We arrived back home from Santa Fe yesterday, and I have some great ideas for new egg designs that surprisingly have not much to do with either Southwestern or Native American traditions.
We always try to get a visit in to Ten Thousand Waves after a day of skiing. I would like to go every day, but it gets a bit expensive. This time we enjoyed 85 minutes in the "Waterfall" tub, which is a marvelously large tub with a bench and jets on one side and a deep end that goes to at least 4 feet at the other end. There is a cold plunge with a waterfall to jump in when the hot tub gets to be too much, and a dry sauna for variety. I felt like a boiled noodle at the end - it was great fun!
The spa is inspired by Japanese baths, so everything is spare and considered and simple. The gift shop is full of candles and tea sets and gorgeous little ceramic bibelot. Among all that, I found a well-thumbed copy of a book called "Traditional Kimono Silks" by Anita Yasuda. The book is basically a photo album of kimono fabric scraps, so visually inspiring, though edited sloppily with mislabeled pictures throughout - very disappointing. However, it has furthered my thinking about trying to keep the rhythm of a design or pattern while managing to free it from a rigid grid or framework. More of this in the weeks to come...
In addition, I started thinking about using a bit of gilding to pick out some highlights in the eggs. Today I dug out my glue and gold leaf to see what I could do to enhance a finished design. The picture above shows the finished product. I used Mona Lisa Products sizing and leaf, that I got ages ago at Hobby Lobby.
To start, I put tiny dots of the glue/sizing where I wanted the gold to be:
The difficult part of this is waiting for the glue to get tacky, which takes about an hour, without accidentally smearing it.
Once the glue is tacky rather than wet it's time to put the gold leaf on. It gets kind of messy, and I need to figure out a better way to keep the sheets smooth so that they go on smoothly. It looks "okay" when it is wrinkled, but much better and more professional when smooth.
I used a large paintbrush...
to smooth the gold leaf over the adhesive...
What do you think? I am of two minds about this. I love gold and glitter as much as the next person (probably more), but it does have a tendency to make something look cheaper somehow. Plus, I want to avoid looking like I am trying to make Faberge style eggs.
Here's another one that I glitzed up:
2 comments:
I think it adds a nice dimension to it, but I know what you mean about not wanting to glitz things up.
Yes, the more I look at them, the more I think that I don't like it. Because it either adds nothing at all or looks wrong somehow. I will keep it on my list of things to do to try to save an egg that needs something, but I don't think I will be doing this a lot.
Post a Comment