long, and sadly unloved in our peer rating/jurying thing. Perhaps I'll use it as a Christmas ornament this year, it uses magnets to pinch a shirt between it when wearing it on the shoulder, and therefore also sticks to any metallic surface. Just don't put any electronics near it.
For our next and last go at making alternative material body adornment we got to see what was in the next set of packets, and the majority of them were Lego based. This pic has some of them in it, while the others are arranged into this:
I am liking this necklace so far, but it is so hard to not just mash the Legos together and call it a day. Similarly I'm having trouble working up the urge to ruin the little Micro Machines car, though I have no idea where I'd work it into the piece. The long Legos that make up the drop of the pendant will be spray painted light blue but beyond that who knows? I feel bad that I cannot come up with ways to use more of the materials, like I'm supposed to. Maybe matching earrings? Nothing to do but get back to it, I guess...
Despite being slammed to the wall with daily life, I was able to crank out these single earrings as samples for production.
Since I foolishly said I banged these out over the weekend I now have been set to making ten more earring samples and five pins which will be interesting as real life theatens to take over this week as well.
On the upside in the pre-critique for these pieces they were greeted favorably which naturally means I hated them. Still I wanted to further explore combining acrylic with metal and of course started coming up with a boat load of interesting designs after the critique. Side note: everyone liked the leaf earring even though I think its the most boring thing ever but, I have redesigned the earwire for it so stay tuned I guess?
Somehow in all this I remembered records are made of vinyl which is a plastic and that there are tons of them to be had for dirt cheap at thrift stores so new material ahoy!
I'm pleased to announce cutting a record is easier than acrylic, even factoring in how thin it is, and quite fun actually! Im also glad it didn't shatter even when drilling it to start making these earrings:
I wussed out and didn't use silver sheet for the overlaying tear drop pieces because the sheet I do have of sterling is a lot smaller than I thought which is why these look a little like roads, but oh well. The next step is to ball up some silver wire for ear wires on my fancy home soldering system:
Also work mates are awesome and everyone should have at least one, go to Sears now and buy one, I command it!
For the other earrings I'm going to attempt to make an image dump post with the finished projects as the sketches aren't much to look at and make little sense to anyone but me. And as for other alternative materials to explore there's always laser discs.
