I’ve been fiddling with some new projects lately. I have begun working with PMC (Precious Metal Clay), PMC3 pure silver, to be specific. I totally love it. It’s clay, so you can make something, remake it, or do something entirely different without losing material. Even if it dries and you decide you don’t like it, you can grind up the dried clay into a powder and rehydrate it to use again. Brilliant!
Like most hobbies (for ME anyway), this one will cost you about $150-200 to get started. I’m not using a kiln (add $300 to that startup cost), just a simple butane torch. This limits the sorts of things you can make with PMC to earrings and pendants because of strength issues. In order to get a very strong metal for a ring, it needs to be fired for a long period of time in a kiln rather than fired for 2.5 minutes under torch. Which is fine, there is a ton of special supplies you need to make rings anyway. We’ll see about rings if I sell any of the stuff I’ve made. These are the things I’ve cranked out so far:
They will be up for sale at my Etsy shop shortly. I gotta get photos done for them. The small ones will be approximately $15, the larger ones will be approximately $30 for just the pendant. The chains will run $15 and up. I hand oxidize the chains since they are hard to find pre-oxidized. PMC3 runs around $1.88/gm so I’ll have to run the numbers to get the final prices.
It appears that the hormone induced insomnia is back. I knew my few months of good sleep was just a respite from the horrors of menopause. I think the Mirena is losing steam, as I figured it would. Gyno says that it should continue to work even tho it’s at the prescribed end of its life, but I doubt I’d get that lucky. We’ll see.
I’m having a low period in general. I feel very unconnected and vaguely depressed. I’ve been limiting drinking and counting calories for a couple of months and lost all of TWO pounds. Fuck. I’m going to have to get the sleeve, I think. It just feels like everything is costing tons of money and it’s all OUTGOING rather than INCOMING. It’s not entirely true, we’ve been selling stuff on eBay and making some money, but I still feel that we’re hemorrhaging money. I think the anxiety of Nick’s job ending is fucking with me. He said the other night that he’d need to make $250/day to bring in the same money as now. That figure terrified me. $250 a DAY? How will we accomplish this? I’ve no idea. Fuck.
We’re toying with the idea of buying pallets of overstock from liquidation.com for pennies on the dollar and then selling that stuff on eBay. LOTS of people do it and make a living at it. We’re also trying to find some good dumpsters to dive – retail stuff, like Best Buy, Office Depot, etc. There are people who make livings doing this, too. We are scavengers by nature, so this appeals to us, but we drove around Gwinnett the other day and found pretty much nothing usable. Liquidation.com will probably be our first thing to try. But $250/day… Fuck.
I realise that two nights of VERY limited sleep is making me overly anxious today. It’s hard to keep it together when your brain is buzzing with completely random SHIT and playing the same three songs endlessly. ARGH. I’m trying to stay off FB so I won’t continue the fight I’m having with a pompous ASSHOLE that I’ve still got on my FL for some reason. I should mute his ass. But today is not the day to make those decisions. I’m too volatile.
I think I’ll go grocery shopping. Maybe drive around for a bit. SOMETHING. Blaaaahhhhhhh.