sorry for leaving. in return, here's a quality nailed it.

OOPS.
so i accidentally went and finished my phd and in the midst of that i forgot to post anything here at all.

but luckily, i'm back (now as DR. KATHAYOON) and i have lots of crafts and style observations to share. in lieu of doing a massive brain spill where i convey everything i've thought and made in the past eight months, i'll take things slow and start with a craft i did recently! ready? let's begin.

yesterday i embarked on the task of concrete heart necklaces. i got the directions from here but true to form, i only sort of followed them and did a lot of things my own way. let's begin.

first, i gathered my materials. these included:
- a plastic knife
- really old petroleum jelly
- leftover concrete from our house remodel
- water
- three paper cups
- a fondant mold in the shape of the pendant (a heart)

the fondant mold i got was clutch because it has a spring mechanism so you can push the concrete out without messing it up. so first, i lined the mold with some petroleum jelly:

next, my dad helped me mix some concrete. just a little bit because it hardens pretty quickly. and not too watery - the perfect consistency was like that of cold butter. 

then, i used the knife to fill the mold with the concrete and level it off. we really packed it in there to make sure there were no air bubbles or holes. 

removing the concrete too quickly ended up messing up the pendant, so i let each one set for as much time as it takes to play one game of candy crush.

then, i removed the pendant from the mold by pressing the little trigger at the bottom of the mold and set it on a bag (smeared with more jelly) to set in the sun. i made about 10 of these. 

on some of the pendants, i used a small stick/piece of wire once the stick broke to make a little hole for hanging. i didn't do it to all of them because i wasn't sure i was going to like it when it was dry. 

after the pendants dried (i left them overnight because the drain from our air conditioner maliciously sprayed them all with water, preventing them from drying in the normal amount of time), i sprayed them all with a touch of gold spray paint. i thought about being more adventurous with my painting, but i kind of like the look of the raw concrete, with just a little bit of sparkle.

now here's the part where things get tricky.

at first, i followed the directions from the site and flattened out some bails to stick to the back. i used jump rings and hot glue to fix everything up and ended up with a necklace that looks like this:

pretty okay, you might say. except gluing the fixture to the back of the pendant caused it to lean forward annoyingly. so i took that off. and then i used hot clue to stick just the jump ring to the top of the heart:

this looks much better! i made a whole bunch of them:

then i took my prototype to my bff and it broke in about 10 seconds. hot glue was not the right choice. so this is where we're at right now - i used gorilla glue to set one of them in the same way. i've taped the jump ring to the pendant to allow the glue to set. we have about one more hour of that before i can say if it's the right choice or not. if gorilla glue doesn't work, i'm going to hop out and get some epoxy or superglue. STANDBY.

but otherwise, so fun! modifications for the future include sticking a headpin into the heart while it's still wet to avoid this whole glue fiasco. and also adding shiny things like glitter or crystals while it's wet to add a little pizzazz!

aren't you glad we're back?! next time i'll either post something about making my own birch coasters, or spray paint. or something else that's a surprise!! unknowable.