Gee Tood,
Sounds like you owe 20 of us blanks! WHERE ARE THEY???!!!???
Mine are to all be from Exotic Blanks
10 feathers
10 Creatives
30 of Dawns choice
THANKS
Jerry
Jerry,
Well, I hate having to cry poverty, but I looked into what it would take to buy my way into the group, and I just can't swing it right now. I've been working on the best way to meet my obligation, and I think I'm on track. I have a friend at work, a real classy and worldly woman with and interesting sense of high fashion. She let me have some feathers from some of her outfits, and I must say, they must be very rare and from some exotic species and foreign lands, cause I've never seen birds that looked anything like these. I'm working on getting them glued to some tubes, and then I'll cast them in some clear acrylic when I can get enough scrounged up (more on my acrylic issues in a bit...)
I also happened by a construction site the other day and hit the jackpot. It must have been a REALLY expensive high end building, becuase I had never seen wood like they were using. The boards were HUGE, I can hardly imagine seeing trees this big, and the grain pattern on the wood was unreal. Looking at it, it's hard to belive a tree could grow in so many directions at the same time. They must have left it outside for a long time or the tree was diseased or something, as most of the pieces have developed an intense blue spalting like nothing I've ever seen. I think these pieces will make some fantastic worthless wood blanks when I cast it with some swirled acrylic colors...
So I'm hoping that the feathers and worthless wood will come out great, and will pay my way into the group. I just may need some of you to hold on for a bit for your blanks, I have a good supply of feathers, and it is amazing how much of this blue spalted strange wood those builders are throwing out. (In fact I've been thinking about posting in the classifieds to see if anyone wants me to put together a bunch of flat rate boxes of the stuff for people to try out. I'm sure few people have ever seen anything like it...) The acrylic casting is the main bottleneck in the process. I've found what looks like a really cool pre-colored acrylic that is available in a great variety of colors, so there's no need to worry about mixing dyes and powders. I'm hoping I can disolve it in some acetone or ethanol or something and get a good casting resin out of it. I've seen piles of this stuff around, and the small people who live in my house have a huge supply of it, but it's going to take some work on my part to secure it for my use. They seemed to be very upset when I mentioned I wanted to try and melt it down and make pens out of it.
Solid colors seem to be extremely plentiful, but the supply of clear colors is rather limited, so especially for the feathers, it may take a long time for me to get my hands on enough clear material.
I'm sure that the blanks I come up with here will be at least on par with, if not vastly supperior and far more unique than anything Ed and Dawn could offer, and should pay my dues to the club.
I also spoke with Steve, and he said he'd settle for just some plain old regular blanks rather than all the fancy stuff you require. Personally I think he's going to be disapointed in missing out on these blanks that are sure to bring a tear to your eye...