Waxing and rolling

One of the stranger blog post titles I have used, but I was doing two different things but not enough of either of them to warrant their own full post, so here they are together.

Firstly, the waxing.  We recently purchased some really large chunks of bees wax from a friend's garage sale.  The wax was pretty icky (a technical term) and it was a little bit hard to see the beautiful swan underneath the ugly duckling outside, but Barry encouraged me to buy it so that I could use it for encaustic and other lovely wax things.

I'm sorry there are no before shots; nor any action shots of Barry going at it with the machete to cleave off the worst parts and make the chunks small enough for me to manage...

We thought that if I melted it down, then strained it through fly-screen wire, and poured it into waxed paper cups, then it would be in good shape for me to use, and it was!

Here are some of the 'ick' bits I strained off, and some cooled wax - you can see the perfect soft, creamy golden colour of it.

As I was melting, straining and pouring them and letting them cool, I couldn't help thinking I was making lots of coffees for folk. They even look like black coffee, white coffee but then when they harden they don't look like coffee at all...

Here they are finished and stacked in the cupboard under the electric wok for easy access. You can imagine the simply divine smell that came from an a afternoon of melting kilograms of wax.  It was interesting to see quite a few bees buzzing around the studio door.

I have used about 2/3 of my first cup and the wax is simply gorgeous to work with. Sometimes you spend a long time doing background work or preparation work just so that when you need to use something you can - this was one of those tasks, and a good one for the start of the year when I am full of good intentions!

And then to rolling.  On my list for about a year has been to have a play with a 'roller' Barry purchased years ago.  It is for for rolling jewellery metal through but I had some ideas of things we might be able to do with it - just had to find time to play. So we did.

Firstly I wrote out some words and cut them from stiff card.

And then we got going with some aluminium and the roller, and tried to press the words into the aluminium. Impossible to photograph, I'd have to say that nonetheless I was pretty happy with the marks we managed to make.

In case you're wondering, my iPhone has a purples case which gets reflected beautifully...

Lots of food for thought and opportunities to see if we can take this places I think. We have a bit of work to do getting the balance of the rollers right and working out how to not have it pull too much to one side, but oh, the possibilities do excite me!