Homemade Heather Gems?

i don't even need the snippers there we go that bundle of sticks that's what we were looking for [Music] i picked up that branch probably nine months maybe even a year ago in the middle of covid on one of our walks and i brought it home much to mrs brown's chagrin as we were walking down the street and then i honestly completely forgot that it was up there and it is well past dry at this point we have got a lot of leftover stabilizing dye and i was wondering if i would be able to do a version of heather gems with twigs heather is a brush i think a plant of some sort and they actually take the stems dye them and epoxy them together to make what they describe as gems it does have a certain gemstone look to it if i can replicate or even get something mildly similar with twigs but that's what we're gonna try bark on this tree branch is gonna get in the way with dying so i wanna see how much of that i can [Music] remove [Laughter] a couple of these larger pieces i think are too big for what we're trying to do so i'm going to see if i can't split them all right so i just cut this down on the bandsaw and i don't think i'm going to share that footage just presume that i did that super safely and that way i don't have to light anyone on camera all right now we have a lot of stick in order to avoid my weight solution from the last video i'm going to weld together some nuts into some large weights that will help hold down our twigs if you have any photo sensitivity i just jump for a little bit there's one down i've got two more don't have large enough ones for two more of those but we'll just make do as best you can [Music] [Music] so if you watch the ramen knife handle video you'll remember that we've got a lot of stabilizing resin in these three main dies uh extreme pink emerald green electric blue electric blue yes i want to separate these sticks into piles that one might be too big you know what that might be too big i'm going to bifurcate this one on the bandsaw as well yeah that was just the safest thing that i'm never never going to show you okay so it doesn't have to be exact we're not we're not doing that it's not really my thing uh it appears to me that my weights might actually not do a whole heck of a lot just from the shape of these sticks and the shape of these weights yeah okay cool let's not overthink it i'm in the pot and this is the blue and if i recall they almost don't fit yeah cool yeah pretty snuck the more i think about this the more i wonder if these weights are going to do me any good whatsoever uh i guess we'll just see what happens this one in blue and this one in the emerald green will this actually do anything maybe yeah that will do something that was a failure did you hear that it just went all the way straight down to the bottom all right so there's a weight at the bottom i probably didn't need to even add the weights they don't appear to actually be the right shape to weight down sticks so i'm just going to go ahead and get this started i think more important is just getting them dyed i might just have to dye them once and then flip flip a bunch of the sticks around that are sticking out and do it a second time turn on the vacuum and it should start pulling a vacuum here so what the bubbles are that's actually air in the sticks that are being vacuumed out being pumped out of the sticks and we're going to replace that with dyed resin again i don't care about the resin portion of this so much as i care about the dye portion of this it is 3 30 on july 11 at the moment and i will come back in a few hours and see how we're doing all right it's like six o'clock and do see some bubbles still it is definitely still bubbling but uh i think i'm going to turn this off [Music] and flip it flip some of those pieces around just so i get good coverage editor peter here and truthfully i just try my best to take what maker peter has given me and present it in a way that makes him look like he he might know what he's doing but he's got one glove on i can see the other glove in frame it's not like we're holding the camera it's on a tripod they're dripping i i mean i get it he's trying to flip these things and to end this guy he drives me crazy all right all right it looks like we did it it looks it looks like we did it again i don't care as much about the resin and the stabilizing as i do about getting good guy see what happens all right i'll let it bubble till it stops and then we'll go on to the next step all right looks to me as though the bubbles have stopped it's like 7 30 here i'm gonna go ahead and turn off the pump i don't see any more bubbles tomorrow is monday and i'm gonna let it sit for a couple of days and just soak so these have actually been sitting in here for a week which means they should be good and saturated [Music] [Music] [Music] toaster oven for 45 minutes at 200 degrees fahrenheit oh fresh out of the oven oh i thought this was going to be the pink one just got it's got pink dye on the top of it but this is the emerald green hopefully we've got color throughout these twigs oh yeah okay we've got dye throughout the whole stick i think that's blue throughout i don't know if it's as deep blue on the inside but it's definitely on the inside hopefully yeah look at that cool that's a good color i like the pink a lot typically what just done with heather gems is these are soaked in resin and then smashed in a really big industrial machine i don't have a really big industrial machine for smashing so we're going to do something different it's going to become our own thing at this point i've kind of folded this one over a little bit just just a little tighter so everything's just a little tighter together resin today we're going to be using total boat high performance resin i'm not sure how many ounces we're going to need let's start with 12 ounces and see where that gets us i'm going to do one in clear and one in black and we'll see which one we prefer oh i hear power tools in the distance it warms my soul someone on my block is using power tools maybe a planer hard to tell i have a series on this channel called die trying which is where we try household pigments and this is just ground up charcoal briquettes this is just regular old lump charcoal that you get for your barbecue and i went ahead and put it in a coffee grinder and got this powder i mean it's nothing revolutionary people have been using um charcoal for dye and pigment for centuries but we didn't have to pay extra for it was already in the house tasha yar hates this one weird trick i put this urethane mold in here to give them a little support maybe i'll put a couple molds on i've got two more i'll put two more molds on this side and just kind of keep them up against this wall and we'll just keep it all from falling over actually these can probably just stand right up yeah those that's smarter that makes more sense we'll just stand those two up and uh we'll keep everything smashed up against the side all right put the lid on it put it under pressure under pressure [Music] and we'll pressurize this up to 50 psi [Music] look at that that looks so cool they totally don't look like heather gems they don't look at all like heather gems um but they they are interesting so let's start with this small section of clear one here [Applause] uh so so we're turning around 1100 rpms and i'm gonna be using my easy wood carbide tools for it should uh cut through it pretty well all right so that plastic bottle just destroys people's knuckles put that down as a fun little side effect there we go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] i used to sell bottle stoppers at fifteen dollars a piece now at that time i wasn't a resin guy i didn't i didn't do any reds and so that was all wood and so i would say in bottle stoppers to maybe 240 and then be done with it i think we're going to have to do a little bit more than that on this one this is 600 and 800. [Applause] ooh i'm starting to be able to see through the piece even while it's turning i'm gonna put a little plastics polish the micro mesh does the heavy lifting i always like the way it looks with this on there that looks pretty good [Music] yeah looks pretty dark and now we're gonna start the whole process over with the charcoal blank this is absolutely the least efficient way to do this so [Music] oh it's the ice cream man you hear him not today ice cream man you're not gonna lure me out to your illicit goods you're a dollar you asking me for a dollar you hear the ice cream right now you have the ice cream man no i don't have a dollar neither do i ice cream man [Music] i cannot see where the tape is now are we close i have no idea that was crazy that thread just kept going and going no we're not close i mean relatively sweet things off this goes on this goes oh that's a little loose so you just take a piece of paper towel tighten things right up it's not the worst idea i've ever had but this part of it is a little inconvenient there we go no more attacks from the plastic bottle do [Applause] so all right and we're going to start again with the sandpaper deja vu here what do we got here we got the trailer hitch knobby shape [Applause] this is the last grit at 800. let's have a look and see looks pretty cool let me grab my micromesh micromesh starts at 1500 goes through to 12 000. it's its own grit system just work through the grits put on some plastic polish [Applause] the goal was to make some approximation of heather gems i got sticks i can dye them all the way through so i know that works i just need to figure out a different way of binding them together that's that's doable that being said these are really cool looking the gaps in between the twigs give a depth that makes it very interesting and then on the charcoal one the dark of the charcoal makes the colors really pop and if you look in really close and the grain of all the wood that's dyed the center section doesn't seem to take dye and that's actually kind of interesting as well so each one of these has a little dot at the middle which kind of gives them a unique feature this video is going to end up being super long but i haven't been posting videos as frequently i figured you wouldn't mind a little longer format so thank you very much for watching please like and subscribe that actually helps me out a ton and i will catch you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Peter Brown

Views: 243,938

Keywords: dipit, shop time, epoxy

Id: uTaDH1_9AdM

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021