Week 45: Gears Galore

It's steampunk o'clock again!  The more popular the style becomes, the more materials seem to show up at my local craft store.  I have to admit, the lure of antiqued metals and gears is too much for me to resist.  So in another great showing of my favorite crafting style (gluing things to other things), I decided to work with my considerable steampunk components stash this week.

Clock face, key, and gear pendant on leather.  I love these little flat keys from the scrapbooking section at Joanne's!  They look great and are super easy to attach to other components.

Clock face, gear, and cameo necklace.  I'm really feeling the clock-y goodness this week!

Altered key with clock face, hex nut, crystal, and weathered art-deco style "wings".

Another altered key, this time with gears, scroll work, and a neat little mirror!

Filigree pendant with gears and hex nut.  I created a blue patina on the base for the pendant  by using the ammonia and salt technique.

Altered key with keyhole, gear, and fan "wings".  The fans came from the clearance isle at Michael's, and I just knew they had to go on a key!

And back to clock faces!  Clock face with gears and washer on antiqued brass base.  The pendant is threaded on leather, and I added a few gears to keep it company.

Week 3: Bang Bang

It appears that I'm having weekly themes!  My lovely little sister gave me a whole bucket full of spent shells from her husband's latest foray to the shooting range.  They hung out for quite some time before I got around to doing anything with them.  Thanks to the blog I thought I could figure out at least seven different things to do with shell casings.  That turned out to be not quite true.  I managed to execute six different designs for the bullets, but I was lacking a seventh.  My seventh object was a washer that I wanted to turn into a pendant.  Because with most of the bullets I had decided to solder jump rings to the top, I used it to add a jump ring to a washer, and then decorated it.

The world's most amateur attempt at a solder join.

The finished washer pendant with chain

 I am pretty happy with the washer pendant overall, as long as I don't look at the back too long.  I'm much happier with the bullet projects.  They are all pendants waiting to be officially made into necklaces, except the lucky two that actually got hung on a chain.  I'm pretty happy with the results.  overall I consider this week a success, but I'm a little worried about keeping up this accidental weekly theme thing.  :)  Still, here are the finished bullet pendants.  See you next week!

Bullet with butterfly wings.  I'm so from the 90s.

I added origami paper, a bent brass finding, and some chain to this bad boy.  I think this one is my favorite.

I "re-tipped" this bullet with a an amethyst bead from my stash.  The casing is also "engraved" (aka I slipped while drilling holes and decided to drag the drill all over the casing to make squiggles to hide it.)

This one got wrapped in text printed tissue paper and tipped with a quartz crystal point.  I then "antiqued" the paper by running a heat tool over the paper to add the dark edges.

This bullet was treated with an ammonia fume and salt treatment to turn it from its original brass finish to this really cool mottled blue.  I added a red tiger eye tip before I gave it the patina treatment as I was worried trying to "smoosh" the end of the bullet around the bead would mar the blue finish.