soc_puppet | Feeling crafty

With significant progress made on my two trades, I've begun work on the Ship in a Bottle.

By which I mean I've melted exactly nine crayons in the base of the bottle. See, I'm using a bottle like this - I'd go so far as to say it's exactly that type of bottle except it's more than three-and-a-quarter inches tall - and I wanted to have a base in the bottom of it to raise the characters up a bit. Gives 'em a bit more room, see. And while the crayons initially looked like they'd be the perfect solution, well. Completely drying left something of a sinkhole in the middle of wax, which isn't exactly a solid place for two polymer clay characters to be standing, let alone in close proximity to one another.

My next plans are either MORE WAX or more polymer clay, but if anyone has a suggestion for how I can get the wax to not do that sinkhole thing instead I'd love to hear it.

Current Mood: creative

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

soc_puppet

Okay, first of all: Wow! You do amazing work :)

Second: That's very helpful, thank you!

Third: Rather than an actual nautical ship, I'm going with the fandom type of ship ^^a This is still very helpful and applicable, just. Not entirely in the way you interpreted? (My family has a thing for puns, I have no good excuse.)

What I'm planning is to mold a couple of characters out of Sculpy or equivalent and then stick them next to each other in the bottle. I would love to have any advice or suggestions you could give me re: putting interesting things in bottles with the intent to keep them there if you're still interested in helping me with this project. Either way, thank you for pointing me in the right direction for ground materials and the accompanying information :)

From:

needled_ink_1975

I write fic, and I missed that pun...

...head!desk...

LMAO! This is gonna be awesome, and of course I'm in. I'm qualified. I once built a plastic model *tank* in a bottle. And painted it. And added blasted 'trees' and assorted shrubbery. It took over a hundred hours. That was for a bet, and yes, I was young and stupid. Your project is infinitely more sane, and not to mention, mature and clever :)

First things first, if you want to get that wax out of the bottle, you need to mix up a strong soap-and-water solution, in a big pot, bring it up to the simmer, and put the bottle in it. The soap should stop the softening wax from smearing the glass, but sometimes it doesn't. Take the bottle out every now and then (use oven mitts!) and use whatever fits down the neck to scrape wax out. When there's hardly any wax left, change the water (yes, add soap), bring to a simmer again, and keep swishing the bottle so that the melted remnants of wax wash out. One word of caution: if your water is hard (lots of minerals) it may permanently mark the glass. If you see any greyish residue forming, yank the bottle out and melt the wax via external heat; pour it out. Then settle in front of the TV with rags on the end of a stick, and rub, rub, rub till the remaining wax is all gone.

And tell me about everything you'd like to have in the bottle. If you can, take pics of what you have already. Even better, draw the kind of scene you want. If you don't have an image host, attach the pics in email (I'll send a PM).

Umm, and you'd better know that if you enjoy this bottling business even a little, you'll be tempted to enjoy it more the next time, and try variations on the theme (think: brandy snifter, with custom-cut glass sheet for a lid), ad infinitum; this is a lifetime hobby (it's also one that sells rather well, just btw).

*trundles off to send PM*

From:

soc_puppet

Lol! No worries; it got you here, so it all works ;)

XD I don't know about mature, but I'll take clever. And I also have a bad history when it comes to resisting a challenge. Hint: I don't manage it very often.

Full disclosure: While I've been planning to try making Ships in Bottles for months at the very least, I'm only actually getting around to it now so I can enter a contest. (Three guesses which characters this'll feature, and the first two don't count 9_9a) I figure it has a decent chance of winning (because awesome pun), it means I'll finally be making one, and it'll get me lots of exposure for when I offer to make them custom at a later date ;) ...Plus I kinda ship it, so I won't be too terribly disappointed if it ends up hanging around my room for an undisclosed period of time :P

I've made a couple of things I put into bottles before, but my primary medium thus far has been crochet. That said, I'm a fair hand with pretty much any craft, and was planing to make Sculpy-or-equivalent figures of the two characters involved and slipping them in the bottle. The bottle involved is this, with a Sharpie for size reference; here's a better picture of the funnel in the wax. That's the only size I've been able to find them in reliably, though I did pick up this one at a thrift store a while back. I've got two more small ones I haven't touched yet, and they're relatively cheap besides, so I'm not too worried about it. I'll probably be going with the apoxie method to fill in the dent.

I had vague plans of making the characters in chunks and hot-glue-assembling the pieces together in the bottle, since that seems slightly more in keeping with traditional "things in a bottle" - it's one of the reasons I started with crochet, since that's relatively easily squishable and reshapable - but that just seems like asking for trouble. I haven't made the figures yet; I figured I'd get to that later. I've got a friend with experience painting Sculpy and was planning to ask her for tips in that area.

So yes! That is my entire plan up to this moment.

XD I certainly won't complain about the profit margin! *broke college student* Crochet doesn't sell as well as I'd like, I'm sad to say.

From:

needled_ink_1975

I clearly need to get out more. I mean, crochet? It's what my grannie did, and she ne'er did make anything like tha'. The octopus is too cute for words. The Pikachu (I checked to make sure I spelled that right. I am a Phillistine when it come to anime) was hard-done-by the light bulb. If you want to use a light bulb again, use a real one. Full instruction on how to take it apart. The most expensive thing you'll need is a diamond glass-cutter (like $5). They're dead easy to take apart and SuperGlue makes 'em even easier to put back together.

Okay, onto your current project. Let's start with the bottle and why it's being badly behaved. That bottom bit has wings, and as the wax cooled, it contracted, and pulled into the wings. I mentioned air bubbles: when you heat the existing wax, or pour in new hot wax, those bubbles collapse and make MOAR room in the wings. Hence very rude sinkhole. Now that I've seen the pics, I'm gonna advise you to start with a new bottle.

Reason: base material to that level needs to be all one substance. You're hoping to mount your figures sturdily on that base material. Two different substances, with two different consistencies is guaranteed to result in friction. It might be a small amount, hard to notice, but you'll end up with a gap between the malleable wax and the hard apoxie = not good.

Apoxie is a very good idea, given the shape of your bottle. It hardens at room temp without shrinking (ergo, no rude sinkholes!). Get some and roll it into little balls, and drop them one by one into the bottle. Use a chopstick to pummel them into submission. If you have trouble working around corners, get a cheap sundae spoon (long handle) and use pliers, a hammer, whatever, to bend the end of the handle in a way that'll help you out (yes, yes. You read me right: you must also become a smith. For it is written, crafting knoweth no boundaries, and likewise all crafters obey no laws... or something like that).

Once you've got those pesky corners filled in, the rest will be easy. BUT! don't fill your base all the way up to your preferred level. You need to plan where your figures are gonna be placed. Their feet are going to have pins which will be glued into the base. So you need to poke holes in that last layer of apoxie.

Fun idea? Apoxie comes in a wide range of colors, and there's a 12-color sample pack here. You could make the base up in layers of color if you'd like to.

Gonna leave it here for now. Zap any questions my way, any time.

–N