Of course, this is exciting for me, as I also get to have my steampunk wares on display for the world to see in the Little Seed. Woohoo.

So, Come and drop by and support local art in the region. The Little Seed Shop is located in the second arcade as you come down Lawson street from the main roundabout, on the left hand side.

I met a brilliant young man named Max at the market, it was fantastic to get to share with him some of my techniques and tricks for making jewellery. He was also an excellent model of some of my wares.

Max the Maker at the Markets

looking a bit sinister perhaps?…..

Here ya go Max, I’ll see ya around hopefully, thanks for the good chat at the market yesterday!

You can find it here if you are looking for a nice looking, easy to use photo gallery. (This is not an affiliate link)

I had a couple of super cheap dancing robots that had broken within the first couple of dances, so I dismembered them and pulled out their drive mechanism. Made of cheap plastic gears and a spring.

Dancing robot’s insides

Anyways, I was able to take these parts and cast them in bronze, as seen here.

Cast in Bronze

With much tinkering, filing, and polishing, I was able to get the mechanism to work. Not perfectly but pretty good. It still sometime stops before it completely unwinds. Anyways definitely a proof of concept that has got me imagining all kinds of wondrous uses for this new technology.

Here’s a little video of it working.

Now, however, I am all geared up to get creating again, and thanks to jet lag, have been dreaming up new designs and ideas in the wee hours of the morning while trying to get back to sleep. Hey, I’ll take new ideas any time of the day or night ( I must admit some of the epic ideas bought of in the middle of the night turn out to be somewhat ridiculous when viewed in the awakened state).

So… Back to work

First the supplies

• A sheet of heavyish, not corrugated cardboard. Approx 1.5 mm thick
• glue gun and glue
• some thinner cardboard for the plates- like a cereal box or file folder
• 5 minute epoxy
• contact cement
• flat black acrylic paint
• Rub n’ Buff antique gold and pewter

Okay, the first thing to do is figure out what size it needs to be to fit your head, which I failed at miserably, the hat ending up too small for my head. So I guess you are on your own for that. I think the problem was that the brim fit my head nicely when flat, but as I gave it some curve while putting it on the hat, that shortened the distance from front to back, making it too tight in the front to back dimension. So, make sure the head cutout is nice and oval. As you can see there are tabs left to attach the brim to the hat cylinder.

Next I made the cylinder, again, probably better to make it a little too big rather than too small. Also, the tabs from the brim are going to fold up inside which will also make the fit smaller. I think it actually might be the best to start with the cylinder, get it right and then trace that and cut out the brim.- just thinking on the fly here Anyways, I didn’t want the cardboard to overlap on the seam so I cut another strip of cardboard out and used hot glue on the inside of the hat, with the strip overlapping both sides.

I figured out a nice curve to give the brim some shape so the hat wouldn’t end up looking like a prop from a primary school play about Abraham Lincoln. I just drew it on freehand, trying to keep both sides equal, and trying to have it one nice continuous curved shape without any flat spots.

Now, I bent up all the little tabs on the brim and fit it into the curve of the cylinder. It didn’t fit exactly and I had to cut some of the tabs deeper so that it would. Hopefully you will have more luck/skill and it will fit perfectly the first time! Once it fit, I grabbed my hot glue gun and started glueing the tabs from the brim onto the cylinder. Watch out for burnt fingers.

Now for the fun part. I got some thinner cardboard from some cereal boxes and cut them into many random squares and rectangles. Just cut a big stack. Then I applied the contact cement to a portion of the hat, say maybe 1/4 of the cylinder. I then also applied the contact cement to the backs of a bunch of the cardboard cutouts. With contact cement you apply it to the separate surfaces, and then let both surfaces get dry to the touch, and then you put them together, creating an instant bond. So once both the hat and the pieces were dry to the touch ( about 5 min) I started randomly sticking the squares on. Of course wherever a new piece overlapped another piece, I would add a bit more cement where it would overlap.

It is O.K. to leave some of the original hat showing through, because it will just look like another piece of metal has covered it up. Around the seam where the brim meets the cylinder can be tricky, try to have relatively narrow strips of cardboard crossing it. For the top of the hat, I cut an oval larger than I would need and just glued it right on to the cylinder from the inside. It doesn’t have to be pretty, because it is going to get completely covered anyway. I then trimmed it off from the outside with some scissors.

And cover the top as well. I didn’t try to get the cardboard to curve around the edges. I just put them on flat and then went around the top with scissors again to trim them all off.

Here are the strips I am going to use to cover that gap around the top of the hat. I cut lots of little “v”s into the strip and then I used the contact cement to stick them around the top of the hat. Also I might mention that you don’t have to be too careful if some of the contact cement is not covered up by paper, it all just adds to the rough old feel of the hat once it is all covered up with paint.

Now, just glue those top flaps down.

Now let’s make some rivets!

Take some two part 5 minute epoxy, and mix up a little batch. Then, using a stick or something with a rounded end, dip it in the epoxy and then on the cardboard, leaving a small raised dot on the cardboard. Keep doing this until you have traced the overlapping edge of all sheets of cardboard. You will have to figure out how much is the right amount of epoxy to mix, that you can use before it sets. You will end up mixing lots of batches of epoxy by the time you are finished.

Paint it Black. I used artists acrylic paints because that was the only black paint I had, you could probably use low gloss regular acrylic interior paint as well. But I would stick with water based paints as the Rub N’ Buff  seems to work best over that.

The Rub N’ Buff I applied using just a little on my finger and rubbing it on really lightly. You want it to highlight the rivets and the “metal plates” so you don’t want to apply it so thoroughly that all the crevices get filled. To start with, to get a feel, I would dip my finger in a little Rub N’ Buff and then wipe it on a piece of paper until there was hardly any on my finger. Then rub it onto the hat. This gives a feel for how little Rub N’ Buff you really need. I don’t have any pics of applying the Rub N’ Buff, but there is a little video I made here though I use a paintbrush in that one and I would recommend using your finger instead for this project.

And Done

Ah well, it will still look great on the shelf.

Stay tuned if you would like to know step by step how I made this wondrous creation….

It is the first time I have used the Rub N’ Buff on a fairly flat surface, and just as I thought, it was tricky to get a convincing aged metallic look.  I think maybe if I could layer some different shades of  gold it might start to give it some depth. Looks like I have some experimenting to do.  The main key I found with the Rub N’ Buff was to apply it quite dry, because I want some of the background black to show through.

Anyways, this box will look good enough to be in the background of a photo or something like that. Right now I have already put it to use as a box for carrying my camera lenses around. Perfect.

Oh, yeah, and next time I will try to get the camera in focus before I start recording:)