Snail Shell Protection in Metal Pomander Case

One of the things that I’ve noticed in high street fashion jewellery shops lately is the popularity of necklaces/pendants that are essentially a hollow ‘cage’ of some sort with a fancy bead sealed inside it. To those who are unfamiliar with the history of jewellery, these ‘cages’ were originally used in the medieval/renaissance period for people to carry fancy smelling things around with them – either to make themselves smell better or to hold up to their noses in order to prevent them from smelling too much of the sewage that lined the streets due to the bad sanitation of that time period.

So anyway, the really great thing about having a dad that loves to travel is that during high school, we got to visit a different place every summer. Given my love of the goddess Aphrodite (the official Greek version from their holy texts opposed to the popular modern myth version), one of my favourite holiday momentos is a white snail shell that I picked up on the beach at Cyprus when we went to check out Aphrodite’s rock.

After letting it sit in the bottom of my jewellery box gathering dust for a long time, I finally figured that I wanted to turn the shell into some sort of necklace. Originally I thought about doing something so that I could turn it into a pendant in the style of the gold one that Ursula wears in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

After googling for a long time on how I could make this possible, I finally realized that I didn’t have the tools nor the skill to do this. So in the end I decided to settle on either using a spiral cage that you often see in new age shops that have gemstones inside or something in the style of a pomander case. 

The issue with getting my hands on a metal case is protecting the shell from getting chipped as it’s really thing. So it was off to lacquering it with several layers of my trusty clear nail varnish. This turned out to work pretty well, although I am a tad disappointed that I now can’t remove it from the cage and use it with something else, due to my mistake in not checking on how runny the nail varnish that I’d put inside the shell to solidify it a bit was, before I put the shell inside the case to check that it would fit.

Very First Crocheted Flower (21 March)

Given my love for lacy things, part of me has always had a soft spot for crocheted items. 

So it’s a bit of a no-brainer that I also wanted to add crochet to my list of things that I could do…

Seeing as I already have a crochet hook that I use with my knitting, some bright multi-colour wool that I couldn’t think of what to do with and that I’ve always loved the look of crocheted lacy flowers, I decided to give this tutorial that I’d found on youtube a go…

 

Procrasti-baking the Cheat’s Way (March 18)

I got it into my head to make the guy I’m sub-letting my room in a sharehouse a birthday cake (partially motivated by the fact that I’d badgered him into cleaning out the oven and not used it for something like 1 ½ months).

As there are no measuring cups or cooking scales, I figured it’d be safer this time round to use a ready-made mix and just eyeball guess the amount of water I needed to add. It also gave me the opportunity to use up some of the marmalade conserve that I pretty much never touch. It also confirmed my personal belief that spring-form baking tins are the best type to use as they make it easier to remove the cake from the tin without breaking it. 

Red Ruffle Yarn Knitted Triangle Wrap

I’m usually more of a cardigan girl, but I’ve always been kinda curious about how and when to wear a triangle wrap shawl.

One of my favourite stories is a variation on the selkie wife story which is about a firebird lady with a beautiful feather coat.

I’d stockpiled 2 balls of red Elicia ruffle yarn for a special project, so am really proud of myself that I finished making the ruffle yarn triangle wrap in about a week – inspired by that feather coat…

N.B. It turns out that as the ‘triangle’ became ‘wider,’ the ‘netted part’ became more and more likely to get tangled at the ends. This problem was solved by using stitch holders…although I have 2, I somehow managed to lose one of them, so I solved the problem by tying the first 8-ish stitches from the end together using a piece of string.

My Very First Attempt at Making Pewter Tokens

On the Baronial Sunday of March of the SCA – being a market day in which people sold gear – it was also attempted by various craft workshops.

I’d long been curious about finding a way to make better pendants for my Anne Boleyn / Ugly Betty style necklaces, so I was keen to give pewter making a go.

This particular class taught you how to make pewter ‘tokens’ – basically tiny decorative pendants that have a design on one side and is completely flat on the other.

 

Due to the fact we were making one-off designs, it was better for us to use soapstone rather than plaster of paris or silicon. This is more to do with the fact that the stone is easier to shape…

Soapstone turned out to be ridiculously easy to carve, basically to make more detailed things, it just required hours of gently scraping the stone. I pretty much just went right in with heavily chiseling into it with the tools – informed by the teacher as being basic clay carving tools…

I decided to start off with a basic heart shape, then added dolphins on the sides (as wings are just too overdone!). My dolphins didn’t really look like dolphins at all as I was too hasty in my carving, so I decided to turn them into fish instead. Initially, I’d wanted to create a mini crown above the heart with the loop to hang the token from just above it. The crown design turned out to be a little too tricky for me to carve at such limited time (we were getting close to 8pm) that I decided to just have it as 3 lines instead. Most of my time in the end was spent deepening the main heart shape due to the fact that it wasn’t ‘sucking’ the molten pewter into the mold enough to reach the other parts of the design. The main heart part was seeming rather 'empty' to me, so I decided to carve the ancient Greek word 'kalos' (beautiful) in mirror style (so the word comes out the right way) across the middle. Most of the design was 'drawn' using this mini needle-like file with a very sharp point (which was also very handy for deepening thin lines (like the 'crown' and the loop). I also know now that it is very important to make sure that the design is pretty deep (say 2 – 4 mm opposed to the suggested 1 mm) in order to make sure that the molten pewter runs into the mold enough.

It is also important for every carved mold to include a funnel to give the molten pewter something to run into to reach the hollowed-out parts of the stone in order to create the design. To help the pewter cool in the right way, it was also important to include mini ‘air-vents’. 

The creation of the tokens was pretty easy for the molten pewter part, where the flat side of a thick block of wood was pressed against the mold, and then the molten pewter was poured in. The excess pewter formed by the funnel was simply cut off using jewellery cutters… 

I think overall my design turned out pretty crude, but not too bad for a first-time pewter token maker…