February 2, 2012: Keepin' Tabs

This one is cool because I picked it up from kids at school. I think the National Art Honors Society has been making them and selling them for fundraising. (Not sure about that one... but I did hear that from a student and I have seen these around on multiple occasions - in and out of school.) I was having a difficult time thinking of something to make today and realized that I had wanted to try this. I had a coffee can full of tabs so that was that. I do, however, have a knack for making things slightly more difficult than they need to be... and here's how I did it this time. I was not fond of the shiny silver look of the tabs so I decided I would try to oxidize them a little using liver of sulfur (technique discussed in January 16 creation). Well... I put about 30 tabs into a small amount of the oxidizing agent and it got interesting. It started making this metallic looking solution and started bubbling! I thought I was going to blow something up. Ugh. I let them sit in there a while, during which time I frantically looked up what could be happening in there. I was concerned that because the tabs were aluminum and not silver... that something crazy could be going on. I could not find anything that suggested it should create a violent reaction so I got over it. The only thing I found was that the effect would not be as noticeable on aluminum as on silver. I rinsed them off and then took some fuchsia satin cord. (The reason that fuchsia is in bold italics is because I had to look up the spelling... because it is down right bizarre! Upon doing so, I learned that this color got its name from a genus of flowering plants... that obviously have bright pink/red/purple flowers. AND did you know that fuchsia is a synonym for magenta? Huhh... the things you can learn on the web!)
Back to the bracelet... Being completely honest, I did not use a tutorial for this because I found it pretty easy to figure out on my own. Buuut... since I am not doing tutorials yet... I searched and found the this was probably the best of the video tutorials on YouTube. Happy tabbing!