The things I do when I should be doing my homework.......

Everyone always told me that when I made it to college I would take everything more seriously and that it would be different the High School. Well, yes it is, high school didn't come with a $1200 price tag every semester (ok, this semester wasn't that bad. I only took four classes instead of five). Something that didn't change was that I still hate doing homework (especially when it deals with politics, I still don't quite understand why that was required for a Paralegal degree, that and Pre-Calculus). In theory right now  I should be working ahead on American Government, doing Criminal Law tests that my half senile teacher hasn't even said when they are due (trust me, I'm not making this up. I could sit in my seat at the back of the class and play Everquest 2 on my laptop and he wouldn't know). I bet that about here people are starting to say "Amanda! Get to the point!"

                                                 Viola! I give you! THE POINT! hehehehehehe


About a year ago I tried the baked marble thing, somewhere I even have pictures to prove it, but they seem to be hiding at the moment.

http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=324990.0#axzz2N4vsFrzZ

The link will take you to the original forum post on Craftster.org where I found it. It's very easy to do, fairly inexpensive, and the only thing that would hold you back here would be your imagination. Mine however hit a road block. I simply couldn't find anything that I like with these! They also tend to be fragile, most of mine broke after my son knocked the box over three or four times and cleaning shards or broken cracked marble out of carpet is no fun! They only bad thing I found was that even though dark colors did crack, by virtue of the dark color, you couldn't see it unless you were looking through the marble at a light.

Then we have today's experiment. 

                              

                           http://candicecharlson.blogspot.com/2012/09/flat-marble-necklaces.html

I thought this was neat, and it didn't look that much different from the marbles. This is what happened.......

The bag on the left is from the Dollar Tree, the bag on the right is from Michael's (I know a lot of people that  like purple. The bag was mostly clear but as you can see it had some dark purple and even some lavender mixed in)

I personally believe that the Dollar Tree is a crafter's heaven. I keep a set of pans specifically for crafting, these came from Dollar Tree and were the perfect size. Coincidentally, I really did like that purple. Shame.

Another wonderful opputunity presented itself though, after the marbles come out of the oven you have to drop them in cold water so that they will crack. We're talking Will-make-your-hand-hurt-frostbite Cold. I needed to clean out the Ice Maker, I haven't been able to replace the filter for the ice make so the ice that comes out when the ice maker is on is kind of gross. I managed to manhandle the fridge out so that the bin would come out and used the nasty ice to get a good sink full of literal ice cold water.

Dollar Tree rocks looked good cracking, the colors look good, had a nice sizzle and they went into the sink,

Not so much with the Michael's rocks. It's a good thing my son wasn't home, I make a point of not swearing around him, but when I saw the rocks as they went into the water I started cussing. The lavender turned an Amber color, which is much more noticeable then the lavender was before. The dark purple turned a dark red/magenta color.

Here is the final product.  In the end I'm pretty sure that the problem was that the oven was to hot. The first tutorial said to bake the marbles at 350 for 30 minutes, the second said 500 for the same time. So in a way I really did cook them. 350 would have been fine in this case, 500 was simply too hot.  I wouldn't call this an epic fail, that would have been if the fire extinguisher had come out.

*sigh* Now it's time to work on homework, stay crafty everyone!

Amanda