Sound Wave Flute

I've had this idea rolling around in my head for a couple of years now.... Growing up, I was a flute player, I still have my 2 flutes and my piccolo, I pull them out a couple times a year and play them. I can still read notes and can play the instruments, but my sound isn't all that great cause my lip is out of shape from disuse. It's still fun to keep on top of it enough that I know if I pull the flute out I'll be able to play it again. Anyway, one of those random playing sessions, I was thinking about my first student flute and thought it'd be really cool to decorate it with polymer. I have sat on that idea for at least 3 years. This month's PCAGOE challenge gave me a chance to bring that idea to fruition. The theme this month is Music!

After some more thought, being a very sentimental creature, I decided I just couldn't use my student flute to do this project (incase the project ended badly, I didn't want to render that flute useless). I certainly wouldn't use my "good" flute for this either, and definitely not my piccolo, which already has a black wood, or possibly plastic, base for the body. So, I headed to ebay and picked up an old beat-up, but still playable, flute for about $30. This thing had a lot of tarnish on it and a nice ding in the mouthpiece, and the head joint wasn't even the same make as the body (it was marked with a Gemeinhardt seal and the body is a Vinci)... so I felt like I was going to be doing it a service by covering up all the old tarnished and nicked-up nickel. Here's a before shot of the flute:

For anyone who knows woodwind instruments, you'll know that they have pads underneath the keys. These pads cannot withstand excessive heat or moisture, so the first step was to remove the keys. I took it to a local music shop and they removed the keys for me. I then began the process of covering the body. Since the theme is music, I wanted the pattern to somehow refer to music or sound, yet didn't want to use the traditional music note symbols... I just wanted something less literal when conveying the idea. So I began thinking about the patterns that sound makes visually, if you haven't seen the frequency resonance experiment video yet, you'll understand what I mean once you watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w 

I have never been much of a millefiori caner with polymer. There have been a few canes I've created in the past, but not many. I do love how canes work and really would like to explore doing more of them sometime. I thought this would be a great project for canes. I decided on a palette of ultramarine  blue and yellow with white. This color palette felt right because it reminds me of air and lightness, which is often the way I like hearing a flute, with a light airy tune. I made a couple different versions of bullseye canes in the blue/white/yellow color palette and placed slices of them on a sheet of white polymer. After I had the sheet covered the way I wanted, and had it smoothed down so that the cane slices blended into each other, I mounted it on the head joint, leaving the mouth piece uncovered for a contrasting ultramarine solid. Separately, I also unscrewed and covered the tip of the head joint with some of this sheet, then used a snake of white and a snake of blue clay to go around the base of that small piece.

Because I wanted to use varying cane slices to cover the keys, I decided that I wanted the body and foot to be mostly ultramarine blue with surprise spots of the canes cut into the body. So, I covered the entire body and foot with the blue and smoothed the joins of clay, then cut out holes to insert the canes. After smoothing over where the blue met the inserted canes, these pieces were cured. I cut thin slices of the different canes and made them all uniform in thickness by rolling them through the pasta machine. I then used circle cutters to get them to the right sizes I needed for them to cover the different keys. There were a few that I had to hand cut with an X-acto knife, for the odd-shaped keys. These were cured on a board, to be adhered to the keys after the flute was put back together. Because I wanted this piece to be shiny, but didn't want the hassles of sanding, especially with some of the exposed metal areas of the key holes and the joints where the pieces fit together, sanding would have been an extremely fussy job. So, I decided to use the liquid polymer/heat-gun method. I've seen this method discussed by a couple different artists, but most recently Debbie Crothers wrote about how she gets her gorgeous finish on her faux lamp work beads in this blog post. Thanks Debbie, for the reminder, this turned out to be a great way to get the finish I wanted, without the fussiness that sanding would have entailed!

After I had The flute covered and had the finish I wanted, I took it back to the music store to have the keys put back on. Here's where the trouble began. Because I've never done this before, and likely the music store guy has never had someone want to do this, there were areas I covered which needed to be exposed to give the fulcrum of the keys the space and leverage they needed to move the keys... this I hadn't realized when covering the body and foot. So I had to go back to the shop, after they discovered this issue, and I simply used my X-acto knife to cut out the areas that needed that leverage. They put all the keys back on, but because I was running close to my deadline, they still need to do a little work to get it into good playing condition. There is one key who's spring is off and I can't figure out where the spring is supposed to rest, so they will have to adjust that. They also removed some of the corks on the back of some of the keys, so I will need to have those reinstalled. They were concerned that the tone of the instrument would be deadened by the covering. I am not a sound expert, but I've compared the tone of this flute to the tone of my other student grade flute and I cannot discern a difference. So, I have played the flute and it does work, and it will hopefully play well one day soon! My goal in this was to create a beautiful, but also functional instrument, and I'm quite pleased, so far, with my accomplishment. I really hope that the music people can get it up to speed with tweaking the keys to good playing condition. Here are a couple more shots of it, from varying angles and views, so you can see all the decoration around the entire piece:

As I said, I'm really pleased with this project, and if the music guys can tweak the keys to get it into best playing condition, I might decide to do more of these...  I'd really love to get my hands on a piccolo to do this to! ;) If I'd have had this flute as a kid, I'd have been over the moon happy to have such a unique instrument! So, what do you think of my sound wave flute? I'd love to hear your thoughts! Leave me a comment below!
Voting for this challenge begins on July 1st and will run through to July 7th at midnight EST. I'll post a reminder here on the blog!

Labor of Love

My latest piece was truly a labor of love.  I wonder if I jinxed myself in the post about my last piece, when I said it just went together without a hitch.  Not so with this one.  The May challenge for my guild is the theme of bowls.  Immediately I knew 2 things, I wanted to make a yarn bowl and I wanted it to have a different design, perhaps 2 levels that were separated by space.  I made some sketches and came up with a design and shape that made me swoon.  I decided to use hammered metal spirals to support the upper level of the bowl.  While this idea was fun, it proved a challenge.  In hindsight I would have made the bowl and drilled holes into it for the metal supports.  I had actually considered doing this, but was wary of how thick I'd have to make it for drilling and was worried that I would drill through the bowl, so instead I tried to build the bowl around the metal supports.

I began by making a first layer of the basic shapes I needed to create the look I wanted.  I used a glass vase to form my shape.  After the first cure I wanted to sand down any bumpies, and in doing so cracked the top piece right in half.  I guess it wasn't cured well enough, as that should not have happened.  Super glue to the rescue and onto the second layer for strength.  This layer went off without a hitch.  Next up, was to build the hammered metal spirals -  I shaped these with my round nose pliers and hammered them on my anvil, and during that process I once missed and hit my thumb with the hammer.  Did I mention that this piece was a labor of love? ;)

After a few choice words and successfully forming and hammering all of the spirals I glued them to my pieces, which was a feat in and of itself!  Once I had them glued, I had to create another base layer to bring the clay to the same level as the metal.  In this next curing the cracks started.  I had 3 cracks from where the metal was straining while the piece rested on the vase for support.  I patched up the cracks, added another layer and back into the oven for another cure.  This time the cracks were healed, but I still wanted one more layer.  Imagine my disgust after the additional layer was cured and I pulled the piece out to find 3 cracks in the same general area as before!  One more patching and a layer of black lpc fixed that issue.

Next I gave it a good sanding all over to eliminate the bumps and fingerprint marks, then another layer of lpc for one more full polymer coating.  I wanted a surface treatment on the bowl that was just as unique as the shape, so I opted for a version of what I call impasto polymer technique, which I did in the Premo Bright Green pearl color, straight from the pack because I love that color so much. 

One final curing to harden the surface treatment, as I held my breath and watched over like a mother hen for fear of more cracking.  It survived with no issue! YAY!  I gave it a nice coating of a polymer gloss sealer for extra protection.  The interior bottom of the bowl, I forgot to mention, is a slab of mokume gane polymer done in black, silver, wasabi pearl and white.  You can get a glimpse of that here:

As I said, the idea for this was to be a yarn bowl, and the 2 layers askew were meant as a place for the knitting needles to rest as seen here:

And the yarn is meant to feed through the metal spiral like this:

Yes indeed, this one was a labor of love.  Lots of work went into it and while it is not perfect, I do love this piece.  The design of it is very "me" and I was so pleased with how the surface treatment turned out considering that part was totally unplanned.  I love it when pieces come together with something that just "happens"! :)  If I ever revisit this project again, I will definitely make the base parts full thickness first and then drill the holes for the wire support, that's the lesson for this one.  But overall I'm quite pleased!  What do you think of my funky bowl?  Have you ever had a project that kept giving you problems all through construction but you stuck with it and it turned out as good as you had originally hoped? Tell me about it in the comments!