Here's a tutorial, if anyone's having a go at making one and gets stuck let me know and I’ll try to help :-)
Materials needed:
3 Wire coat hangers
2 chenille stems
4 1.75" pom poms
8 1" pom poms
8 lengths of white gimp
1 Clock mechanism
1 chunky brass washer (doesn't have to be brass, can be any metal you can solder to)
Equipment needed:
Soldering iron, solder and flux
A vice
A drill
Wire cutters
A glue gun
1. I marked 12 equally spaced points on outer edge of the brass washer. I drilled a hole at each of the points, not too deep just to about 1/8 of an inch, this took quite a while because for each hole I had to reposition the washer in the vice.
2. I cut 4x 7.5" lengths of wire from each of the coat hangers, this should give you 12 spindles, one for each hour on the clock.
3. I soldered each of the spindles into a hole on the washer, using a soldering iron, solder and a flux, be extra careful as the brass will get extremely hot... as I found out! - It was my first time soldering brass, I'd only ever soldered foil tape and wire in the past and I found brass very different to work with
4. Firstly I wove the gimp around the spokes going over, behind and back over each spoke but I wasn't happy with the finished result, it looked very cobwebby and fairly gappy so I unpicked it all and then I tried just doing basic under and over weaving this worked much better but was a bit of a pain because you really need an uneven number of spokes to do this, so it was either put 13 hours on the clock or once on each round go behind two spokes... I've never been too much of a reformist so I opted for the latter!!
5. Originally I had pictured the clock with spokes all at the same length but when I arranged the pom poms into position they looked a bit lost, I think if I'd used bigger pom poms this might have worked but I didn't have 12 large pom poms so I played around with what I had until I came up with my design, here's what the possibilities looked like... pls excuse my feet!!!
6. Using wire cutters I trimmed the spokes to the lengths decided and glued on the pom poms using a glue gun, if you don't have a glue gun any multi-purpose glue would probably do the job
7. To fit the clock together I had to undo the front of the mechanism (this is normal!!) The washer than had to be placed onto the mechanism and the small mechanism nut screwed back on to keep it all in place
8. Lastly I bent the chenille stems into the shapes of clock hands and again with the glue gun I glued them onto the hands of the clock mechanism, I found that I needed to trim the chenille at the base of the minutes hand because it was preventing the second hand from going round!
This has been my first challenge and I've really enjoyed it, I normally design crochet patterns and make stained glass so this was something completely different, something i'd never have thought of doing it it wasn't for the challenge! :-)
button to nominate it!
