Thursday, April 24, 2014

Landscape, Lace, and Long Ago


When I'm not working, I'm generally found in my studio...working!  Lately I've been obsessed with fiber.  My fiber guild decided to show some of our work at Saline library next week, so I've been up to my ears in fiber, fabric, and thread!  Here's a couple of examples of what I've been working on step by step......
Landscape





Did you notice the onion bag I incorporated?


Lace






Long Ago


This piece you might remember, was for the Paris Challenge.  I called it "Paris 1940's"


Sunday, March 16, 2014

Beeswax!


I confess I forgot to include you in my beeswax making method.  I forgot to blog it, photograph it, and share it. If you'd like to check out the link to the YouTube video I used, go here.  The guy in this video uses a solar oven.  I just used my regular oven on the lowest temperature and it worked great.

Here are the awesome results!  As mentioned, I washed the wax in water twice to remove as much honey and other impurities as possible.  Then using an old window screen that would fit in my oven, I layered an old 9x12 cake pan with an inch or so of water on the rack in the oven.  The window screen was placed on top of the pan and a paper towel was placed to fit exactly over the cake pan but on top of the window screen.  The paper towel was my fine sieve, used to remove all the tiniest bits of impurities.  Then I heaped the wax "shavings" onto the paper towel, turned the oven on low and watched and waited until all the wax melted through the paper towel into the waiting cake pan.

The most crucial part was to turn off the oven and leave everything alone until the morning.  This way the pure wax hardened and floated on the water in the pan and there was no accidental mixing of impurities back into the cooling wax.





I have this photo of some of the wax collected after straining the honey out.  This is before all the wax was collected and washed twice.


My sheet of wax is quite thin because I didn't have a whole lot of wax.  But this will melt nicely into my molds for easy use.

Photo Friday: Alive!


Showering Bluebird