Ice Bangle with Friendly Plastic

January 28, 2013

Ice Bangle – Article for Craftseller magazine issue 20

I know I have been wittering on about Jewel Enamels recently, that is because they have been taking up a lot of my time as I want to do my best by Sarah Lawrence and Craftynotions, and Jewellery Maker TV, and besides which, it is rather good fun.  The show last Monday went well I think, so I hope that there are a lot of people out there experimenting with Jewel Enamels.  If you are one of them, do let me know what you get up to.

 But as promised, here is a quick post about Friendly Plastic.  If you are browsing through WH Smiths and come across CraftSeller magazine issue 20 you will find my most recent article for them entitled Ice Bangle. As you can see above, these are simple cuff bracelets refined and designed to be cost effective craft market items that are not too time consuming to make.  At this point I will say that one of the construction techniques (fusing two layers together using a dry electric skillet) has been inspired by Jana Ewy’s fabulously precise and quite time consuming methods she kindly shared with me a few years ago.  However I have shied away from using Envirotex Lite because of the length of time and precise timing required to emulate Jana’s methods, and also I have preferred to use my own patchwork and foiling  techniques for speed and variety.

For obvious reasons I can’t give you a step by step here, you will have to read CraftSeller, but I will say that these are very easy to make.  Neatness  however, comes with practice!

The main bangles are a mixture of dragged designs (using the marbling comb) cut up and pieced together with virgin pieces of Friendly Plastic with added inlay.

The bangle at the top left is made using the scraps and off-cuts from the patchwork bangles.  I used my Lacework technique to create the overlay which was gently fused with a plain piece of Friendly Plastic.  The inside of this bangle was finished with Transfer Foils applied in a splodgy random pattern to the back of the strip of FP.

Random application of Transfer Foils.

Even though I have not used Envirotex Lite to seal and finish the bangles, I have used 2 or 3 coats of Duraclear varnish, gloss or satin work well for this project.

There will be some new things appearing on the web site in a few days time, assuming I can get everything up and loaded quickly, but I hope you will like them, some new bezels and jewellery items amongst them.

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