This was a fun project!

You know how you are about to throw something away and at the last minute you think, "I like this. I could make SOMETHING out of this!" I do this a lot, which is why I have so much stuff in my basement. Anyway, I saved the top from an Amaretto bottle because I liked its shape.

I wanted to try something new and I had been doing a lot of soldering; I read somewhere that if you put copper foil tape around a matt board and treated it just like a piece of glass, you could solder pieces together. So here is a picture of the first piece I did using this method. It is a Fairy Princess!

The head, body, and wings are all made with a matt board base. I used stamps on white matt board then very slowly cut the board out with a very sharp X-ACTO blade - taking each layer down just a little bit at a time so I didn't cut myself. After all the pieces were cut out, I colorized them in different ways. The face was painted, the wings were embossed, and the body had a piece of copper sheet glued in place before I embossed over the whole belly area. I painted the back one solid color. Then I started to apply the copper foil tape to all the edges, connecting them together as I went. My tape wasn't very wide so I had to double up and go over some parts to make the tape cover more areas. I used my soldering iron with liquid flux and found that it was very easy to attach all the parts.

I didn't want the silver edges to show, so I painted over the silver solder with paint or more embossing powders. Sometimes keeping the silver solder edges is wonderful but in this case, I just wanted to cover them up. I rolled up a small piece of copper sheet to make the wand stick, and I actually went back in and dropped a few dots of hot solder on the top part to make it stay in place.

After I had this cute little princess, I wanted her to stand up... Oh yeah! That Amaretto bottle top would do! I covered it in Model Magic, stuck in a few embellishments, coated the white Model Magic with gesso, and painted over the gesso with Lumiere paints. The bottle top was turned upside down so the flat part was actually at the bottom, and where the bottle neck would normally screw down is where the Fairy Princess is. While the clay was still damp, I just pressed her into the divot and let it dry with her body in place. To add the corners and feet, I just balled up some clay and stuck a long head pin through all the layers eight times. I didn't mean to smash the feet down more than the top corners, gravity did that. I liked it that way though.

So try a new technique and if you have a soldering iron, give this one a whirl and let me know how yours turns out.