Saturday, July 12, 2008

I can't see a difference, can you see a difference?


Ok, other than one has a brown frame and one has a pearl frame (more on that later) - there really is no difference, (or at least not the difference I was expecting) which came as a suprise to me. Here's why.

As I've mentioned before, I have a terrible time with Pinata Inks migrating into my clay and blurring things up. So, as I was perusing Cindy Leitz' http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/ something somewhere caught my attention and I had the idea to cover the tinted flakes with Future to seal the inks into the flakes before trying them out on something else.

So, flakes, plus lime green Pinata Ink (which actually makes almost an emerald green colour on the flakes if it's concentrated enough), one batch drizzled with Future and left to dry, and the other left as is. Put the flakes onto bezels and bake. Add liquid Kato, bake some more. Heat gun, add, bake, etc.

I was even smart enough to put an x on the back of one of the bezels so that I would know which one was treated with the Future and which one wasn't. I wasn't smart enough to put down what the x meant so I'm not sure which one it is.

The brown frame is due to me heat gunning it way too much to try to eliminate a foggy bit in the corner. But, once I saw how pretty the frame looked compared to the pearl background I continued with the heat gunning to try to make the frame an even colour. It turns out that liquid clay is a pretty good insulator as you can see by the bottom edge of the brown frame. The colour flakes change colour quite a bit with heat as you can see in the brown frame and have taken on a bit more of a yellowish cast compared to the frame below.

What I was expecting to see is a bit of a green haze in the liquid clay from the untreated green ink. But, hey, all is not lost, since now I might be able to play with burning the clay just a wee bit (I know, I know, toxic fumes and all that stuff... I'll be careful).

So now it turns out that it's not all inks that migrate so freely. I tried making a faux green opal with the green flakes and I didn't have any problems with the translucent clay turning green, even after many passes through the pasta machine. But, blue flakes turn the translucent clay blue within only two or three passes. And red is just as quick.

I'll have to try another experiment with the blue flakes.

Cindy's got some kind of scavenger hunt going on with her site which looks like it might be kind of fun, if you're interested check out the link here..

And, of course, the frames are from the Cabezel stamps that Bev and Wendy have created. It's so wonderful to be able to make custom frames for things.

Oh, and thanks to Cindy who posted a comment wondering if the experiment actually worked. The answer is...I don't know. I'll have to try it with the other coloured flakes. Might be something to do on the weekend or if others want to play and let me know I'll post images of their experiments instead.

Cheers everyone,

Sandy

2 comments:

Virginie Dufour ... fimodevivi@gmail.com said...

hey, this is top ... I've found your "translation in french" ... it helps me, thank you Sandy !

Anonymous said...

Hi Sandy, cool experiment! I wasn't that clear though... did the Future work? or did it not make a difference?

Thanks for the mention! BTW the scavenger/treasure hunt will be starting this week and should be fun.