Romantic watch part necklace

When I showed you the pocket watch yesterday, I mentioned all the watch parts I extracted from my mother's old and broken watches.  Part of the pile was a watch back that I thought was really neat:

I picked through the other parts and thought that a few of them looked like the heads and necks of some odd technological animal.  I put those together with some very tiny gears to make a romantic scene:

I cut out some Japanese paper and sealed it to the bottom of the watch back and tested to make sure the parts would fit:

I poured the first layer of resin.  I let that cure under the UV lamp then added more resin.  Unfortunately, the bumpiness of the big pieces was taller than the indented area of the watch back, so I had problems getting the resin to dome the way I wanted it to.  I also didn't seal the paper enough, so there are a few dark spots.  There are also a few areas in the resin that don't look quite right.

The thing I don't like about resin is that you get what you get.  You have to either pitch it and start over or live with it.  I didn't want to lose the watch parts, so I've chosen to live with it.  I took a chain apart and attached it to the holes at the top of the piece for a necklace, and I decided to leave the bottom holes open.  I could dangle something there, but it was pretty long when I tried it on, and anything dangling would get "lost in the shadows".  Even with everything wrong with it, I think it's cute:

I have another set of the "kissing figures", so I can do something like this again.  Next time, I'm going to find a deeper bezel so I can completely encase the pieces in resin and not have to worry about making a big mess (like I did this time).

"Wibbly wobbly time-y wimey" pocket watch

People assume that time is a strict progression

of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear,

non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of 

wibbly wobbly... 

time-y wimey... 

stuff. 

 The Doctor in "Blink"

I've posted this quote before, when I ranted about time (or the lack thereof) two and a half years ago.

A little over a year after that post I purchased an empty pocket watch on clearance.  I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, but I knew I wanted to do something.  At some point after that, I acquired a bunch of old, broken watches my mother had lying around.  I painstakingly pried apart everything I could and stored it in a little container.

When I decided to do the Gardens and Gears Steampunk show at the Domes (which is this Sunday - mark your calendars!), I determined that now would be a perfect time to use the pocket watch with the watch parts I had pried apart.

It was the perfect plan but with imperfect organization, as I could not find the parts!  Yeah, yeah, I know... my studio has been organized and reorganized so many times (the last post about it is here, and from there are links to the other posts), so how could I have lost something?  It was a small container, and it could have been "filed" in any number of places.  As soon as I made up my mind to use other pieces I found my watch parts in my "stuff to use in polymer clay" basket drawer.  Tomorrow I'll show you what I did with some of the pieces.

But today is for the pocket watch.  Remember that mixed media section of Michaels I mentioned when I showed you the brightly colored gear and key earrings and necklace and the "magnifying glass" earrings?  They also had clock faces and spinners, so I decided to use a few of those along with one of the gears I enameled yesterday:

As you can see, the pocket watch opens up, and this is the approximate placing of the components.

I put some UV resin (Lisa Pavelka Magic-Glos) in the bottom of the glass (in the regular part of the watch, not the part that opens up) and pressed the gear in.  I put that under the UV light to cure, then I added some more resin and the spinners:

Now you know my secret - I didn't enamel the back side of the gear.  :)

I let that cure for a while, then added more resin and the clock face.  I brushed some resin over the top of the clock face in the hopes that it would stay put.  I couldn't cover it all the way with resin because I needed the space for the winding crown, which is still useable to open the cover of the watch.

After that cured, Steve filed the inside rim so the back would fit better, and he glued the winding crown in.

Here is the final watch opened up:

And here it is closed and on a chain:

Steve dubbed it the "Wibbly wobbly time-y wimey" pocket watch.  Too bad the back of the watch isn't plain, or I'd have that Doctor Who quote engraved on it.