Corona Crisis Crafting: This Time for Real

Well, sitting in a chair making tiny movements is something that still works, so I made jewelry, what else…

This set predates my Covid infection. It’s polymer clay with so called silkscreen stencils.

Who’s a good little fire demon? Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle is one of the sweetest half-villains ever conceived.

Come swimming in a sea of flowers. Yes, those roses are hand made. Yes, I know. My sister got a matching pair.

Come to the beach with me. This was a cane made after a Youtube tutorial and I really like the results.

And last but not least, some beadwork: The Sungoddess

A Big Commission – Part 1 – Beginning

I got a new commission via the sign on my garden gate. Maybe if I did not live at the end of a road in the middle of nowhere I would have gotten more business that way, but a little is better than nothing.

The customer initially asked me if I could harden a kukri machete that he has bought and found of insufficient quality. My reply was that it might be possible, but only if the steel is good enough and only the quench is botched, not if the steel is craparooni as well. After a bit of back-and-forth, he brought me the bad kukri together with one that belongs to his friend and that he initially intended to buy.

Both machetes are from the same company. I won’t tell you their proper name, but it could be paraphrased as “Low-Temperature Carbon-Iron Alloy”.

The bad one was manufactured allegedly in Africa (the country was not specified) and it is really bad – it has no primary bevel, so it is essentially just a sharpened flat bar. The hardness is about 50-51 HRC, so it is hardened. But this is the lowest point where it might be useful as a cutting tool – with very frequent sharpening. Which would be difficult with steel this thick and this type of grind.

The good one was manufactured in the USA and it is in my opinion still bad, although not as bad as the first one. It does at least have primary and secondary bevels, so there is no need to remove excessive amounts of material when sharpening.

I took a picture of the good one, proposed a few design modifications, and made an outline and a price offer.

Since this is supposed to be a working tool, we agreed that there is no need for high polish or any excessive fancifulness. On the other hand, there should be some fancifulness since a handmade product is going to be expensive regardless. So there will be a jatoba handle with hidden pins and a dyed leather sheath with a pocket and natural sharpening stone. The offered price is about ten times higher than what the manufacturer of the original has charged, but I do hope that I can deliver a product worthy of that expense.

I have already cut the outline from 4 mm spring steel and then I got distracted. I could grind the bevels freehand, I do have the skill to do so. But I thought to myself – I might need to make a second one if the first one cracks in quench, I might get more requests for big blades, so it probably is worth to spend some time making a jig. And today, I started to make that jig.

More about that when it is finished.

Third Wooden Mystery

I did not expect these pieces to be mysterious but they are.

I got these as logs with circa 10-15 cm in diameter from my neighbor. He got a permit to fell some trees on the premises of a nearby former sanatorium when there were some conservation works performed and he also got a lot of wood when trees on his property were felled during roadside renovations. So he got a jumble-mix of local species from the roadside and some imported park species from the sanatorium.

I swapped a few nice pieces of wood with him for briquettes. At the time, I thought these are just pieces of European oak (Quercus robur) and indeed I almost tossed them when I got my hands on old oak boards which are easier to work with. But I cut them into prisms anyway and I got confused.

The bark and very small and densely packed growth ring do look like oak, but there the similarity ends.

The boundary between heartwood and sapwood is very pronounced. In this regard, the wood is more similar to walnut trees, although it could be oak too.

Walnut has more chocolate-dark-brown heartwood whereas this has a purplish tint to it. And locally grown walnuts have way bigger growth rings in my experience – easily three-four times bigger in fact, even on branches. And walnuts, irrespective of the growth ring size, have a big cellular pith in the middle, whereas these had almost none (like oak).

The sapwood also seems too white for European oak, which is more yellow-brown-ish. On its own, the sapwood looks like ash, but ash does not have a differently colored heartwood and it too has much bigger growth rings, although they could be this size on branches.

The sapwood was almost completely destroyed by wood borers, even though the wood was stored in dry conditions the whole time. I did not have a lot of wood borer damage on any other wood that I was storing (except basswood, elm, and ash, none of which is this).

And all the wood borers stopped at the heartwood boundary as if by magic. I have observed this phenomenon on elm and oak trees that died standing in the forest.

The lignin rays are visible but way smaller than they are in oak. In this regard, the wood is similar to beech or sycamore. But it also could be an oak branch and not an oak trunk.

It is pretty wood, it would make nice knife handles, but I do not know what it is for sure and that is a bit of a problem. All I know for sure is that it has grown within 200 m of my house and I am about 90% sure it is not local species because most of those I can recognize at a glance. Thus by process of elimination, I think it might be Northern red oak (Quercus rubra), but I cannot be sure since I never held a piece of definitive red oak in my hand and internet search is of limited use here.

But it fits the known criteria – it is grown around here, there is a huge tree nearby, it sometimes even sprouts in random places from nuts buried by jays (I have a seedling in my garden), and it is not local species.

Crafting: polymer clay

I’m currently a bit confused, as I wanted to do this post as a follow up to the last one on polymer clay, but it turns out I didn’t write that one, despite me remembering the post. Well, just imagine that you read the first part of this post 4 weeks ago or so.

Having seen gorgeous shit on social media, I decided to do some polymer clay jewellery. I did a lot of it as a kid/ young teen, but the style back then was pretty different. I saw some tutorial on youtube and decided to go for a calaidoscope cane.

two pairs of earrings. Each earring consists of two square parts with the same pattern: colourful shapes wrapped in black, all symmetrical.

Now, while I liked the results, I didn’t like two things: One, it’s very material intensive. That was easily 10 bucks worth in polymer clay and if you fuck up that’s it.

Two: You end up with lots of the same. I can understand why there’s a lot of small businesses making polymer clay jewellery: You can actually create things within a reasonable time in a way you can’t do with beads. But I’m just making stuff for myself and friends and family, so I don’t need 50 pieces with the same pattern.

So I thought: This was nice, but I’m not going to do much more of it. Well, I should have known I was wrong. Of course I did. I learned different techniques (I’m still learning, they aren’t coming out quite as planned yet) where you can use smaller amounts of clay and end up with a couple of pieces, not a whole drawer full.

A pair of earrings. on a brown marbled background are white cala lilies and green and gold leaves

A pair of earrings. green and old leaves on a brown marbled background.

Oval earrings, blended yellow purple and blue, with abalone shells.

U shaped earrings in blue, yellow and purple

The last two pairs are a bit too bright for my taste, but the kid already stole some, so I guess they came out alright.

The good thing about having may hobbies is that I have many tools, so I used my silicone moulds for the scraps. While I love my big earrings, my ears occasionally appreciate small studs.

Drop shaped earings. white pieces with blue lines

This is another technique where you cover the clay pieces in mica powder. Again, I’m happily stocked in that particular area and I really like the results. Now to my favourite pieces from that collection:

Round blue and white earrings with a dragonfly charm

I’m just in love with them. The charms (again, yay for having tons of craft supplies) work just perfect.

The next pieces are from the same batch, only that I had to roll the clay more thinly and it turned into a whole different affair:

The effect became more like marble, with the colours blending more. Again, lots of nice, light studs. I think I could do with a second pair of ears.

Big Gay Sword

I have featured michaelcthulhu several times already, and he keeps proving that he is a wholesome and good person.

The summary quote from this video:
“I don’t pretend to understand God or being gay. But only one side is sending death threats to a 22-year old so I’m pretty sure how I feel in this situation.”

Mike is trying to mad science how to make various patina colors on his sword in this one. I feel like I could have saved him a lot of trouble with that.

Another Wooden Mystery

In one of the sacks were these two pieces.

I cut off the two ridges and I run all four sides along the table saw blade to clean them and I got two pieces 45x35x250 mm. One of them has a slight crack, but it is in a position where I would probably cut it anyway so not a big deal. This is enough for 4-6 knives, more if used as scales for smaller knives.

I am reasonably certain this is coconut palm wood. I worked with it before and Giliell has the resulting knife.

What is puzzling are the darker and lighter parts. Those are not sapwood and heartwood, palms do not have those, and anyway, I know of no tree where the outer sapwood is darker than the inner heartwood as would be suggested by the curvature here. I do not know what caused that color contrast, maybe it was cut close to the outer layer of the trunk, maybe it is decay, I have no clue. Palm trees do not grow around here so I have no knowledge about their variability and specific properties and no way to obtain said knowledge (google does not help).

It is not an extremely expensive wood but two pieces like this would cost me somewhere in the vicinity of at least 40,-€ plus shipping, so it is nothing to sneeze at either. These were, alas, the last surprise in my firewood treasure trove, the remaining sacks were all pure jatoba. Still, I can’t complain.

Solving a Wooden Mystery

I haven’t worked with anything but wood for a while now and I still won’t for another while. But I am progressing and today I started to seriously sort through the Unexpected Treasure woodpile. And it turns out that there is more to that treasure than I initially thought.

When sorting through one bag, there were a few pieces that puzzled me. The wood was sold to me as a mix of jatoba and black locust, but these were definitively neither. I am also fairly certain it is not a local species because I would recognize most of those at a glance, certainly those that can produce pieces of this size. I put the pieces aside for later use and went on sorting the wood into neat piles by size if useful or into bags as firewood. And then I opened one bag and it turns out it is full of this mystery wood.

Here are some pictures:

It is a very hard wood, not as hard as jatoba, but close to the black locust. It is also very dense – specific gravity of about 0,8. The growth rings are not very visible, the pores are very fine and the color is various shades of golden-brown and orange. It changes a bit depending on the viewing angle. On none of the pieces is a visible distinction between heartwood and sapwood.

That is not a lot to go on, so I have made one assumption – Jatoba is from South America, so maybe this wood is from there too. It would be sensible for a furniture and flooring manufacturer to order multiple species from one supplier and then for said species to get mixed up in the offcut bags.

So armed with this information I went on a search on the Wood Database website and I am convinced it is Garapa. All the properties check out. And it can be used in combination with both Jatoba and Black Locust because it has very similar properties (not only hardness and density but also shrinkage) to both. I am researching whether it could be used to make cutting boards and I think it is so. I have come to the conclusion that black locust can, despite the plant being toxic – but black locust cutting boards are, in fact, sold here. But even if unsuitable for cutting boards, there is nothing that would disqualify it from knife handles and knife blocks.

If you think my solution to this mystery is not correct, I would be grateful for any info. It is useful to know what wood one is working with.

Why Relying on Algorithms is Bad

About two years ago, I got into playing chess online and I also watch chess videos since then, usually at dinner or lunch. One funny thing that happened last year in the online chess community was that a live stream interview between the (then) most popular chess YouTuber Agadmator and chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura was banned for hate speech. Apparently, the algorithm has interpreted the phrases as “white is better here”, “black is defending”, “white attack” and similar as incitement to violence, and completely failed to recognize that the talk is about a board game.

At the same time, open racists and transphobes were spouting and often keep spouting their bile on YouTube completely unimpeded under the guise of “Humor” or “Just Asking Kwestchions”.

Today the algorithm struck marvelously again.

I do not remember precisely when I have seen so-called fractal burning of wood on YouTube, but I think it was some time last year. I thought that it looks cool so I researched how it is done. And I have immediately gone to the conclusion that cool looking it might be, but I certainly ain’t doing that, not even for a big clock. And YouTube channel “How To Cook That” has published an excellent video a few weeks ago explaining why fractal wood burning is not a good craft hack for woodworkers:

And of course, an excellent youtube video cannot go unpunished – the algorithm yanked it for allegedly promoting harmful and dangerous acts. And while it was banned, that same algorithm has actually recommended to me a video showing the hack in action. Marvelous work – a warning about dangerous practice gets banned as promotion of said practice and an actual promotion of it gets promoted. Logic straight as a corkscrew.

The video has been reinstated after YouTube got pushback, but I do wonder how many really good and possibly important videos get yanked and never get back because the channels that made them were small and did not have millions of subscribers to cry foul on their behalf. Because let’s be real – YouTube gets an actual human to do the review only when there is an outcry, otherwise, they do not bother.

I think that overreliance on algorithms has great potential for actual harm. Human social interactions are so complex that there are humans out there (like me) who are barely able to navigate them. I do not think that AI is there yet.

Don’t Test Blade Sharpness With the Ball of Your Thumb!

Recently I was on a short trip with my friends from the university. I have shown you my traveling sharpening kit and said a bit about its evolution. I did not mention any details about what has happened on the trip.

In addition to a gratis sharpening of one blade per person, I have also offered a gratis lesson in sharpening and knife maintenance to anyone intersted. I did not expect that several parents will herd their children in (mostly, but not exclusively, boys) and that I shall have a complete class to teach. That caught me a bit unprepared, to be honest.

I have therefore included basic knife terminology and knife safety – do not carry a knife with the point upwards or forwards, do not cut towards yourself, that kind of stuff. One mother was afterward worried a bit that the children will try all that stuff I told them not to do just to test it. It was the same lesson I got when I was a kid and it never occurred to me to test whether a knife buries itself in my stomach or my hand if I do not heed my father’s advice (I cut myself plenty of times even so). There is one exception, however, and that is testing the knife sharpness with the ball of one’s thumb. That one thing is, to my bafflement, widespread and some of the boys already got into the habit of doing it before my lesson, and one of them did it on the just freshly sharpened knife after the lesson. For which I reprimanded him immediately.

“But I have never cut myself that way!” he replied indignantly, with his father watching in the background.

“That does not mean you will not cut yourself in the future if you keep doing it. I have just shown you that this knife is as sharp as a razor, it takes just a slight wrong move and you won’t even know you cut yourself until you have bled all over the floor!” was my reply, in a pretty pissed off tone of voice.

His father thanked me later, saying that the boy has picked up this habit somewhere and needed the reprimand from someone whom he recognizes as an authority when it comes to knives. Not the first time that I have ticked off an unruly child in the presence of their parent, and probably not the last time either (so far I have gotten away with it since all instances were about safety).

I do not know where people pick up this bad habit and why they keep doing it. It is completely useless for assessing the blade’s sharpness. Moving the ball of the thumb across the blade is kinda safe – it is the same movement used to shave hair, another method of testing – but with a sharp knife, a slight twitch of a muscle that flexes the thumb is all that is needed for things go wrong. A thing that I have seen happen. This can also easily result in non-bleeding cuts, those you do not know about until you wash your hands with soap – that is how my father got “cured” of this bad habit when he was young.

If you need to test a knife’s sharpness and you do not have a piece of paper or string to do so, you can put the blade on the fingernail of your thumb at an angle of approximately 45° and try to scrape it without exerting extra pressure. If the blade tends to dig into the fingernail with its own weight and resists movement, the knife is sharp. If it glides over the surface, the knife is blunt. It is completely safe and sufficient.

End of rant.

Evolution of My Sharpening Kit

When going on a get-together with my friends from university, I occasionally offer to sharpen their knives for free or gratis. For that purpose, I used to take with me my sharpening stone, which initially was all that I had to sharpen knives. With time this has evolved into a kind of traveling sharpening kit and in this post, I will describe its evolution a bit. Let’s start with a picture, followed by less than a thousand words.

I have started with the grey, two-layer silicon carbide whetstone on the left. It has to be soaked in water before use and it is the exact type of cheapo basic coarse/fine stone that my father has used to sharpen knives all his life and with which he taught me how to sharpen knives when I was ten years old. With care, it is possible to sharpen a knife with this stone alone, although not to shaving sharp, for that, stropping is necessary. As an impromptu strop, I have used on my travels either folded paper or a dishcloth with a bit of toothpaste on. It was possible to get knives to shaving sharp that way, but it was a bit laborious and time-consuming.

Thus came the second addition to the set, the beige-red stone. The red layer is of a significantly finer grit than the fine carbide layer on the grey stone, which is better for a touch-up on a knife that is not overly blunted. It is a very hard and not overly porous stone that can be used with either water or oil. I do not know its composition, but it does not behave like carbide and does not soak up water much. I only use it with water, it is more practical on travels.

However, stropping was still a major pita. Luckily, I found my grandfather’s old leather strop for razors when rummaging around in the attic (I found the razors too). It consists of a leather belt sewn into a loop that is spanned with a screw. The leather was rotten, but it was not a lot of work to replace it. I improved the design a bit with a bottle cork cut in half to not span the leather over a sharp edge, which would lead to faster deterioration. I am thinking about making several of these for my shoppe too. This has made stropping a lot easier, although it is not ideal for big knives. It works reasonably well even without abrasive paste – this strop is not primed and I am still pondering whether or not I should prime one side or leave it as it is.

One of my friends has a small folding knife that has a kukri-like blade gomtry. That unfortunately means that it is not possible to sharpen with a flat whetstone that cannot reach inside the tight concave curve of a small blade. A stone with a curved surface is needed. And I found a few exactly such stones when I was visiting my aunt – she lives near a river in an area where quartz cobbles are easy to come by in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and surface smoothness. A quartz cobble does not remove the material as well as a carbide stone does but it does work well for maintaining an edge that is not overly deteriorated. And no, I am not joking – it really is perfectly possible to sharpen a knife properly with a stone found in nature, with a bit of skill and care in selecting the right stone.

The last edition to the hand sharpening kit was a hard-backed strop and a hematite-based stropping compound. The strop is simply a black-locust board with leather glued on both sides and a handle screwed on one end. The leather is with the skin-side out on one side and flesh-side out on the other. The rougher flesh-side out was subsequently primed with the stropping compound. It is hard and big, and thus suitable for stropping even really big knives. It is very efficient too, a few strokes on the primed side and a few more on the clean side, and any knife is as sharp as a razor.

For traveling the stones get packed into a plastic food container with a silicone pad and a few other things like the two wooden wedges with winkles (those were an afterthought this time because I knew I will be teaching someone to sharpen knives and I wanted to have some easy way to demonstrate the right angle) a smaller bowl and a silicone pad.

I think this is the final stage for me, I cannot think of anything else that I could need.

I do wonder whether it would make sense to make all of this into some kind of snazzy “traveling sharpening kit” and offer it in the shoppe. It is not a sharpening gizmo, it does require some skill to use properly.

And if you are wondering what you need to sharpen knives to a truly wicked edge, here is all you really need to achieve that goal and none of it is overly expensive or difficult to make. You can buy fancier or more expensive equipment but you do not need to.

DIY Buffing Compound

I am going away for a few days, after that there will be several more posts from my Auntie’s garden and some knives. I wanted to pre-write a few posts, but I do not have enuff time, unfortunately. But I have enough time to finally give you a functioning recipe for a DIY buffing/stropping compound.

It starts with a bucket full of old nails and other rusty steel scraps. It is outdoors, filled with water and a little solar-powered aerator to help the corrosive process a little.

Once in a while I sift through it and collect the mud that gathers on the bottom of the bucket, I put it in another bucket, let the water settle, skim it, and leave it dry a bit if possible.

Final drying is done on the stove in the shop. When it is completely dry, the final product is de-facto ochre.

I put the ochre in an old paint can and put it directly into the fire in the oven or in a pot on a charcoal fire in a BBQ pit o anneal it. I do not have any pictures of that, unfortunately, I forgot to take some when I was at that step. The final product of this step is a hematite powder/sand.

The powder needs to be crushed and sifted. The best method that I have devised is to put a piece of nylon stocking over a bucket, put in it a bit of the powder and gently agitate it with a spoon, put it in the mortar to crush it, put it back in the stocking, rinse, and repeat. That achieves two things – the finely crushed powder does not float around the shop and make everything pink and it is very finely sieved indeed. I have no idea about the exact grain size, but I do not think it is that important right now.

Next step I have started to make a teensy-tiny batch of dubbin. First I heated up 8 g of olive oil, then I added 8 g of bone marrow fat and as the last step, I added 8 g of beeswax. This is the substance that I am using to treat my handmade leather goods.

I poured approximately two-thirds aside into two samples to give to my most recent customers who bought knives with leather sheaths. Then I mixed the powdered hematite into the rest until it started to thicken slightly when stirred. I guess I did not anneal the hematite enough because I got a chocolate brown color. Finely crushed and sifted hematite powder is the true, original jeweler’s rouge and I sort of expected it to be, well, rouge colored. I will do a better job annealing, maybe with a gas torch and we will see with another batch. At least it is a pleasant and not disgusting brown.

After it all cooled I have weighed it all to guesstimate the ingredient proportions for the final product and there they are:

1 part of olive oil, 1 part of beeswax, 1 part of tallow, and 4.8 parts of abrasive powder.

The final product has about the right consistency that I need so I think I do not need to tinker with the recipe further. It is hard so it does not smear very easily, but not so hard that it could not be used for manual buffing. I have used it in two ways and it works for both of them well.

The first was to use it to prime a hard leather strop to buff blade edges. It worked marvelously, getting the edge to shaving sharp like no bee’s knees. I am definititutitevely going to use it for that.

The second use was to put it on a piece of cloth and buff the pakfong and bronze on my latest knife to remove the patina. And it worked like a marvel, much better than all the commercial compounds that I have tested in this way in the past because those usually require much faster movement.

So I do call it a success, I have made a usable compound for manual buffing of blade edges and small metal parts. I will continue with the experimentation and perhaps make even bigger batches. I also plan to try my hand at making sharpening stones, I do have a bit of experience with that already.

Eye Finished a Comishun

I got a commission for a knife, which did make me happy a bit. Making a commission has one huge advantage over making a knife just so – the existential dread questions “Will somebody want this?” and “Will they be able to afford this?” are both answered in the affirmative. And the requests were not unreasonable – a big camping knife with a striker and a ferrocerium rod. Handle from black locust wood, leather sheath with some black-locust ornament, if possible bark-like surface. Black locust has some personal significance to the customer, I did not ask what it is. And they have chosen one of my already finished blades, so I could go right ahead.

I gave them a choice of three types of black locust wood – untreated, treated with ammonia, and a very expensive piece of burl that I bought some time ago and did not deem worthy of a blade yet. They chose the expensive burl, and I must say it does look very fancy. I infused the handle with resin, although it is impossible to get a complete soak on wood as hard as black locust. But a few mm is just fine. The bolster and pommel are stamped 1 mm bronze. Not polished, just brushed with a steel brush and allowed to build up patina. Cow bone spacers for contrast.

It is the same design as the “not a masterpiece” knife, but the blade is from oak bark blackened spring steel. For some reason the blackening reacts differently with the unquenched steel at the spine, making this funny light triangle on it. I would very much like to know the reason for this different reaction – the chemical composition of the steel is identical throughout, it is the crystalline structure that changes. Yet, evidently, various chemicals react differently with hardened and unhardened steel.

Google yielded no usable results for putting tree bark texture on leather, maybe nobody managed it yet. So I had to improvise a bit. I ended up with finding several pieces of sharp basalt gravel and pressing the ragged edges into the leather. It does look tree-bark-ish, I think. On the sketch, it looked a bit empty though, so we agreed to put a black locust leaf in there too. With a bit more refinement the texture would probably look even more like tree bark, but I had to end the experimentation at some point, otherwise, I would not be done on time. The tip of the leather sheath is darker, I have applied patina shading there. Now that I think of it in the photos it looks a tad peculiar. It looks better hanging tip down. Lesson learned – photograph sheaths and knives in them tip-down. Next time, the lesson will be promptly forgotten.

I could not buy bronze tubes for the striker and rod handles, it would seem nobody in CZ sells them. I have bought rods, but drilling a rod concentrically without a lathe has proven to be an impossible task so far. So I made the handles from brass and I coated them with a thin bronze layer electrolytically. The patina has built up almost immediately, which is nice. It took several days for it to build up on the knife bolster and pommel.

It is a big, heavy-duty knife weighing 224 g alone, 447 g with the sheath and accessories. Blade 4 mm thick at the base, tapering towards the tip. Fullered, flat grind. Point of balance at index finger right behind the bolster for a comfortable grip and control when cutting food. When the long grip is held towards the pommel, it gives the knife a nice heft for chopping, for example, when making splinters for starting a fire.

The knife will be given to its owner next weekend. I do hope they will be happy with it and get some use out of it.

Beading: A Promise of Cherries

And the flowers of spring.

These ones are a bit different from my usual work, where the effect is created by artfully and precisely stringing beads. These two are created by stringing a lot of beads together. Nobody will ever notice if the leaves are three seed beads apart or four, just that there’s a lot of them.

Selfie of a middle aged woman wearing a necklace made from Bohemian beads and wax pearls. Detailed description of necklace in the next pic

Close up of the necklace around the neck. The necklace is about 1" in diameter and consists of irregularly strung beads in the shape of flowers and leaves in red, green white and gold.

Same as last image, necklace lying on the table

I al

Small earrings with white glass flowers and green leaves

so made some matching earrings with the leftover beads:

The bracelet actually came first. It’s in my favourite colour: all the hues of blue. The technique is the same for both: A row of large seed beads is strung up and then you keep adding the different elements, always working from one end to the other, spacing them more or less regularly.

Bracelet made from blue and green Bohemian glass beads. The beads are in the shape of leaves and flowers, alternating in an irregular but very dense pattern. Bracelet seen worn on wrist.

Same bracelet, lying on a table formed as a ring

There’s another major difference between this project and the usual ones: cost. A normal bracelet /set of earrings hast a cost of a few bucks. Even the “Mermaid” one was definitely under 10€ , even with the Bohemian crystals. these are quite expensive. Sure, one bag of flower beads or leaves isn’t much, just around 3 €, but you need a lot o them, so each piece comes down to 35 to 40 € is beads alone, hours worked not counted. I’ll call them my easter gift, I could spend money more foolishly.

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Corona Crisis Crafting: This Time for Real

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A Big Commission – Part 1 – Beginning

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Third Wooden Mystery

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Crafting: polymer clay

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Another Wooden Mystery

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Solving a Wooden Mystery

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Don’t Test Blade Sharpness With the Ball of Your Thumb!

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Evolution of My Sharpening Kit

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DIY Buffing Compound

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Eye Finished a Comishun

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Beading: A Promise of Cherries

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