Heatopher's Projects
Not for sale! Not yet, anyway. My purpose here is just to show a few personal projects, some of which are complete, some of which are still works in progress, and some of which should evolve eventually into products which I might try to sell.
Among the latter I include the epoxy flower-presses, which actually pre-date the trays and chessboards, but which I haven't worked on for some time. The lampstand which you see here was a salvage operation, now operational, and the ladder is a very long term project, which will become a planter, I think!
Flower Presses
This project predates some of the more “trademark” projects that I’ve been working on over the last year and a bit. My memory is hazy right now, but I think that I must have started collecting flowers for suspension in epoxy in the summer of 2022, but I soon realised that I would need to press them properly in order to preserve the colours. The effect of epoxy on a recently plucked flower is interesting, but not especially attractive.
I checked online for the price of flower presses, and was not too surprised to discover that they were a bit much, even for something very basic. So I decided to make my own – just using MDF and a few screws. Easy peasy. But then I thought – WHAT IF I made them pretty, using flowers from my collection, a little naive painting, and some well chosen epoxy? They might be worth a bit more than the stuff I saw on eBay?!?!? Let me know!
A Pimped Lampstand
Just an old lampstand, for which I think I had either lost the shade, or it was broken. Meanwhile, I had a very old attractive glass cover, which had been lying unused in the cellar for as long as I can remember. I think it had been used for an external light, either in the front porch, or another old fitting at the back. My idea was to adapt the lampstand to fit the glass shade.
There’s no epoxy resin involved in this project. I used epoxy putty here. The idea was to form an attractive shape around the top of the stand, and then to create a groove for the glass shade to fit into it, around the bulb. That sounds easy enough, but there are a couple of things that can go wrong. First thing to say is that if you’re doing something with epoxy putty, it’s best to do it all in one go. In my case, I started with a little bit, and then realised that I wanted the form at the top to be much bigger than what I had. The trouble with doing things in stages like that is that the new layer of putty won’t stick very well, if at all, to a previous layer which has already cured. That’s what happened here, so although the thing looks great, the top half of that putty extension kind of detaches from the rest.
Never mind – it looks cool in any case. The rest of the effects there were of course masking tape and spray paint. If you look closely at the stem of it, you might be able to see that I will need to tidy that up one of these days. Another thing that I had to learn on the way - how to stop paint getting in the cracks. It's kind of common sense, but sometimes you need someone like the guy in this video to tell you what you probably should have worked out yourself. Speaking very much about myself there. I splashed out a lot of money on spray paints, without getting the lines right.
A Stepladder Conversion
Someone nearby was giving this away on Freecycle/Trash-Nothing. I think that I had actually gone there for something else, but she persuaded me that it’s a fashionable thing to convert old stepladders like this into planters. It was pretty manky, so I had to sand it down hard before thinking about anything else. Also the piece at the top had become unstuck, so sticking that back on was part of the epoxification process. (No, you won’t find “epoxification” in the dictionary – that’s my personal jargon).
The concept here is that each step of the ladder should reflect one of the seasons. The layer that you can see already is of course intended to reflect winter. I chose colours that would evoke the darkness of winter, but wouldn’t be all too depressing. I did do another step after these photos were taken, the season of that one being autumn, but I wasn’t especially happy with it, and I will probably redo it when I get back to the project (whenever that may be). The concept here is that each step of the ladder should reflect one of the seasons. The layer that you can see already is of course intended to reflect winter. I chose colours that would evoke the darkness of winter, but wouldn’t be all too depressing. I did do another step after these photos were taken, the season of that one being autumn, but I wasn’t especially happy with it, and I will probably redo it when I get back to the project (whenever that may be).
Also – well aware that there are four seasons (in this part of the world at least) and six steps, so I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be doing with the two remaining ones. Well, at least one of them will of course have to support the planks for the planter, so that’s one of them sorted. Not sure yet about the other one.
Updates will follow.
Glow in the Dark
Not much to say here yet. I discovered these glow in the dark mica powders about a year ago (mid 2024, that is). You need to experiment quite a lot with them to get the right proportions in the resin. Too little, and of course the effect will be pretty lame. Too much and you can actually mess up the curing process. That hasn't happened to me so far, thankfully.
You can buy these powders in the form that will give off the same colour in normal light as the colour with which they glow in the dark. However, it's more interesting to mix with a completely different colour, to get a two-tone effect. In that case, it's pretty important, if you're mixing with these powders with normal colours, to ensure that the other colour won't obscure the glowing one too much. Naturally a darker colour will obscure more than a lighter one. Getting the balance right takes a little learning.
What's coming here???? Who knows? My imagination will be free to think about that again once this website is done! For the time being, you can see here some chessboards that I've made using these powders.