Copper Danish Heart

This is the second piece I have made in my metalwork class at Shelburne Craft School. I made it in copper to test out the design for my final piece which will be made from silver, it's better to make mistakes with the cheaper metal!

It is based on a Danish heart but it is single-sided. Making the test gave me a chance to work out the dimensions I need to get this to work in metal, and how to weave the strips together. The beads are threaded onto a wire which hangs independently on the jump ring, it was fun to make the little ball on the end by heating the wire up until it melted.

I've got a few tweaks to make now for making the silver piece, which I started on this morning.

Valentine Heart Crayons

Valentine's Day is a big day for kids over here and it's usual to send cards in for the whole pre-school class. This year I decided it would be fun to try and make something so Freja and I decided to give heart-shaped crayons a go. I bought some heart-shaped ice cube molds from the dollar section in Target and a big box of crayons. We're not big crayon people in this house so we didn't have any spare to use, but this could be a good way to use up old crayons if you happen to have some.

The first thing we did was remove all the paper and break the crayons up into small pieces. We just went for as small as we could do with our hands. We tried to fill the molds up so they were pretty full but without having any bits hanging over the edges of the shape. We went for some red, pink and purple, and some blue and green.

Next I put the molds on an old baking tray, poured a layer of water on it and stuck them in a low oven set at 200F/ 93C. I watched them closely until they had completely melted, about 10 minutes. (This pic shows them about half-way through, I waited until there were no visible lumps).

I took them out of the oven to cool and gave each one a little swirl with a bamboo skewer.

Once they were cooled we put them into these little plastic heart boxes which are also from the dollar section in Target.