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Saturday August 17, 2013
More buttons
Felicity ran another (different) workshop for the Guild on making buttons - in fact she is so oversubscribed we are having to run another one next month.
One of the types (made using a similar sausage techniques to that which we used last time) produces imitation wooden buttons - which, as we observed, can look more like wood than wood itself. (More wood fakery).
Two new techniques were making buttons using air-drying clay painted with an acrylic varnish, and making resin buttons. Felicity brought Adam along (a trained chemist) to manage the two-part resin. They had to compromise on the resin they used as they needed it to be dry within a couple of hours in order to suit the workshop environment. This had several effects - one of which was that Adam was torn between saying: "don't panic - just pour slowly and carefully into the moulds" and: "hurry up...it's all setting...". Another effect is that there were a lot of bubbles caught in the button, which does not have to be the case with a slower setting material; the latter might be easier to handle if one were doing it at home.
Posted by Christina at 4:29 PM. Category: Crafts
