I’ve been a bit remiss in my blogging, so here’s some catch-up.

I’ve made a couple of frames and cradles.  Here’s one for the fly’s eye piece (which will have a small fly in the back:

I mixed some “bronzing powder” into a blue-green mix of acrylic to get an iridescent effect, hopefully reminiscent of a house fly’s body.  The frame is almost 3 inches thick, and the top piece floats a quarter inch off the frame.

Next up:

Again, a deep cradle to make it feel like you are really peering into the keyhole.  This is for the “Somebody’s checking out your ass” piece.

I also prototyped using copper pipe as magnifying glass holders:

Of course, if you saw if from an angle it would look more interesting:

I tried etching text into the pipe by masking with paint, scraping off text (“BLAH BLAH BLAH…”), and having it sit in an acid bath for two hours.  I’m not thrilled with how the etching came out.  Looks a bit sloppy.

Speaking of etching, I also tried etching the dolls at last.  Here they are after painting and two passes of the laser to etch off the text “So it goes.”

I then let them sit in an HCl acid bath for 5 hours.  Unfortunately, the paint wasn’t an adequate acid resist, and it broke down, so the result is crap. I think I need to use an enamel paint instead of an acrylic one.  Grrrr.

On the bright side, I do like the rusted look as it will go better with the bombsight.  I’m thinking maybe just rust the letters instead of trying to etch them. Only problem would be sealing the metal so the rusting action is halted.  I may just screw it and keep it in the painted state, but use a different color than black.

In other news, I got some roofing copper that I played around with. Here is an embossing experiment:

And while I was on the laser at TechShop, I etched a hand onto some nice thick acrylic that I scored at Building Resources:

On Sunday, I met with Mauri Skinfill of Unspeakable Projects.  She gave me some very good feedback on my direction, and confirmed some of the doubts I’ve been having about my recent work.  The decorative frames that I’ve been making are cute, but not really all that interesting; they distract from the elegance of the magnifying glasses and text. She encouraged me to also work on the military themed pieces- gas mask, bombsight, and to make multiples of each. I’ve been wanting to make more gas masks, so it was nice to hear. To that end, I’ve ordered a bunch more online. Some are being shipped directly from Russia!  I’ve been doing some thinking as to clarify what it is I am trying to achieve in this series.  I’ll keep you posted…