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.
