Gluing ain’t easy
I decided to take some time after lunch the other day to glue the pattern to the shell. I love living so close to work that I can take an hour lunch and actually accomplish something at home. I got all the paua done in 20 minutes or so.
When I got home, I reviewed my handiwork and found that on a couple of pieces the lines bled.
Since my goal this time was more precision cutting through thinner lines, that wasn’t going to work. So I decided I’d just redo those pieces. I realized that I’d made the problem myself by touching and retouching the paper with sticky fingers and what have you, trying to get it positioned properly. Every time I scraped over the line, I contributed to this problem. Doh! I realized that if I put the glue down first and then placed the piece of paper on the shell with the tip of my Exacto knife, I got precision placement, kept my fingers superglue-free, and kept my lines nice and clean. This is piece #3, which was the fuzzier one on the left in the picture above. Much better now.
Putting the glue down first, though, you get to see how the shell will really look once it’s sanded to a gloss and finished. It’s beautiful. It’s visually dusty when dry because of the scratches made when cutting the shell into blanks.
I decided to try to get the patterns of the 3 pieces I ended up redoing off immediately. I haven’t bothered with all the scrap pieces, but these were 3 untouched piece. The solvent works slowly and it took many baths and much scraping to get the gooey superglue and paper off the pieces. I could’ve just put another pattern on top some day, but I’ve done that before, and it added probably 20 minutes of sanding to that one little piece. It was a pain, and I don’t want to do it again. Nor do I want to do the clean-up again; it was slow and messy. So I’ll just have to try not to stick patterns to shell unless I’m certain I want them to stay there.
I didn’t try to do it this way, but it worked out that the flower part of the design fit two apiece on the MOP. Very economical. Sawing should ensue tonight, and hopefully routing on Sunday.
