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Paper Mache: Pendent Light Base - Part 2

Madeleine, may I employ your assistance and do you want to give it a try? Ok, cool, we've got one more layer to d'oh kind of spread the love here yeah, take off your jacket and you've got your lovely dress and we'll just well ok oh yeah, and it is a good idea, especially if you are doing this bare handed as I just noticed you did remove your jewelry you don't want to end up with, um, any of the paper mache a in your wedding ring or bracelets or anything along those lines. So at this points, um well, madeleine is putting on her gloves, I'm just going to start back now I've put on I would say maybe six to eight pieces of vertical paper wrapping it around, we're now just literally going to go back and start again applying it in this new direction and, um, get one more on here battle in and I'm gonna pass it off to you. You can see from the overhead cam what our work surface looks like a the moment it's just sort of unavoidable and it's totally okay it's fun to have some messy crafts every...

now and then, especially when you know in advance they're going to be messy and can prepare for it it's those crafts that end up being messy thatyou I didn't think we're going to be messy those air more of the challenge all right? I'm going to switch positions with you lady and let you step over there. It does have a really distinct battery smell to it, doesn't it not batteries and car battery, but as matter as and yeah, you know, bread batter flower better it's not too crazy straight no it's not bill's not I'm working with paper where he went the paper and stripping uh it's all good with some of those and when you're doing this is another thing to keep in mind, it doesn't necessarily have to be in strips. I know that a lot of the projects that we did, especially his kids, we were tearing up that paper and all sorts of pieces, and sometimes when you are dealing with a cat or a mold on under form, that is irregular shaped like perhaps in the case of the dinosaur that that you all built when you were a kid sometimes strips don't necessarily work the way you want them to sometimes it's it's better to tear off a more spherical chunk of paper to get into some of those cracks and crevices um to completely cover the exterior didn't make a mini pinata for a friend's engagement party and sweets is mexican themed I love that I've kind of been amazed living in los angeles where we have very large hispanic and latino population and you see a lot of that culture and everyday life and thie complexity and creativity that goes into some of the pinatas is amazing there in a couple of areas downtown los angeles where a lot of oh party wholesalers set up their shops and they're always lined the eves are always lined with all of these amazing pinatas hanging from them um and everything from sports figures pop culture figures too flowers and sporting good shapes you know football's and basketball's have seen ones in the shape of children I was just kind of weird you know? Well yeah I can feel a little bit like an effigy at that point I think yeah no agreed I love pinatas though you to every party should have opinion right? Great with candy with candy yeah or you know, for adult version maybe the travel size booze they need to be plastic plastic bottles it's just going to say that would make a mighty mess all over your face filled chocolates oh, well see now you're talking my language anything chocolate although I do have to say um having hung more than one pinata in my day chocolate does not always hold up well in the interior of opinion out especially its standing in the hot sunday and backyard yeah if it had true look yes that's what it's adult probably a way it's true and then, yeah, later and later in the evenings, by the best time to do the pignon anyway, perfect wait. Been working on for the last generation. That kind of seems like the crowning achievement of the evening. Um, I wanted to talk about a couple of other applications aside from, we're obviously gonna be transforming this into a pendant light because excuse me, but there are many other household objects you could create using this same process. Now, obviously, instead of cutting a hole, you simply could have flip this over and use it as a decorative bowl were going to when we start in on some of the finishing for the exterior of your pendant lights were going to be talking about different ways. You can decorate them, but you certainly can add decorative elements to both the interior and exterior to make them, you know, beautiful bowles has set out on your show for your coffee table. They're not necessarily well, not necessarily. They are not at all food safe or nothing. You want to get entirely wet. They would be more for keeping perhaps some office supplies in or your jewelry at the end of the day. Having one on your nightstand could be really lovely. You could also build some that are larger and a little bit more conical shaped to use his trash cans if you do that, I would just recommend obviously keeping a smaller trash bag inside to protect the interior of it, but once we put some finishes on it while they are not waterproof they are water resistant, so we're going to be using some some decca podge material today that does act as a sealant and so if I were tio spill a glass of water say near one of the paper mache abel's it would not necessarily immediately permeate it would beat up and I'd be ableto you know what? Have time to clean it up it wouldn't wreck my my project at all like a bull for your waxed fruit yes only make a bowl for your west fruit now you're thinking or lovely vase for your paper flowers cruz I really really like that idea you have to be careful of the neck. You would have to be careful with the neck well, especially if you are that's a good point because if you're building it around a you know sort of a cylindrical structure say if we were to take my glass of water, flip it upside down, put the saran wrap on it and cover it in paper machete at least with this it's straight side and it would be much more easier to release I think what rachel is saying if you had one that tapered up at the neck you basically would have no way of getting your mold out of the interior basically would have just encased it. Um so you do want to have something that will be able to release either straight sided or more of, you know, half dome shaped like we're using today? Can you do? Can you construct paper shea to pieces and then you can't yes, we definitely can, as if it were like we were talking earlier about some of the larger baking molds in the last paper mache a section where you could take I'm sure many of you have seen those figural cake pans I have one at home that looks like an easter rabbit and it comes in two halfs where if you were to spray a release in their impress that paper mache a pulp in you could bring that out the same sort of concept. I think if you had ah larger object you could somehow rig it up so you could create the two halves, bring them together after their dry, even mask over those scenes with masking tape and then go around it with another layer of two paper mache, eh? And that would really you know, I think structurally that would be pretty sound I think you've got one piece to go and we have made it all the way around again, thank you so much that's. Great. So, really, all of the bulls that the ladies are going to be working on today for their pendant lights. The swap outs that I made really was just this amount of paper. We did one round with all of the vertical strips. I did one round with the horizontal strips to give it a little bit more structural integrity. And then a second round with the vertical strips. Now these dried surprisingly quick, but of course, here, let me grab the paper tells down here give you one of those. Um, I made the swap outs that we're using today during the course of several very hot days in los angeles and had plenty of sunshine. So I think that all worked in my favor and they drive extremely quick. A zay mentioned in the evening. I did set them in front of fans as well to kind of aid that drying process. Thank you so much, madeline. And so I would say two days in total, I let it dry at least a day, day and a half on the mold and you will be able to tell that the color changes slightly. Um as it dries, it lightens up a little bit obviously and then once I took the bowl out of the mold and I then said it upside down so that it was positioned as this bowl would be so that the sun could obviously hit the interior and dr that out a little bit more because when it's still on the mold, obviously the inside is going to be a little bit damper than the exterior. So at this point I need to do a little bit of a swap out, so I am going tio move this off to the side. I can't say when I was working it on this at home as well I got a couple of large round trays that I tend to use for a lot of crafting projects and there are large enough that they kind of allow me to spread out a little bit and then if I have to move a project from room to room it's not necessarily an issue, but what I did with those is I covered them in wax paper and that kind of seemed to work well and clean up easily and what I want to show you is after hiss sat on the block for a couple of days it starts to look like this and you can see the bowl in the interior you can see all of my cling wrap is still in there so I am going to start now that my bowl is completely dry we had used these in our last segment I had just mentioned I love having this pair of heavy duty scissors sort of as part of my everyday tool kit they are not paper only as I had mentioned in one of the earlier segments it's really nice to have a pair of scissors in your toolbox that is designated for paper only also for fabric only the's air my cuts everything kind of scissors so what I love about this is that I can use the rim of the bowl as my cutting guide so what? I'm going to do some kind of kind of make sure that all of my strand my plastic wrap is tucked down into the bowl and then I'm just going to start cutting into it you could do this with a standard pair of scissors I just find that it's a little bit easier with these heavy duty guys if some of the plastic wrap gets cut up and caught up in the cutting process not to worry kind of push it out of the way there and the nice thing is you can see you get a pretty even lip um when you're cutting around this way using the bowl as your guide talking you know it's really it's pretty stiff and hard at this point so if I think if I were to upended in it's a good question. If I would've ended in, though it would tend to crack and then you wouldn't be out to get the bowl out. Correct? Yes, exactly. So removing that allows me to have a clean edge on my bowl, and it also makes it a little bit easier to release the ball from the interior. So this is a very imperfect process, and it doesn't always go as planned, but typically you can use the saran wrap to sort of start tugging on the sides. You can kind of work the edges a little bit, put a little muscle into it, but the hope is there we go that it will slide out. Thank you so good. I love when that happens. So, yes, andi, I was able to pull that out. Now I want to point something out on this. We had talked earlier about adding certain ingredients to your paper machine mixture in order to prevent mold. The swap outs that I was doing for you all I was doing in pretty rapid succession, I was building those over the course of a couple of days and cutting out those centers. This particular swap out, we left on the bowl for probably at least a week, and you can probably see in the overhead, a little mold has started to form in the interior. Now this is a portion we're going to be cutting out so it's not necessarily going to affect this pendant, but that is probably added reason to not only unmold it earlier and allow the interior to dry, but it might be a little added and senate if you do want to add in that that tablespoon of salt to your mixture just to help prevent some of that. So what I'm going to do with this point is pull out one of my light kits these are pendant light cord kits you can find them in most hardware stores, you can find them online as well, which is why where I purchased this one, I happen to like these particular ones because they're covered in this lovely colored cloth on the exterior, but the ends of them screw off and essentially what it's intended is you will slip this down through the hole in the top of the pendant, reached underneath the pendant bowl and slipped this backup screw it on toe, hold it in place, but what I'm going to be using it for at the moment is a cutting template grab a pencil and I'm gonna grab my craft knife and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take my ring and I'm gonna position is best I can in the very center bottom of the bowl now obviously if I were to put my my whole here or here somewhere completely off center your pendant light when it's hanging is going to reflect that it's going to be a little bit wonky it could be completely charming if that's sort of the look you're going for. But if you wanted to hang a little bit more like a traditional pendant, we're just hanging straight down in the center it's often a good idea just to eyeball it and try and get it is close to the center as you can so that's what I'm doing here I'm taking my pencil you could also use a marker or something of the sort and do your best to draw a line through there um the pencils making a decent mark when I've done this in the past, I've used a sharpie and that kind of seems to stand out a little bit more that it's going to give me atleast a basic cutting guide. What I'm going to do then is I'm working on top of my cutting matt, which is always very important whenever you're using your crafting knife and I've got a new sharp blade in my craft knife and I'm just going to start cutting down very careful as always, whenever you're working with a craft knife, you want to keep your eye on your, um work and this is a little bit of a slow going process just kind of cutting it around. I'm going to go through and make an initial pass. My blade came out there, I just need to tighten that up a little bit. I mean, you're good you cut from the top down, but it collapsed your way. You know what? I am going to go to the top at a second pass? Exactly and that's exactly correct, because I don't get this point want to put too much pressure on it. It is chicken feel these air pretty. These are pretty hard and solid, but I just I don't want to tempt fate. I don't want tio unintentionally crack anything, and I'm going to step away from cutting for a second just to tell you that if, during the unfolding process you get a split in the side of yours, not to worry, and I don't know if any of the swap outs, they may have a little split or something along the side the way that you can deal with that is taking your masking tape and simply taking some masking tape. Going over that kind of wrapping it from the inside around to the outside, maybe doing a counter, one that goes across it, and then when you go to cover it with your deck a pas, you're not going to see any of those corrections and it's going to help maintain sort of the structural integrity of the theme edges um, of your bowl, others are asking if you use a craft heat tool ever to speed up the drying process. You know, I often find that a fan works better because it distributes the air a little bit more evenly with those heat tools, it tends to be very focused. I know a lot of stamp er's use those from bossing in that sort of thing, and so it's a very narrow sort of funnel of air that's hitting it. I just think it was taken off a long time. It might be a little bit more effective if you just said it in front of a large room fan, I think made the base with ah hole already preset, so you kind of create a hole as you're going along, would you find that just doesn't go well, you know, the reason that I do it this way is because it's sort of expands the possibility of mold shape. Because I'm just dealing with things that I'm finding at home and to find something that would be the shape that already has a hole in it would probably already be a pendant light, although I have seen some people that have taken sort of old school metal pendant lights oftentimes, like the kinds you might find, like hanging outside a garage on auto garage or something like that and they've used that is their mold form, which creates sort of they tend to be a little bit flared and come up a little bit in the middle, they're actually quite attractive, and those would actually already have the hole in it, so you could then kind of paper machine around it, which would be a nice thing hide or h j green, I'm sorry is asking, do you ever use a bit tolar drilled, trashing, drill a hole that you find the cutting is much? I think that you could potentially use something smaller, like a dremel tool? Um, my fear and using some of the larger power tools would be that the force of them might cause the actual structure to crack. And I want to try and avoid avoid that, but with the dremel tools that are a little bit more delicate, they're not quite as powerful, and they've got an amazing array of bits that you could use. So I definitely think that you could use that for some of their finishing this you can see I've done the first pass, we've removed this incredibly thick plug, actually, from the it's about I would say excuse me at least a half inch thick from all of that overlapped at the top, and then I'm simply going to take this and sort of saw around the edge to open it up a little bit more, and this is going to be a process of going, you know, I'll make my initial couple of passes, and then I'm going to hold this up and just see if it's wide enough and then after I've done a couple more passes, I will probably then take the other end of the light kit and see if it will fit down through the center. So I'll just do this for a second just to kind of give you an idea of the process, and then I'm going to start with some of the finishing techniques you can see, I don't if you could see that in the overhead camera, just sort of the thickness. Of the top there, which is great because we've cut away the thickest part. But again, that thick wall is going to help us in holding the whole pendent together. I think if it were only the thickness of our edges, where it's much thinner and you're going to increase the likelihood that the dependent will crack. So all right, so I think that I could fussed with this for probably another fifteen minutes, but we're going to go ahead and move on to our finishing techniques. But you basically see what I did is I took the portion of the pendant like kit. I traced it onto the interior bottom he's, a very simple craft knife took me a little bit of muscle to kind of work my way around and pull that out. But then setting it up right. You can simply go through and kind of in a sawing motion, work your way all the way around to clean up those edges, and you will get to the point where you have a nice clean size appropriates opening for your pendant light.