Silent Auction donations

I was asked to provide a couple of items for the charity silent auction at Maidens this weekend. I decided it was high time to solder two projects that could be put to good use:

Badge for the Award of the Purple Fret
This is the Midrealm's AoA-level individual service award. It lends itself well to stained glass and hopefully will have a good appeal to bidders.

         

Celtic Knotwork (crown/cross/heart)

I actually made this for the 1st Midrealm Takes Care of it's Own piece, as an overflow. Unfortunately just getting the Midrealm Populace Badge panel took everything I had. I went ahead and soldered this so at least it's still going to charity. In hindsight it needed to be cut more carefully but it hopefully works well enough to bring in a few dollars.

Midrealm Pale Box

A short update to this post on the Challenges of Boxmaking:

After asking some others via an amazing Facebook group for advice regarding my hinge troubles, I discovered two key things that made this box a success, finally, a year later:

1) Tin your hinge! I use a large version of what I'm told is called a "Jewelry hinge", one copper rod within three pieces of brass tubing. You can see in this picture how the two end pieces are soldered to the box and the center piece. I was trying to solder the un-tinned hinge onto the box and conceal all the brass coloration. A bit foolish, in hindsight. It works much better, and is infinitely easier, if you tin it beforehand.

2) Use paper strips. I tore three paper strips approximately the width of the brass parts, and bent them around the box/lid as appropriate (so the papers on the outside were bent "above" the hinge, around the lid, to prevent solder from accidentally attaching those hinge segments to both the box and the lid. Likewise the one center strip was wrapped "under" the hinge and around the red glass of the box to ensure solder didn't go there either)

Now I have a completed and functional Midrealm Pale glass box.

Glass D20 Prototype

D20s (20-sided dice) are emblematic of gaming. Even someone who doesn't

Progress!

After a little bit of research and discussion I can wrap up my silver stain experiments for the A&S Faire this spring. Just before Christmas I purchased a much more accurate gram/ounce/etc scale. I'm going to redo some of the samples in order to have accurate measurements.

I'm looking for a safe way to make a couple of the recipes. I hope to get to use a proper fume hood somewhere, but will suffice for a hot plate in the middle of a field somewhere!