It all start­ed with a thought that came into my head one day: I’d love some ear­rings that look like for­get-me-nots.

We saw these for­get-me-nots while trav­el­ing in Nova Sco­tia a cou­ple of years ago. They were so small, and so perfect.

Isn’t the blue just stunning?

And if I want to have some­thing, I’ve got to make it. (That’s some­what bet­ter than “I’ve got to buy it,” perhaps?)

And they’ve got to be as small as the real for­get-me-nots, with the same bril­liant blue colour. I thought shrink plas­tic would be per­fect! Because it can make a real­ly small, stur­dy piece of plas­tic and the colour becomes more sat­u­rat­ed as it shrinks.

And it did work! They were exact­ly the colour and size I want­ed them to be.

While I was at it, I thought I would also make some cher­ry blossoms…

… and sweet lit­tle but­ter­cups.
(If you haven’t seen ¡Three Ami­gos!, you must! It’s total­ly ridicu­lous and absolute­ly hilar­i­ous. My skin tone does­n’t agree with yel­low at all; I only made the but­ter­cups so that I can call them sweet lit­tle but­ter­cups XD)

At the end I’m only real­ly hap­py with the for­get-me-nots. And that was the goal of the project so I was con­tent. But there are still sev­er­al things to fine tune. Next time I’ll have to sand the shrink plas­tic bet­ter, and pay more atten­tion to my colour­ing with the pen­cil cray­on so the colours are more even and less translu­cent, because the ear­ring posts were show­ing through when I glued them on.

Most impor­tant­ly I’ll have to find a bet­ter glue! I used E6000 and every­one raves about it, but it did­n’t work at all. I let these cure for almost a week and I can still pry them apart. Actu­al­ly I used the E6000 on my rose ear­rings and the ros­es fell off after a few days as well. The only thing that it worked on was my dahlia ring. So I won­der if it has to do with the size of the con­tact sur­faces, and the ear­rings are just too small for the glue to work prop­er­ly. I spent quite some time research­ing dif­fer­ent kinds of jew­el­ry glue on the inter­net, but they all have con­flict­ing reviews. Super glue seems to work in the short-term (I used it to fix my rose ear­rings when I was total­ly frus­trat­ed with the E6000), but almost every­one warned against it for jew­el­ry-mak­ing. Even two-part epoxy was described by some review­ers as hit-and-miss, because it won’t work if the two glu­ing com­po­nents were not equal in quantity.

Plus I read that E6000 is tox­ic to peo­ple and the envi­ron­ment. I knew that when I bought it but at the moment I thought it would­n’t mat­ter so much if I don’t use it fre­quent­ly. But the more I thought about it the more I feel that I should at least try and find a less tox­ic alternative.

So! I need a glue that’s strong, flex­i­ble (can with­stand stress of twist­ing and pulling on a reg­u­lar basis, because that’s how ear­rings are put on/taken off), per­ma­nent, water­proof, and non-tox­ic. If you have any idea, or a trust­wor­thy glue that you’d rec­om­mend, please let me know! I would real­ly appre­ci­ate your input.

(Have I ever told you about my love/hate rela­tion­ship with Pow­er­Point? Ah, that deserves anoth­er blog post of its own.)

Any­way, I thought if I’m real­ly care­ful I can prob­a­bly wear the for­get-me-nots a cou­ple of times before they fall off the ear­ring posts, and I thought today would be a good day to wear it, because we were going to the botan­i­cal gar­dens! :D

 

Pic­tures of our botan­i­cal day trip to follow!

Have a love­ly evening, everyone!