The reason I always give my resin pieces a few extra days before sending them out: you just never know how stuff's gonna react to hard-curing. I generally go with Swarovski crystal in my work. Yes, it is more expensive, but you can SEE the difference. That said, under resin, all glass and crystal loses its faceting. So when I found some Austrian crystal rhinestones in cool shapes, I pounced. Alas. Both pieces I used the green crystal teardrops in totally cracked today during the last day of hard curing. Totally unsaleable. The Swarovski pieces still look lovely.

Meh. Sadface. Swarovski needs to get on making more rhinestone shapes.

I also made one bee piece that was sitting on a pressed sunflower petal. I thought the petal was well sealed enough with Mod Podge. Not so. It seeped this red color all over the bezel, and it looked like the poor bee bled to death! But Ariel is a creepy weirdo and wanted it anyway. The other two bees pieces I made turned out fine.

In other news, cool oxidization effect: when brass and copper oxidize in the air, they get darker. When they oxidize in resin, they get a cool pale blue ghostly halo. It looks antiquey and steampunky and cool.

So, update tomorrow. The weather was miserable, and as such, I got no good shots. I prefer natural light. In any case, there's supposed to be a small window of sun before I go in to work tomorrow, so I'm going to get up early and photograph, that way I can photoedit and post when I get home.

On the plus side, my new background papers look great. Here are some yellowy previews at the flickr. Flickr!



( Also, upside down Bean is upside down.Collapse )

In other news, pretty much every day, my LJ is only working half the time. If I reply to you, I am most certainly replying from email. It seems to be cluster-specific, as it says "database busy," but I don't even care anymore. If this keeps up, I am jumping ship for Dreamwidth. This service is quickly becoming one I do not want to pay for.