A Sassy Conspiracy

So Smashu received my goodies yesterday, which means I can post what I made!

First up, the most labor intensive item of the package is this reproduction of one of the comic panels from the film, done in acrylics. The enigmatic and more than slightly disturbed Pavi Largo, as portrayed by Skinny Puppy’s frontman, Ogre. This bad boy measures 12×12″, and took around 15 hours to do (shocking, I know, but it took a lot of coats of paint to make the colours nice and even). Smash’s favorite colours are black, purple and red, so I modified the original colour scheme to suit her. I also added silver to the mix, to accentuate Pavi’s mask clips, earrings and mirror. As I said, its just a reproduction image, but I still love how it came out. It’s nice and crisp.

Smash was one of the first to compliment me on my original Zydrate pendant, and I can’t think of anyone more deserving of one of these than her, since she’s been attending Repo! showings in Toronto as Amber Sweet for months now (and she makes a damn fine Amber, let me add). Like the original, this pendant is hand-cut from sterling silver, and is hung on a 3mm sterling rolo chain. Maybe she’ll let me post an action shot of it with her in costume (hmm Smash?).

Finally, I took another stab at making rings and made this little cutie. The fact that a repo opera is a palindrome has had me amused for weeks now (what can I say, I’m easily amused) and I really wanted to incorporate it into the package somehow. This was made with my new sterling ring stock – oh so pretty – which was really nice to work with. Once again my math turned out right (yay me!) and I got the size 7 I was after on the first shot. I did, however, manage to mess it up fairly spectacularly in the soldering phase. Turns out I CAN melt silver with my wee bitty torch after all and I went from having a perfect join to molten silver in a blink of an eye. I’m just being a perfectionist and after a good couple episodes of The Dog Whisperer, I’d filed, sanded, steelwooled and polished it back to near perfection. You can only really notice the flaw on the inside, back of the ring now. Unlike my first ring attempt, I annealed the ring blank first before attempting to bend it for soldering and that worked SO much better. Its probably also why I was able to melt the silver so easily though, since it’d already softened from the annealing. Now I know what to watch for. A final note on this project: cracked out the liver of sulphur for the first time to blacken the insides of the letters, which I think yielded a nice result. As I was mixing the solution in the kitchen, dear boyfriend came in and immediately ran from the room, on the verge of vomiting from the smell. Turns out having a blocked nose serves a purpose after all :) I followed the directions on the package and ended up with a toxic-looking opaquely black solution… according to my book I was looking for something more in the Lemon-Lime Gatorade colour range, so I put my solution aside and followed the book’s suggestion to “toss a small piece in a dish of warm water” which gave me the correct results. so much for measuring!

A final shot of the whole package I sent her. Its also her birthday this weekend, so I added a few extra goodies. I think she was really pleased with everything. It was a really fun swap and I’m thrilled with everything I received, and it was a lot of fun getting to know her. It’s nice to have finally met someone through swapping that there is a geographical possibility of a relationship with outside of craftsterland :)