In my experience swaps are a wonderful way to collect other works of art and a great way to get inspired. My suggestion though is keep it simple. Limit yourself between 5 to 10 participants so that it is not overwhelming.
If you are interested in hosting a swap relating to Friendly Plastic, please email me and I will post your details on the site.
These swap tips are courtesy of Creative Woman Newsletter. It is a wonderful resource on a variety of craft mediums and a great source of inspiration. To receive the newsletter - click here.
Besides trying out the wonderful Amate jewellery blanks, I have been busy making some other jewellery in preparation for the weekend jewellery course I am running at Tintern Abbey, and to take with me to Colorado in October for a Friendly Plastic Retreat at Jen Lowe’s.
You might recognise the one on the left, I made the Friendly Plastic bit ages ago, but I have only just now got around to making it up in to jewellery. The little scribble wire beads are made by wrapping silver wire around a kebab stick – I love the contrast of the open bead with the more solid FP beads.
The pendant on the top right is a stamped image that I coloured up using acrylic paints and Rub n Buff, then set it in to an Amate blank and used Envirotex Lite resin to give it that high gloss finish and to add depth.
The pendant on the bottom right is made using sequin mesh (laser mesh / punchinella), net and my Oooze technique which you can see on a video slide show in an earlier post or on You Tube.
Sorry about the slightly fuzzy image. This is a little piece of patchwork (double sided) that is a mixture of plain and patterned FP plus FP that I coloured using Alcohol Inks. The edges have been foiled to give them a nice finish.
Another Amate Jewellery blank filled with FP (patterned with a permanent pen) and embedded with washers and crystals. Again Envirotex Lite seals and gives depth to the piece.
This little pendant makes use of the Metal Flakes and Alcohol Inks to create the mottled strips. Silk ribbon provides contrast to the hard materials used.
Whenever I make these little hearts everyone always says “Ooohh”! They will turn out different every time when you try Ooozing with Angelina fibres.
Friendly Plastic Pellets, a leaf from the garden (can’t remember the name of it), Alcohol Inks and silver wire make up the key features of this pendant.
I will post some more images of jewellery very soon, some of it is a bit bolder and funkier – so watch this space!
I've seen beautiful sunrises give light to shocking areas of plastic accumulation, held handfuls of plastic particles filtered from the surface of the ocean, and shared the simple joy of sailing while storytelling with ocean enthusiasts from around the world. You do not need to sail to the middle of the Pacific to know what to do about plastic in our oceans, in our streams, and on our shores, but sailing to it makes the message even more compelling. Most people reading this blog know the personal solution already; Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Many of us have found new ways to live with less stuff; how to make things last; and how to properly dispose of what we use. If you have done this, you know that we are all works in progress and that it's only with constant attention to details that one can succeed. On the other hand, how do you make a whole culture pay constant attention? It seems that, while we've been chanting, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," somehow our throwaway culture has marched forward unaware.I share his frustration, and I'm sure many Plastics Blog readers do, too. As I've pointed out before, many people in the plastics industry consider themselves to be environmentalists. They may have a bias toward plastic products, but that's understandable. Plastics offer many advantages to the sustainably minded: energy efficiency and light weight (which saves on transportation costs) are in the forefront, but so is recyclability. But now there's so much plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean that, in a single summer, we have multiple scientific missions exploring the problem. Something must be done to get more people to change their behavior. They've got to start to recycle, or at least properly dispose of plastic waste. If they don't, the problem will keep getting worse, and the industry will face more solutions that it finds distasteful -- bans and taxes. So the question is, how best to change human behavior, and discourage the throwaway culture that Rogers laments? I hope his voyage helps, and I applaud him for focusing attention on the problem.
I stacked the cut stripes of plastic on an old Sil-Pat that I cut in half and laid on top of an old cookie sheet.
I got out my griddle, and set the temp according to the book (a toasty 300 degrees F). I just have a cheap-o griddle that I bought at WalMart a couple of years ago, and it worked just fine. However, I am thinking that if someone had intended to work for a LONG time they might want to have a more expensive griddle 'cuz mine got pretty freakin' hot after a while.
I stuck the whole plastic/silicone/cookie sheet contraption on top of the griddle to heat. In retrospect, I would probably have arranged the plastic stripes on top of the silicone mat/cookie sheet while it was sitting on the griddle BEFORE turning the griddle on. The pieces kinda shuffled around a bit when I moved it from one counter to the other. Easy enough to fix, but could have been avoided entirely.
Then, while I waited for the plastic to melt, I decided to have a little snack. YUM! Strawberries :D
Once I got the little gems stuck into the plastic, I stuck a tiny little square shaped cutter that I had bought from the clay section of Hobby Lobby into the melted plastic while it was still on the griddle. Once again, this is something that I did differently later on 'cuz it got REALLY HOT and I burned my finger when I fiddled with it. (Yes, I fiddle with things. It's what I do.)
The plastic wasn't cooling fast enough (In addition to fiddling with things, I also stick my fingers into things before they are dry. It's a curse. LOL) So I put the whole silicone mat on top of my lovely bakery cooling rack for a few minutes in hopes that it would hurry up. (I ended up putting it into the freezer 'cuz it just wasn't going quick enough for me. LOL)
When it came out of the freezer, I popped it out of the square cutter. (It literally popped right out. It was great.) Then I decided to hit it with a blast from the Ol' Embossing Tool. This rounded off the edges nicely and smoothed out the surface a bit. But I decided that I didn't like it so much with the gem already embedded into the plastic.
So I made a few more that didn't have the gems in them and then cut them into quarters (The original squares measured out at appoximately 1"X1". So, when quartered, they were tiny.)
I laid all the tiny quarters out on top of the silicone mat and heated each one. Then I used the Dissection tools to stick the crystals into each individual square before they cooled.
They needed a hole at the top so that I could feed wire through them, so I decided to use the probe again. The first time I tried this, I heated the plastic and then tried to stick the metal through it. BIG mistake. The plastic just kind of stretched and ended up all out of shape and 'blobby' looking. (Blobby? Is that even a word? I am guessing that it is now.) After that, I just heated the metal part of the probe with my Embossing tool and stuck it through the little plastic square. It worked well. :D
Now I have a pile of these tiny little 'charms' just waiting for jump rings or wire or whatever, so that they can be added to something creative.And yes Cupcake...goodnews....I will go faster next time. If you'd like to follow Cupcakes blog and her crafty adventure - click here.
