BAUBLE A MONTH CHALLENGE - SEPTEMBER

It's a busy month for me....not only the start of the rugby season, lots going on work/art wise, over hauling the studio, and celebrating my 40th birthday....but I'm also off on a little holiday too....so much to do...so little time...

...so this months bauble is another simple quick make -

BAUBLE A MONTH 2012 CHALLENGE -

 

SEPTEMBER

 

'A VERY BEERY BAUBLE'

I'm rather a fan of real ale (thanks to Clive) and also a member of CAMRA (campaign for real ale) and over the years I've amassed a pretty good collection of beer bottle caps, labels and the like with intentions of using in artwork...pretty much like my wine corks and bits of stuff and nonsense I hoard for recycling and 'altering' purposes...but never get around to using them. So this month I decided to put these particular pieces to good use and experimented with making a simple bauble.

 Firstly I selected a premade, cheap round plastic bauble for the base and collaged ripped up scraps of various beer bottle labels all over it (using Mod Podge).

Using the same technique as for the previous made silicon sealant bauble - I attached the bauble onto the end nozzle of a sealant tube to enable me to work around the whole bauble in one go...and it meant it could dry without any part of it laying onto and sticking to the work surface.

While the bauble was drying, I selected a variety of colourful bottle caps (the designs were of no importance) and distressed them a little by sanding the edges and roughing up the paintwork with sandpaper (this also provided a key to enable me to glue them on later).

I then printed out a number of words associated with beer and brewing and glues these, along with more scraps of the labels, onto the inside of the caps. Once dried, the caps were then filled with clear resin.

I then returned back to the now dried, label collaged bauble and distressed this with sandpaper too...it not only gave a nice aged look but also smoothed the surface of any hard lines and creases. At this point I really liked the look of the piece and wondered if to leave it just as it was...

...but decided to carry on and finish off the design I had intended....and I'll make another simple collaged bauble at a later date.

The old silver coloured bauble hanging cap looked cheap and nasty....so was removed.

A metal bottle cap used as a replacement - I reused the wire loop,

punched a hole into the centre of the metal bottle cap,

 

inserted the wire loop and fitted this back onto the bauble....much better looking!

I then took a spare same-sized bauble and bottle caps, and using blue tack, attached them onto the surface of the sphere, moving them around until they all fitted and a nice configuration was achieved. This was the proto type and template for me to use to then finish off the actual beery bauble.

The resin filled bottle caps were then glued over the bauble (using pinflair gel glue).

The resulting finished bauble is rather heavy, textural and masculine looking....something very different and unusual for me to do...but it was fun to assemble.

Clive loves it and so does another beer drinking friend of ours who has just seen it and put in a request for me to make one for him too!