Today, it was back in the studio, working on my piece for the Cedar Crest show next March. I'm making my blueberry game pieces. From left, the lump of mixed gray-blue sculpey, some sculpey blueberries sitting in the tin foil tray (not yet baked), a bit of sculpey formed into a ball, a real frozen blueberry, a sculpey blueberry that's already been baked, an awl & a pencil (what I was using to form the tops and bottoms of the blueberries):
A close-up, with a real frozen blueberry at the top, the rest are sculpey blueberries:
And after baking:
They're definitely darker after baking, and these are almost black. The packages do show the "after" colors being darker, but I might've also burnt these. When I tested the little toaster oven I got at the Goodwill this afternoon, the temperature held pretty constant. But when I used it tonight to bake the blueberries, it ran a little high (25 deg F higher), and I wasn't able to monitor the temperature throughout the 1/2 hour. I had planned to make batches with color variations anyhow, so these might be ok as part of the "blend." We'll see.
And more about our electricity usage
Back in June, I mentioned that by doing a few things, we reduced our electricity usage by 20%, down to 19.7kWh/day without much effort. Sometime in the last couple of months, the Good Prince also moved the mail server to the computer that was doing the backups and so was able to turn off the original mail server completely. We just checked our November usage, and it's down to 14.5kWh/day, down from 25.9 a year ago November. We're not sure if it's real or not, I guess we'll find out when we get our December usage information and see if it holds.
I also figured out how we can air-dry (at least partially) our laundry indoors in the winter. I already picked up some of the materials but I still need hooks. Then we'll see what that number goes down to!
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1 comment:
those are very impressive blueberries. I would be quite tempted to eat them.
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