New Year Projects

With a New Year beginning we are finishing last year's unfinished projects and starting new projects. We hope to do what we do for many more years :)
Here is a sneak peek of a new chair we are making, actually I finished the last finishing touches today but could not take the end pictures today. Look at those cute little crocheted flowers around its feet, isn't it adorable :D
I will show the entire chair soon.

I will show this little 'project'. These leather key fobs are super cool, unisex and very handy too. I made one myself to try it and adjusted it to make it user friendly. It is available in 3 colors and 3 sizes for different amount of keys :) Available at StarDelights.

Painting Hearts and Roses

I am painting a new furniture piece, and here is a tiny sneak peek. This one is going to have a theme, it will be upholstered with collages with appliqued scenes, can you guess from what the scenes will be? Does the blue white colors and the red heart ring a bell :)?

Ok then... here is a hint, where else do people plant the roses white and paint them red???
Stay tuned for the results, this one is going to be totally mad :)

Work in Progress

With all the sad and dark things going on in the world, it is nice to escape to a peaceful and colorful place by creating. I am painting a sweet little piece of furniture which is basically made from scrap but I will show that in another blog post once the piece is entirely ready as the transformation is quite something and I want to show it completely.

Hoping that July will bring happy news around the world, I think we can all use it these days!

Work in Progress

Finally some progress with the two chairs that I have been showing since January!
They are now all cleaned and repaired. And I am now painting them with 6 layers of different colors.

As it is a pretty classic chair we wanted to have it a little crazy and unusual. The 6 layers with sanding in between does take a lot of time and upholstering of course will take a while longer.

But after 4-5 months it really is now time to see the end result as this is crazy :)
The weather now is perfect to spent hours outside to paint, so that is great.

Touched by the Sea

Don't you just love beach pottery? Pieces of china end up in the sea, and are tumbled by the waves for months or even years, making the edges soft and the pieces unique. A beautiful mixture of men made material with touches of nature.

I love to use them in jewelry and when someone asked if we could make a cuff like this sold one again, I started right away, puzzling with the pottery pieces and vintage materials.

The combination of all these pieces with history makes each piece one of a kind.

At this cuff I added blue coral pieces (shaved to fit in the cabochon spaces) for an additional beach vibe in blue shades.

This cuff has a lot of beautiful details and only had a few glass cabochons left, all were removed and replaced with irregular pearls and a natural shaped beach pottery in the center.

These cuffs are at least 70 years old and made completely by hand with very primitive tools, yet with gorgeous results. They are nowadays hard to find luckily we bought a bunch years ago. Planning to make necklaces in this style too!

Rainy Days Projects

It has been storming and raining non stop for 5 days now, great for the mountains and trees who suffer long, dry and hot Summers. Our poor old roof is less happy, but there are no roses without thorns :) So we have been stuck at home, our beach visits also haven't been possible for a while.

While we layer ourselves with jumpers, the doggies find warmth and comfort in each other. Poor Zeyno gets smashed under the weight of Toffee, like every Winter. Beside breathing with a little difficulty she never complains, even though she is not comfortable at all.

Under my desk I found these 3 side by side, the one in the middle is the little one who came a few months ago, as you can see she adapted wonderfully :)

We have been mainly working online, adjusting shipping profiles. This Christmas we had a lot of delays, USPS had a hard time keeping up with all the packages, so we now also offer TNT express shipping, which arrives in 4-7 days instead of the 15-30 days of Registered airmail. All of our listings needed additional information, a super boring job which I managed to let Star-mum do. She had a bad pay back though...

 She is crocheting a new clothing piece for the clothing shop, and her pay back is for me to working away all those threads, arrrrggg, a super boring job, but at least I can watch a movie while doing it :)

And I am working on a new weekender with vintage embroidery. These take a about a week to finish with all the leather details, you can see one here if you wonder how they look like once finished.
I am however failing horribly in accomplishing my January tasks. The piano stool will finish. And we are promised to have some sunny days from tomorrow on so I will also paint the walls, the chair duo however will have to wait till February as I haven't even started yet!

Our Creative Space...

For years we have collected all kind of oddities from the beach. While our focus is on sea urchins we have accumulated a lot of other things like a nice amount of crab claws and bodies.

And starfishes. Both of these finds are fragile, so we never really used much of them.
We tried to cast them in resin but somehow resin never really worked out for us.

For ages we thought of electroforming and investigated the materials and method, we bought some tutorials about them and finally made the investment. As the electronics came for the US and the chemicals from the UK it took a while to get them.

The pieces first needed to be coated in several layers of lacquer and then in graphite paint which is an electric conductive paint.

And then each piece was electroformed one by one connecting both the anode and the piece to electricity, copper goes off the anode and attaches itself to the piece.

Even though you see that it gets a layer of copper pretty quickly, a nice solid layer can take a while, these all took around 30 hours each to make them suitable to wear.

After that they got patina'ed with liver of sulver for a nice dark finish. I high lighted the texture with a metal brush, as it was entirely black at first.
And here finally after months of preps, the first electroformed pieces, we will also make silver ones soon!

I will be slowly listing them today in our StaroftheEast shop, and we'll continue to experiment with more beach found oddities :)

Our Creative Space...

Today I was all day busy with making some new driftwood clouds as only one is left in the shop.
And thought it would be fun to show the steps it goes through to become a piece of home decor :) First of all we of course need to find cloud shaped driftwood. Luckily clouds do not have a specific shape but still most driftwood pieces do not resemble a cloud, I always get a smile on my face when I find a 'cloud' on the beach! Most clouds we find on a beach that is hard to reach and a 1 hour drive so we do not go too often, mostly in winter time when storms bring treasures and the beaches are empty.

Although they are usually dry on the beach, I never use the wood right away, best to allow them to dry for a few weeks just to be sure that they are not damp inside.
The next step is then to attach a hook system on the backside so that it can be hung on the wall and little hooks below to attach the raindrops.

They then get a coat of white spray paint, I do not over do this or they would become white blobs, instead I give them such a layer that you see the beautiful cracks and texture of the driftwood very well, creating more dimension to the clouds.

While the clouds are drying it is time for the rain drops, which are vintage chandelier crystals. I give them a solder edge with the tiffany technique, the small crystals are hard to foil as they are so small, this prepping takes me several hours as I always do more clouds at once.

And then they need to be fluxed and soldered, again the small ones are tricky and I usually end up with several first degree burns on my hands and sometimes on my legs as the melted solder drops sometimes, ouch. Luckily we have air conditioning in our atelier as it is still about 45 degrees Celsius here (113 F degrees) and soldering is a hot job, I most likely would melt too :)

After soldering the flux gets all icky and black and needs to be cleaned.

Cleaning it thoroughly is very important, any flux residue will cause for oxidation of the solder which becomes pretty ugly. I used to do the cleaning with a nail brush and soapy water but discovered that our tumblr does it better without me breaking my back so I keep it in there for several hours and it comes our sparkling clean.

Now that the raindrops are ready it is time to arrange them to my liking.

I then measure the distances between the cloud and the drops and cut chain pieces accordingly.

Once all chains are ready it is time to attach them with special clasps, the drop to the chain and the chains to the clouds.

And tadaaa!

The clouds are finally ready, just in time to take some pictures before the sun went down :)
They will slowly appear in our decor shop, StarHomeStudio.