Creative Exchange – Part 3

June 9th, 2010

Last week I cut the two rods of acrylic I received into small discs as I decided to make an orange neckpiece and a green neckpiece too. The next task was to drill two holes into each disc and this is where things went horribly wrong. I nearly cried as it took me so long to cut all the discs out and drilling holes into the acrylic was impossible…read on…

I set my Dremmel drill to it’s slowest setting and drilled away. The acrylic melted and set instantly onto the drill bit. Nightmare!

But I persevered and made a few acrylic buttons, peeling the melted acrylic of the drill each time with my precision pliers, but soon gave up and felt totally despondent.

Luckily it was Friday and so I packed everything up and headed to college to see if my tutor could come up with a solution. Thankfully Andrew has an answer for any question and anything is possible in his workshop, so he dug out a little drill that works at really slow speeds and this did the trick. It took a while but I managed to drill through all my buttons with only a few melting incidents. Yay!

Back in my studio I cut a load of short lengths of silver wire and balled the end of each to make my flower stems:

And look how lovely they look with the acrylic:

I needed to sand all the discs to get them smooth and remove all the marks made by the saw. This gave them a matt finish and I really prefer this to the shiny look. So much to do, but I’ve still got plenty of time so will carry on and report back next week with further progress.

Posted in Work In Progress |