I really haven’t made or done anything new since I completed my broken shovel waterfall. I have a couple projects I’m working on right now, but they’re both multi-step projects and I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for stuff to either dry or cure. Unfortunately I have a busy week coming up so they probably won’t be finished or on the blog this week. There’s always next week though!
One of my projects involved first carving SM Blue foam. What a mess that makes! It’s pretty easy to shape, I mostly sanded it to the shape I wanted, but there was foam and dust everywhere.
Once I had my shapes, I needed to make molds of them. I used a tip seen on Made by Barb to mix silicon and corn starch. Honestly, when she says it smells strongly of vinegar, she’s not exaggerating. We’re talking about a vinegar smell that slaps you right in the face! She makes some really cool stuff though so go check her out.
Learn something new…
Okay this may not be new to you, but it was very new to me. My ex-husband is a plumber and whenever he did any caulking, he always spit on his finger and then used it to smooth the caulking.
I have never in my life had enough saliva in my mouth to even spit much less smooth caulking with it. So there are tools you can buy that will smooth it for you but sometimes the tools won’t fit where the caulking needs to be smoothed. I’ve tried using just water, but water is not saliva and on it’s own doesn’t work. But then I saw this recipe for making silicone molds that uses dish soap and the light bulb went on.
If you add some dish soap – any dish soap people, there’s nothing magical about blue dawn – it adds enough slip that you can dip your fingers in the soap water and smooth the caulking without the silicone sticking to your fingers.
Failure is still an option…
One of the things I most dislike about multi-step projects is that completing any of the steps successfully doesn’t guarantee the final project will work. So I carved my shapes and they came out beautifully, just like I wanted. I’ve made my molds, and they worked in spite of some kinks and the frustration of trying to work on something fiddly with flies biting and neighborhood dogs barking. What I wouldn’t give for a garage!
Biting Flies
On the topic of flies biting – they are horrible this year. We’ve never had them so bad. But I found these disposable fly traps at TSC Stores and they work. They stink – like rancid grease – but they work. The included bait even draws in those gnats that are always hanging out around the dogs butts so I call that a win. It seems to be helping, I have two in my yard. They’re supposed to be good for 30 days so we’ll see how it goes.
Have a happy Sunday and hopefully in another week I’ll have a successful project to share.
