Please Throw Me Some Fairy Dust! + a mini craft update..

Yah, I am seriously in need of some Fairy Dust to magically jump start my burning passion for making things. This past month has been pretty much an arid craft desert for me.

Perhaps it's the extremely bad weather. Besides the occasional pockets of heavy downpour, it has been really humid and hot. It's the kind of weather which you'll have totally no mood to do anything. And when I have no mood, everything just spirals into procrastination and the non-existence of motivation! Maybe I should just shift my resin/jewelry workspace from the non-air-conditioned living room area to my air-conditioned sewing room... Or perhaps I should just kick my butt and just get the sewing going! Sigh.

Well. There's still a tiny glimmer of crafting magic in the air last week. I'm planning (oh yeah, though I lack the motivation to do any physical crafting, I have tons of ideas and plans in my head... Oh, the irony!) to include some mixed media buttons and jewelry pieces involving metal work and wood work. 

I finally got some of the materials and tools needed for torch soldering and got my hands dirty on some first time soldering. I tried some gold-filled solder-filled wire first... And it was a total failure.. None of my test pieces soldered properly! I guess the omission of flux was what caused my failure. == I thought I should stop wasting more of the gold-filled wire (which ain't cheap) and wait till I have some flux on hand before testing that again.

Anyway, I switched to Argentium silver for my next testing. This is the material which I intend to use for my future pieces for the shop. And you know what? I love Argentium silver, a lot! Together with the Argentium silver soldering paste, it's quite a breeze to work with! I managed to create a letter 'a' and a geometric focal piece of triangles, which I later made into stackable bracelets.

I used half-hard wires and personally, I had to anneal them before creating the tiny triangles. In case you're wondering, I learnt quite a lot from the various YouTube soldering videos and the metalsmithing classes on Craftsy.

On the sewing front, I made a waterproof lunch bag, which was really a quick and simple project. And that was doubled up as a gift bag which contained some yummy gifts for another friend of mine. BUT, I'd forgotten to take a photo. Man. ==