Archive for May, 2008

13th May 2008

Patterns

Julia Rothman is guest-blogging at Design*Sponge this week and one of her first posts was a tutorial on how to make repeat patterns by hand. I couldn’t wait to try this out but, as I’ve been feeling a little tired/brain-dead today, decided to use one of my existing designs…my Fetterangus stationery design!

Fetterangus notes

Using that Pictish-inspired design, I was able to come up with what would make some pretty darn nice paper:

Fetterangus paper

This gives me tons of ideas for more paper designs…if only I knew where to get it printed!

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02nd May 2008

Glass Etchings

When the Spouse bought his bead blaster, one of the “selling points” in his pitch to me was “you can use it to etch glass for prizes”. I think he may have regretted that yesterday as I had him conscripted into helping me etch 54 pieces of glass as prizes for this weekend’s race meet.

I adapted a 1912 Ludwig Hohlwein design for the vinyl cutter; this meant a fair amount of detail had to be removed and some of the angularity softened. Once the vinyl had been cut, the actual design was weeded, leaving a negative image. The remaining vinyl was applied to the glass, the piece was masked, and off it went to the garage to get blasted!

And the results:

Etched Glass

In total, thirty glass plates, sixteen 6″ rectangular vases, four 9″ rectangular vases, and four 7″ large vases were etched. All the glass came from IKEA so this ended up being a pretty cost-effective load of prizes.

More importantly for me, etching these pieces gave me some ideas for other “negative image” pieces I might do in the future. (And I’m sure the Spouse will be glad to hear that they DON’T involve the bead blaster!)

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