bird brooches

I think about making stuff a lot, I suppose. And sometimes it takes me years to getting around to finally executing an idea, and sometimes something just gets done. So, last weekend was one of those 'just do it' kinds of weekends.

I decided I wanted to make brooches. Now, I'm not exactly sure precisely how I arrived at this conclusion, but I found myself standing in an aisle at the craft store buying a baggy of wooden shapes and then standing in the jewelry findings aisle looking for pin backs...
and well, now I have brooches:

Yes, so, I opened my baggy of wooden pieces and sorted them... and then picked the biggest ones and measured those... and then made a file of that size... and then spent a good hour opening files and copying and pasting and combining until I had at least 30 bird portraits...
And then I printed those out and cut them apart and began the odyssey of production... I painted the fronts and sides of my wooden pieces with black acrylic paint... and then I found my snazzy Elmer's craft bond glue stick (because I have used a lot of glue sticks - and unless it's paper to paper - glue sticks are a nice idea but not a great adhesive) and got to work gluing my printed pictures onto the front of my wooden pieces... and then I pulled out my jar of satin varnish (because, honestly, satin is the most desirable finish — not matte, not high gloss) and gave each tile a good 2 coats of varnish...
Amusingly, okay, so maybe it's really only funny to me - while I was doing all this I was sitting there at my desk watching "The Nine Lives of Chloe King" via the internet.

And then I took them outside on the back porch and proceeded to apply pin backs with a generous helping of E-6000 glue. Oh, yeah, it's industrial strength - and so is it's odor. E-6000 must be used in a well ventilated area and whatever it has been applied to should be left in a well ventilated (or open) area for at least 24 hours for some of that pungent odor to dissipate. Yes, not everything about craft projects is all sunshine and sparkles.

And then, of course, I had to photograph them... Now, as it turns out, I made 30 brooches, since 30 is the number of picture fronts I could fit onto a sheet of paper (and there happened to be at least 30 of the same sized pieces of wood in my little baggy). I mean, when I started I was just going to make like 3 to see if they turned out well enough to be viable... and yeah, by the end of the day I had made all 30.

Apparently, I cannot do things in moderation.

So... I have them listed on Etsy at sarahkdesigns


and on Artfire at "SunshineSight"


So, get some art on that lapel : )