Arright, yall! I've got a pretty awesome thing to announce! I can now screenprint glossy vinyl stickers AT HOME!!! It occurred to me this was something I could probably do at home around the time I got my vacuum table, so I talked to my boss about it. He hooked me up with some samples of pro weatherproof ink and some sheets of old vinyl sticker material and I set to it.


I remembered that Jennpac had wanted to have some stickers made, and that seemed like a great place to start and test out my new gear. Well, I'm pleased to say that they came out fucking GREAT!!! Oh man, these things are awesome! (Check out her post here.) The art looks fanastic, and I gotta tell you, it's really sweet to see a high gloss finish on something you print when you're so used to matte finish inks.


The inks my boss gave me to try were solvent based inks, which worked well enough, but I'd have to switch emulsions to use them, and the fumes are unbelievable, heh, so fortunately, NazDar makes a really good, high gloss, waterbased ink for this kind of thing, so I've gotten myself some of that. BOO-YA!

I'd really love to do more of this kind of thing, so if you want some stickers done, send me an email!

-P.

SWEET! So, I just ran another quick test with my discharge paste, attempting to work out a way for me to be able to print waterbased inks onto dark fabric. Waterbased ink is quite thin, and even the best stuff isn't opaque when printed on a dark substrate, so to print on dark fabrics you've generally got two options: 1) print, dry, print, dry, print, dry ad nauseum until it's opaque, or 2) print a layer or two of white ink down, dry it, then print your color on top of it. This second method is actually quite adequate, but takes time, and leaves you with a heavy print.

What discharge agents let you do is basically bleach the color out of your substrate, so when you print your color on top of it, it's as though you're printing on a much lighter shirt.

And as you can see by these samples, HOLY CRAP! It worked out even better than I could have hoped. I tested out white, process yellow, and red ink, printed over a layer of discharge base. The colors are BRIGHT, vivid, and look more like they've been burned into the shirt than printed heavily on top of it.


So this is pretty exciting. My only concern is that when I wash them, as the discharge paste washes out, it may take the ink sitting on top of it with it, but we'll see, I'm going to toss these samples in the wash later today or tomorrow.

Also, I think tomorrow at work I'll ask my boss if I can take home a little bit of discharge powder that can be mixed directly into my inks, and try that. Using that would save me the extra step of printing the base down, and make printing on dark shirts every bit as easy as printing on light ones :)

w00t!
-P.

PS - ah crap, I still haven't posted about that show I did last weekend. Aight, I'll get to that later.

What's up folks! Got some new stuff to show you. Plush toys!!! My everencouraging (I declare that to be a word) LadyFriend™ encouraged me to combine my screenprinting and my sewing and make up some cute plush toys, so I figured what the hell and gave it a shot! You might remember these two little fellows from the shirt I made for my cousin's kid a few months ago. It's a modified version of him, and who knows, if he proves popular I may make additional permutations of him in the future. He's easy to edit, and small enough I can make films of him at home.



And, so then, there's this guy, heh. He actually comes from a nightmare I had at my girlfriend's place one night: (I was on a camping trip with my brother and dad in the Linville Gorge area. We were contemplating our campsite when we heard a rustling behind us and turned to see the shape of a very large bird forming out of leaves and other detritus from the ground, swooping by the tree line. There was a crack like thunder and the form of the bird dissapated, and something fell, spinning, out of it. The spinning object slowed and hovered a few feet from the ground. It was a koala, a very ANGRY koala, with antlers, holding a scimitar. That's when I woke up shouting.) Erm, right, so anyway. I told Hana about the dream in the morning, and she laughed at my ridiculousness and insisted that I draw the koala nature god for her, but that he must be cute. Heh, so I drew him up, screenprinted him and surprised her with a koala-nature-demigod plushie for her birthday :)

These have really been incredibly fun to make, and I've learned a SHIT ton about sewing in the process. I'll definitely be making more of this kind of thing, as well as other soft sculpture things in the future. Heh, I sort of have a vision of getting a wicker basket, making a model guillotine out of cardboard and filling the basket with plushie severed heads. I think that'd be fuckin rad.

Anyway, while they may not always get along, these fine stuffed, printed gentlemen are available for sale, individually, through my Etsy Store :)

More soon!
-P.

So, dig this, yall. I hung out with my old mentor Bill Fick a couple weeks ago and we got to talking about ways to create a bleached effect in printing. The obvious answer is, of course, to use bleach. However, bleach is a harsh ass chemical which breaks down fabrics after a while, and, as a liquid, is impossible to screenprint with.

So, I decided to do some digging. For screenprinting, you want a kind of thick liquid. Think... melted cheese, or stirred up yogurt at room temperature. Turns out, a company called SoftScrub makes two GEL cleansers that have bleach in them. BOO-YA! Perfect!

... Kind of..


I tried the first one (SoftScrub gel, in the green bottle), with lackluster results. Even left to bleach over night, it barely made a dent in the color of the shirts I tried it on.


So then I saw the other one (SoftScrub gel in the white bottle). THIS stuff got the job DONE! It's a thick, opaque white liquid, that I think has some abrasive 'microcrystal' stuff in it. Whatever it is, it did a great job bleaching the color out of the shirts I tried it on. It got black down to a nice texas orange, blue all the way back to white, etc, and that was only after bleaching for 30 or 40 minutes. If left longer, I imagine the effect would be greater still.

So, while yes, the white stuff works pretty well, I'm still not totally satisfied with the bleach technique. It's still a harsh, smelly-ass chemical, and will still degrade your fabric after a while. And, how exactly you would work it in with other printing (as in, bleach + other colors in a design) is... tricky.


So, then, I found this other--terribly named--product called Discharge Paste. THIS stuff is EXACTLY what I've been looking for. Basically it works like a heat-activated bleach. You either brush or print it onto your fabric, and it goes on totally clear. Once it's dry you can't even see where you printed it. So yeah, once it's dry, you heat it, either with a steamer or an iron (I used an iron), and almost as soon as the iron hits it, the color just saps right out of the garment. BOOM. Gone. It did a better job than bleach, but I still would like more of the color to have faded away. I think a few more strokes (getting the paste deeper into the fibers of the swatches) would have helped. Here's some pics.



Now, this is exciting for a number of reasons. Using discharge paste on its own lets me get an awesome bleached effect in a controlled way without degrading my fabrics. It also may finally let me print waterbased ink to dark colored shirts at home. Waterbased inks are thinner than plastisols (commercial, oil based t-shirt inks), and so you really have to layer them up to get them to look opaque on dark fabric. Using discharge paste, I can print down a base layer of the paste, dry it quickly, then print a colored ink on top of it, then when the ink is dry, iron it, and the discharge layer underneath should sap the color out of the shirt, making the waterbased color on top suddenly appear, very bright, as though it were printed to a light colored shirt. I haven't had a chance to test this latter technique yet, but rest assured I will in the coming weeks.

These are exciting times, folks!
More later!
-P.

Heh, haven't seen one of those from me in a while!

So dig this. Someone at work (I think it may have been Bossman himself), described his job as like having a bunch of little baby birds cheeping at him all day. My buddy at work Jeff thought that was pretty funny and decided to illustrate it.

I'd been wanting to experiment with plushie thingies for a while now, so I came up with the idea of making a little plush thing out of it.

So I got Jeff to scan it in and do color separations for it, and I printed it up on some old soft white jersey cotton, I made a back for it, and tonight I sewed it up, stuffed it, and sewed the corner shut!

It's super cool and was WAY fun to do. The craftsmanship is CRAP (except for the printing, which is pretty spot on), hehehe. It's misshapen and lumpy as fuck. My sewing, it needs work, and I need to learn to stuff these things and not have them be full of lumps.

Now, to sew the thing closed, and not have a big, obvious spot where it was sewn shut, I had to learn how to do an "invisible" or "ladder" stitch. Now, I'd looked around for a good tutorial on how to do this for a while now, but couldn't find one. In fact, the ones I found were impressively shitty. But then I found this one, and all was well with the world. It really laid it all out, cearly and comprehensibly.

So lemme know your thoughts, cuz I definitely see a lot more of this on the horizon! And check out the flickr page for more photos of the cushion!

-P.

Howdy yall! I'm very pleased to announce that I've finally worked my iPod cases up to the point that they're ready for the general populace. And I now have four of the li'l beauties available at my etsy store--3 skulls and a cupcake. So go check em out!

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade flameswithin.etsy.com

And hopefully sometime soon I'll have cases available for other versions, such as the iPod Touch/iPhone and iPod Nano! If you'd like me to custom make you a case to fit your device, just let me know!

Cheers!
-P.

So, about a month ago, I signed up for a meme committing me to make something for the first six people who signed up. I ended up doing a little more than that, but it's ok. These are the results.


First up, for Jenn pac, a new headband, since her manfriend Richard vomitsaw stole the last one I made for her. This one's a little more fancy than that though; I took the opportunity to redraw her horns, and add a decorative stitched border around the front. Er... and ignore that huge spot in the hem where I clearly fucked up, lol. Modelled by my roommate Jen.





Next up, iPod cases for four lovely people: Ali mckenzee, Josh joshtothemax, Laura alethalruby, and Aubrey spookyelectric1. Note the custom hand-screenprinted designs on Josh and Aubrey's ;) Fun stuff :) And, I fixed the tops on Josh and Laura's so they don't look quite so fucking bobo now.



For Lisa mishmashed, who requested not an iPod case, but a woodcut, I made this, heh. I haven't had a chance to print it yet, but I should be doing that one night this week. Once it's printed, I'll watercolor it or tea paint it. The image is flipped, so you can read the text. This was a hell of a lot of fun to make actually. I haven't worked much with wood, and when I have it's always been a nightmare. But I carved pretty much all this in the "proper" way, using a single blade and carving out each line individually, rather than just using U and V gouges like I would with linoleum.






And, for my friend Tim, I drew up this pretty wicked skull and screenprinted it to some purple fabric and sewed up him up a case. I've gotten a lot better at making these. In the end, it turns out that while machine sewing is fine for the inner and outer linings, to stitch the top in place, I pretty much have to hand-sew it if I want good results. I discovered this doing Aubrey's, which was too small to even attempt machine sewing. I've got some more cupcakes and skulls printed to a couple different fabrics. I may sew up some more of these and try selling them on etsy.



Anyway, gotta run to work, but wanted to share these.

Later, yall!
-P.

What up y'all! I kinda wanted to keep this under my hat until I was further along, but I'm way too excited for that, SO, dig it:

Ever since I made those screenprinted patches a while back, and found out about ThreadBanger, I've sort of had sewing on my mind. So, while I was home for xmas, I got my mom to show me the basics of using a sewing machine, and she lent me an old singer machine she's not using anymore.

For my first project, I decided I want to make iPod cases, for myself, to give to friends, and to sell on Etsy.

This was my prototype. I can't fucking believe it went this well! It's a little snug, but it fits like a GLOVE! I also can't believe that in the span of... probably 2 hours total (over a few days) I went from not knowing how to use a sewing machine, to making a fucking iPod case, complete with soft cotton lining!!!

[Edit: After sliding it in and out a few times, the case has stretched out (*juvenile chuckle*) and the fit is absolutely perfect :)]

I LOVE MAKING SHIT!!!!!

-P.

What's up, y'all?

So, dig this. There's a huge art festival going on THIS WEDNESDAY, December 10th from 6-10pm at the Neighborhood Theater in NoDa. This is a HUGE event, featuring 90 or so LOCAL artists, plus live performances by local bands, and best of all IT'S FREE!!!

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but I've been so caught up in getting ready for it (and getting a badass poster ready for friday) that I'm just doing it now. I'm actually going to have a booth at this festival, along with my buddy Swink from work. It's going to be pretty badass.

Now, I understand that most of you--my charlotte friends--aren't really into art. I know this. But there's going to be a lot more at this event than just visual art. There's bound to be clothing, jewelry, wood working, and other cool handmade shit, so please, come out and support your local poor creative folks!!

THIS Wednesday, 6-10pm, Neighborhood Theater in NoDa--BE THERE!!!

-P.

It might seem strange, but I love going to the post office, and I love mailing things. Most of what I mail these days is art sold on etsy (infrequently). But, while the little extra cash is great, I really love decorating the envelopes before I send them out :) I always do the person's name up real nice, in a banner, and of course I use a wax seal, heh. (This wasn't actually an etsy sale, just some art I needed to send back to a band in Alabama, but you get the idea.)

Ok, now dinner and art. Later.
-P.

Oh! And hey, do any of you charlotte folks actually have an interest in getting together to make Ojos de Dios? If so, let me know! I'm thinking... this weekend, or maybe one night next week?

*violently stumbles through the door and crashes onto the nearest couch, reeking of beer, cigarette smoke, ink and facial hair*

Sweet mother of GOD what a week! Let's see what we got here:

Monday, I had some dear friends over for a small Pumpkin Carving soiree. It was so much fun! :)

I decided to do a mexican sugar skull for mine; though, sugar skulls (and day of the dead in general) wasn't something I grew up with as a sorta-rican, so I had to spend some time looking and drawing them to get a feel for them. My pumpkin looks kinda crappy, but it was fun to make. I carved it with my woodcut carving tools, ha!


I didn't get shots of everybody's pumpkins, but here's a shot of Aubrey with hers. Heh, Cameron carved this into his. AWESOME!!!!



I love doing crafty stuff, and I love that my friends are into it, too. One of the few bits of Latino culture I strongly remember growing up with is ojos de dios (God's eyes). We made them and put them on the tops of our christmas trees. I think I'm gonna get these folks together again sometime in November to have an ojo de dios making party :) I've always made pretty simple ones, but I'd love to try my hand at making one a bit more elaborate :)

More in a sec,
-P.

So dig it, I've got some ratty, holey clothes. I work in a factory, so this isn't really a problem. But, my favorite pair of work shorts recently started developing a hole in the right leg, and I simply wasn't going to stand for that. The hole was forming as a long, horizontal tear and I thought it'd be pretty funny to make a patch for it that read "CENSORED," so, I did. (Because, as religion teaches us, the flesh is evil and must be censored.)

I measured how big I wanted the patch to be and drew out the word that size, cut it out of a piece of film with an exacto, taped it to the bottom of a screen and screenprinted myself some patches! I actually had some other goodies burned into my big screen, so I decided to make some other patches, too. I patched up a hole in my pajama pants with a censored patch as well!



I also snazzied up some headbands for mahself, too! Heh, I took some t-shirt sleeves and printed 'SHALLOW END PRESS' (actually, the text from the Green layer of my poster, still in my screen) onto them, with the image from my birthday coozies (with the '25' blocked out) below it. And on the other side, I printed the Key layer from my I Love You hand cards :) They look pretty badass.


I ♥ making shit.

Later,
-P.

Rock! So dig it, I totally just made this awesome 5-color, hand-silkscreened poster for a party I'm having from hand-drawn transparencies. And here's how it went.

I decided we were gonna watch Dead Alive at the party, and I remembered that I had done this little sketch of a skull puking in my sketchbook a year or so back. PERFECT!

( The rest! Image heavy, and a video, but SFW )


Phew, so there you go, that's how this craziness came to be. If ya got any questions, lemme know. And now, I'm going to bed. Later.
-P.

So, there's a good local band called Roof Rabbit. They play sort of folk-punk, heh, and their shows are always a good time. I've been acquainted with their bassist, Mike, for a while. In March, I heard they'd finished a new CD and that a friend of mine was slated to print the CD covers for them, but he wasn't sure he could do it. I offered to do them if it looked like he couldn't, and well, that ended up happening.

The whole thing happened so fast it almost made my head spin. I volunteered the possibility of doing it, and the next day I was getting a call asking if I could do them for sure, and I said yes. The day after that I was getting the screens ready :)

One night, Jason and Mike (two of the guys from the band), and Saya, who did the layout, came over and we set to work. In one night, from about 9:30pm until about 5am we printed 250 CD covers, three colors on the front, one on the inside, plus 20 or so posters, and a shirt.

I was a little nervous, this being my first time flying solo on a project like this, but I surprised myself; I knew exactly what to do in every situation, especially registration, and the printing went off without a hitch. Out of 250, there were less than 10 that actually looked bad. The guys were really happy with how everything came out, and so was I.





I LOVED doing this :) I almost certainly lost money on the project; I originally volunteered to do it for free, but the experience was worth more than money could ever give me. I told the guys that for doing this on the cheap, I want them to give my name to everyone they can who might want this kind of work done, because I want to do a lot more of it. I've even got a couple poster ideas for Roof Rabbit (one I've already started working on).

It really feels like my life just got a huge injection of pure, liquid awesome. Why would I ever do drugs when executing a project like this makes me feel higher than I've ever felt in my life!!!!??? It's like my heart is filled to bursting and my head has literally been spinning with dreams of where this could go.

Thanks guys, for letting me do this for you :)

-P.

Roof Rabbit's 1000 Strokes
So, Roof Rabbit is a local folk-punk band here in Auburn. I've been to several of their shows, and they're always a good time. I've been acquainted with their bass player for most of the time I've been in Auburn. They're finishing up a new album right now and wanted to hand silkscreen the album covers. A friend of mine was going to do it, but wasn't sure he could, so I volunteered. I admit, I wasn't positive I could do it, but I felt confident, and if nothing else, I was really eager and willing.

And so, on Saturday night, two of the guys from the band and the girl who designed the covers came over and we got to work. In one night I printed 250 CD covers for them, 20 or so posters, and a t-shirt.

The album cover is three colors on the front, one on the inside. 250 covers x 4 runs = 1000 strokes, not counting the posters, test-prints and t-shirt.

HAHAHAHAHAH!!!! IT WAS FUCKING AMAZING!!!! 8 months working in the silkscreen business has paid off. I've done enough and watched enough that I knew exactly what to do in every situation, and the printing went off without a hitch. The registration is great and there were less than 10 that looked bad. Everyone was really happy with how it came out :)

My head has literally been swimming ever since, I've actually felt HIGH I've been so happy about this. I've told them to give my name to everyone they can, because I want to do a lot more of this kind of work :)

Now, I wrote up a huge post with pictures about all this last night, but right before I hit 'Post,' it occurred to me they might have a specific release date in mind, and might not want pictures out before then, so I made the entry private and called Mike, the bassist today. Sure enough, they didn't want shots of the cover released until the CD officially comes out on the 6th of April, which happens to be my 25th birthday, hahahah. So, on my birthday, I'll drop a huge post on you guys with a full set of pictures from that night. For now though, enjoy these that don't show the artwork.

Ooooohhhh damn. Gah. I'm just leaving so much out and not making clear just HOW stoked I am about this. But, it'll be clear on the 6th.


RIP Buffalo's
Ahhh, let's see, as long as I'm posting, I guess I'll write about a few more things.

Damn. Two weeks ago tonight, my favorite bar in Auburn, Buffalo's American Tavern closed its doors. It came as a shock. Even the staff wasn't told until 8pm that night they were shutting down for good (which they were rightfully pissed about). It's really sad because it was THE bar where cool, non-frat people went to hang out, drink, and mingle. Most bars in Auburn have covers almost every night (I guess because they know Alpha Delta Dickwad's daddy will give him a few extra bucks to cover it), and Buffalo's never did. It was just an open, cool place. *sigh* and now it's gone.

Heh, closing night was pretty chaotic. Instead of charging by the drink, they charged $20 for all you could drink, lol. The piercing apprentice from one of the local tattoo shops threw up about three feet away from me. Someone handed me a shot of Maker's Mark (*mmmmmmmmmm*). Heh, the bartenders made a point of getting hammered, themselves. Pretty much for every drink they poured for someone, they took one themselves. By the end of the night, you'd order a drink, and you took what they gave you, hahah. Damnit. It's really sad, but it was one hell of a way to go out. People were taking signs down off the walls, I took home three pint glasses. I'm drinking water out of one right now.

Goodbye Buffalo's, you will be missed.


I Met a Girl? I think?
So, there was one upside to Buffalo's closing; that night, I met a girl, finally :) Perhaps it was the booze, but we hit it off, and she gave me a ride home, and a good night kiss. She's 23, in her 6th year of undergrad (*snrrk*), a fashion design major. And she seems pretty passionate about it.

I guess... I don't know though. We've only hung out once since then, and it was pretty subdued since we both had sinus infections. She hasn't called in a few days. She could be busy, or it could be a hint. I guess we'll see. If nothing else, for a few days, someone here found me desirable, and that's something :)


KHAAAAAAAN!!!!!
Heh, also, I came into work today at the frame shop and found this on the desktop by the V-Nailer. Apparently I look like Ricardo Montalbon, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Nighty night,
-P.

So, a few weeks ago, I realized that I'd never printed my name to any of my shirts, so, to remedy that little problem, I whipped up a little name drop for myself, carved it and printed it to all my shirts I'd made. It came out looking pretty neat (pictured right). Basically I drew my name out in charcoal on a scrap of paper, transferred it to a block by burnishing the back of the paper, then carved the original charcoal lines as best I could, giving a cool chewed up look.

While I was at it, I made few vids documenting the process and just posted them to YouTube. Sorry for the shitty quality, but my camera's old and wasn't ever intended for video.



And don't forget Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Hope that was educational! And now, I have the flu, and feel like a bag of assholes. I'm going to bed. Good night.
-P.

So, I *tried* to make Christmas cards this year, and, in fact, I did make some. The results were... well, I guess it depends on what you like, lol.



I planned to make them with spraypaint and cut stencils. I hadn't done it before, so I wasn't sure what substrate to use. I thought some illustration board I had lying around would be sturdy enough, so I drew up the images and cut them out. They looked pretty good. So, I got my buddies Austin and TJ to come over one night and help me do them up.


We got started and things went ok until the first problems arose. Once the board got wet, it warped pretty bad, which made the edges of the image fuzzy and shadowed. Also, since a shit-ton of wet paint was accumulating on the surface of the board, it started to drip down through the stencils onto the cards in ugly gray splotches. Then even later, some of the finer details of the stencils began to break away from the board, leaving holes where I didn't want them. I was pretty unhappy about it at first, but more recently, I've been able to admit that the shadowing probably makes the images look a hell of a lot more interesting. I guess I got attached to a certain outcome and forgot that sometimes in art you've just gotta let things happen.


After a while we called it a night. The cards were half done; they had either an inside or an outside, but not both. My stencils were pretty much toast, so I decided to screenprint the insides. I decided to give the cut stencil method another try. I re-cut my stencils, out of acetate this time, taped them to the bottom of my crappy little speedball screens, and went to town. Heh, the results weren't much better than the spraypaint. The softness of the squeegee, the low mesh count of the screen and the frigging stencil method itself conspired to create splotchy prints with bubbly looking ink. But, some of them did look cool. And, I even got to use some metallic silver and gold ink I got when Davis Design went out of business in Greensboro.


Umm... I guess I could include these, too. This is the other card that almost was. I really wasn't feeling the Christmas spirit this year, and kind of wanted to make the anti-christmas card. Well... a card that didn't look or feel like a christmas card. Heh, I really liked the stoplight and smoke thing because it was just so damned enigmatic, but I was never satisfied enough with it to commit it to a screen. Oh, the text means 'happy holidays' in Russian.


So, even if I wasn't totally satisfied with the results, I had a blast with the whole process, and learned some new techniques to use in the future. And, I also got these. These are the actual physical stencils we used to make the cards. The way the paint dried on them, they look amazing! One of these days (or weekends more likely) I want to frame them.


And with that, dear friends, I have talked too much, when these images alone should have been more than enough to say: Merry Christmas.


-P.

Hey everyone, I finished cutting another stone on Saturday. It's another citrine, and another square, this one right about 8mm (give or take .5mm--can't remember). This stone is a much nicer colour, and a lot brigher. It's got a lot more orange in it, and due to the simplicity of the pavilion (bottom), has a lot of really bright, colourful flash. Very fun to look at :) Cutting went well. I think there were only one or two minor problems. I give myself a B+, and I'm quite happy with it. There is one flaw I was hoping would cut out, but didn't, visible on the left side of the stone in this picture. I could have cut it out, but the stone would be nearly half the size it is now, and I like finishing large stones. There are more views below, and here is a diagram of what the stone physically looks like, for those interested. I uploaded one for the previous stone, too.



-P.

Damn I'm glad to be done with school! In school, class and projects took up so much of my time and energy I really didn't have room for anything else in my life. That meant giving up things I really enjoyed like making comics, playing the bass, and faceting (cutting gemstones). I've been doing these things again since I moved to Auburn, and it feels so good. The machine on the right here is my Facetron faceting machine. A stone is mounted to a brass stick (dop) and then held in place by that mechanical arm, which allows you to cut and polish faces of the stone at specific angles and indexes. It's awesome.

Just last night I finished cutting this stone: it's a 7.62mm 'twisted square' cut natural citrine. It came out fairly well. All in all I'd give the stone a B or B-. The pavilion isn't quite perfect (though you have to have a magnifier to tell) and there are some chips on the girdle. This was probably the most brittle piece of citrine I've ever worked with; and that's saying something because I've cut a lot of citrine.



Here are some other views. Getting good photographs of stones is hard, and I'm gonna need some practice. For one, I should have taken this picture on something that wasn't a paper towel. Also, daylight would have really helped.

This actually isn't the first stone I cut since starting again, I started with a smoky quartz round brilliant, which ended in disaster when my wax joint broke while cutting in the crown star facets. *SAD FACE!*


The holiday season is coming up fellas. If you want to commission a stone for that lovely lady in your life, come talk to me :)
-P.

Hey everyone! Alright, so here's the second shirt design I made. Just like the last one, it's a bona fide relief print printed directly to the shirt, only this time it's a woodcut rather than a linocut. It's also a larger image at approx 20x16 inches. The design reads "Life is Short - Bray Hard." -- For those that aren't print addicts, a brayer is the rubber roller used for rolling ink out onto a relief block before printing: it's what the hand is holding in the image. Again, these are for sale for the same low price of $20.

     

( More pictures and info behind the cut! )

Thanks for looking!!!

-P.