Fun with Paper

Okay, Sean, hate to admit when you're right, but I need a light box. Taking pictures of soldered pendants is hard! No matter what angle I choose, it's glare-y or too flat. And some of the angles that I'm using to avoid the glare are just weird. But I'm running out of time to post for the day, so these will have to do.

Last night, I put together two pressed flower pendants and one using a couple of paper punches. I was trying my hand at free-form paper cutting (layering many pieces of paper and cutting out gradually larger versions of the same basic shape) and it was pretty much a disaster, as I expected. I was a little frustrated and decided to look through my paper punches for inspiration. Then I decided to just use those instead! I really loved the look - the paper choices were completely random, but I think they work.

The flowers - I'm pretty sure these are pansies, were a response to Brenda's comment to an earlier post where she said she likes purple and yellow pansies. I happened to have a package of them, so I matched them up with some papers. The one with the greenish-blue "mottled" background is just scrapbook paper with a floral abstract pattern on both sides. The other has plain, green, heavyweight paper on one side, and a scrap from an old letter someone wrote in French that I purchased at a show a year or so ago.

I'm still not happy with my soldering skills, but I think they're coming along and (maybe more importantly) I'm able to do it much faster now. These three only took about 40 minutes, and the two floral ones were each done in one pass. I think part of my problem is overworking these, so I made myself stop when it looked okay. The butterfly one is a little wonky and I tried to fix it, but I think I may have snipped it a little too much, so some of the copper tape I see is through the glass, not lack of solder.