Close Up photography is totally unforgiving, the tiniest amount of residual glue or smallest join just looks horrendous …….. but from a distance, this slide looks pretty OK!!! The finished slide measures 3ins x 1ins.
I had a few self adhesive, glittered snowflake stickers from Lldl leftover from last Christmas and I thought I would try to see if they would work on a microscope slide decoration, as the snowflakes are slightly raised I wanted to see if they could be sandwiched and sealed between two slides neatly ……. they could!
Although the glitter was only on one side of the stickers, the adhesive side looked just of effective on the reverse of the slide. There was also a transparent edging round the stickers, but I think I got away with that too, it seemed to add a icy melty look, and from a distance it can’t be seen anyway. Sometimes working so close to something you are making makes you paranoid about the detail, or is that just me?
I am so pleased with the 6mm self adhesive, aluminium foil tape I found on e-bay, without it my microscope and domino tag making days would have been over. I did “A Marc” and bought copiously, two 40m rolls should last me for absolute ages …….. and when they do run out …… I reckon I will be in my 70’s and past crafting or at least blogging by then.
I am still practising applying the tape to the slides, I have done it in separate sections, sides then top and bottom, but that gives you four joins, and looks messy up close, in the end I think the best way, if a little fiddly, is to do it all in one go, with a single join at the bottom which can be hidden with a bail.
I used the last of my G-S Hypo Cement Glue (more now on order) to glue a few pearls on both sides of the sealed slide and then apply two spring bails to the top and bottom. E6000 is my glue of choice, but the pin head precision of the G-S is much better for such tiny work. And with this done I had to leave the glue to set/cure for 24 hours, without touching, aghhhhhhh the temptation!
Once dry I was ready to add an acrylic snowflake charm and a hanging wire. It was fixing the snowflake that the staying power of the G-S glue was well and truly tested, because the acrylic snowflake had a solid loop, so couldn’t be opened to attach to the bail ….. but I managed to open the spring bail, despite my heavy handiness, without a wobble so that the snowflake could lie flat to the slide.
This project was another steep learning curve in my microscope slide quest, but I am getting there, by Christmas I am determined to have it fine tuned to almost perfection. When I pack up a few bits and pieces and ideas to play with when I stay with Marc, sometimes we appear to achieve nothing or are not that happy with what we have produced but while we are continuously bouncing ideas of each other and Marc telling me how impatient I am, something clicks, to be resurrected somewhere along the line later on.
Marc has just bought a soldering tool and some solder that we are both desperate to try, as a lot of microscope slides on Pinterest etc. that first caught our eye are soldered …… we’ve also been watching tutorials on You Tube on how to do it …… so who knows what we’ll come up with in the next month or so.
