Bedroom construction car wouldn't start

Well, this week my boyfriend couldn't get his car to start due to the cold. So we worked on the upstairs bedroom. Last weekend I picked out a soft blue grey pain and the shelves to recess in the walls. We cleaned up plaster debris and lath pieces. Here is the progress so far. We still need to add wiring. 

My kitty and I can't wait to have a real work room to make jewelry. 

Swelligant experimenting brass colorizing

I tried my hand this past week at colorizing brass with swelligant Patina. The results in my opinion were mixed. If you haven't heard of swelligant it causes a chemical reaction to occur in metals like brass and copper. As a result you will get rust or patina that would happen naturally but it is sped up chemically. 

I used these simple brass charms for my experiment. They are raw brass. I started out by washing and degreasing them with dawn dish soap and water.  I let them dry. My second step was to heat them up with my heat gun a little. I used my darice heat gun. 

After they were warm I poured the swelligant into a well and used a stiff brush and gloved hands to brush it on. 

Here are my results: 

My favorite patina was the darkening patina. You can leave the patina dark black or you can buff high lights in the patina to make it look more like brass ox. For this experiment I left it the black look. 

What I like about these Is that they are not very smelly. I would say they smell a lot like pickles. Haha. Could be worse. 

My second favorite patina was this one: 

The vertigris patina was a nice lime green with gold/orange hints. I found the back sides of the charms became heavily affected and were a brighter green. This patina took more time than the darkening,  but less than the Tiffany green patina. 

My least favorite affect was this one: 

The green rust patina just made my pieces very rusty looking. Almost all rust. This patina took the longest to affect the brass off them all. It really bloomed once I dipped the pieces in my plain water bath to stop the reaction. I have been told that this patina looks good when used on copper. I will have to try it some day. 

I experimented with some sealants and my favorite is ren wax. It is used in museums to protect items. I do not recommend using diamond glaze. Yes I tried it, the glaze caused a chemical reaction and it crystallized and flaked off the metal. I don't mind a spray clear coat, but because of the winter weather I don't have a good place to do that right now. 

Over all I enjoyed my experimenting and I will use these products again in my jewelry creating. If you make jewelry I hope you consider trying these as well. 

I will hopefully be selling these charms as earrings in my etsy shop soon so be sure to check them out if  you are interested! 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SarahsSalvageShop

Have a wonderful rest of the weekend.