Braided Lanyard

We came back from vacation back on Tuesday and I've been busy each day since, though I can't quite mention on what until some nondescript point in the future.   While we were on the other side of the province however we spent a fair deal of time with my wife's grandmothers (the both of them).  Last year I'd made a lanyard for her maternal grandmother's cane and during our vacation she requested that she might like one a little larger and in black.  The original lanyard has held up pretty well over the last year or so and it's no trouble to duplicate it again.  Meanwhile, it's occurred to me that this might be a useful sort of thing for others, so it's now being offered through the store.

Vacation Time!

The wife and I are making the half day drive out to see her Grandmother tomorrow.  Said Grandmother will be celebrating her 90th birthday this Saturday so the trip is certainly justified.  We'll be meeting a lot of my wife's other relatives from across the province while we're there and I should be back by Monday evening.  It's pretty quick as vacations go so the Etsy store will remain open but any shipments will probably have to wait until Tuesday.

Trick Braided Bookmark

Because who doesn't enjoy making something specifically so someone else might look at it and go "How the heck did they do that?"

Custom fit Camera Case

My camera's a pretty odd shape with the massive macro lens on the front of it.  It's the sort of thing that's perfect for taking nifty, highly detailed photos of objects that will pose for you but less suited for toting around.  I expect to be doing a bit of hiking over our vacation and I understand I've been nominated as one of two family photographers (probably decided purely by the size of the lens aperture >_>) so I needed a solid way of carrying my camera around.

Voila!  Some stoned oil leather, a bit of latigo, and an old belt clip I've been bouncing around forever and one custom carry case ready to go.  It fits together pretty snuggly and that little latigo partition in the pouch keeps the camera sitting upright despite that honking lens. 

Papermaking Round 10

Round 10 was an attempt to make a massive amount of paper at one time.  I used 3x the normal amount of pulp and probably could have made roughly 25 pages with a gallon bucket full of pulp.  Unfortunately I've found a fault in my mesh that is causing a weak spot in each sheet.  I'm guessing the mesh has gotten clogged with ink and other such byproducts and this is preventing the water from draining through the mesh in that spot.  I'm going to try using some scraps of cloth to replace the mesh and see if that works any better.  It might get clogged as well but cloth is easier to replace than a plastic mesh I bought as part of a kit.

It took a couple hours to mold about 20 pages and only about half of them were decent enough to dry out (the others have been returned to the pulp bucket).  Of the ~10 "survivors" three are still pretty soggy that don't show any sign of drying over the past 2 days.  I'm still experimenting with different approaches towards the drying situation.  It seems like the paper needs to be left unrestrained to dry but it needs pressure to prevent warping and the two are not compatible.

In the meantime, I have a paper that feels nice, folds cleanly, and even looks pretty nice.  All the bits of ink and additives in the source paper seem to clump together (magnetism maybe?) and you get these wee specks of color that stick out against the nice, neutral gray of the paper.  Mixing newsprint and printer paper pulp works so well I'm having second thoughts about trying to use hydrogen peroxide to adjust the color.

Mega Belt Pouch

This new pouch was made under a commission based on the pouch I'd finished last week.  Same sort of general idea but per the client's request I added an internal divider, two pockets along the back wall, and a little pen loop.  It took some tricky stitching to get all that to come together but I'm fairly pleased with the results.

Papermaking Round 9

Now I'm getting somewhere.  I went back to using the dispersion method with the deckle.  The pour method is easier, cleaner, and uses 1/4 of the water, but I can reduce the water requirements (which was all of a gallon for this batch) by making a lot of paper in each batch.  I was surprised with how many sheets I got out of the same amount of pulp and, as one might figure, the sheets are smoother and more consistent now.  They're also more flexible so they can fold without cracking now.

Now that I have a process I can work with I'll be working on refining how the sheet's dry and mass production.  I'd also like to experiment with using various additives like food coloring, hydrogen peroxide, and gelatin to see how they affect the end result.  Get a little more chemistry going in my vat.

Batch #10 is pulped and waiting until I have time to mold it into sheets.  I would guess that it's at least 20 sheets of paper worth of pulp (currently sitting in a gallon bucket as a 50/50 mix of pulp and water) so that'll be pretty representative of where I'd like to be with the final process.