A day playing with UTEE

Today, Kathy came from Hutchinson, KS and we played with UTEE. We didn't have a whole lot of time, but we got a lot accomplished in the short time we had.

In preparation of my play day with Kathy, I added alcohol inks to some clear UTEE for different colors. I originally started with 8 of these containers which used up two of my clear UTEE containers , then read somewhere that you could add regular EP to the UTEE, so, since I have so many more EP colors than alcohol inks AND clear UTEE, I decided to use only three Alcohol inks. I added those same colors to three containers of platinum. You have to let them sit overnight so the alcohol flashes off, so I know I allowed ample time before we play. From left to right (top) blue alcohol ink in platinum UTEE, blue alcohol ink in clear UTEE, (middle) green in platinum, green in clear, (bottom) orange in platinum, orange in clear.

I prepared the supplies in advance. Here they are in the overall view. From left clockwise are cookie cutters, melting pots, clear UTEE colored with alcohol inks, ice cube trays, various things to dip, UTEE, instruction sheet for melting pot, parchment paper.

This is a better view. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

Before we got too far, Kathy looked over the instruction sheets she had purchased earlier.

As you can see, the table is full and every surface is covered. The drawer that is open in the cabinet is the one that holds the UTEE. I put it in there because there was no room anywhere else.
The UTEE smelled bad when we first walked into that small room, so I got out the Febreeze and it took care of the offensive scent. You can also see Kathy's craft sheets she brought, since I don't have any. The case to the right belongs to Kathy. It contains microbeads she was going to use around the edge of an image, but we don't have time to use them.

The first thing we did was dip coasters I had prepainted into gold UTEE. No need to paint them, the gold took care of the words and images. Next we added UTEE to rose stones and paper we positioned in the ice cube trays. I forgot to coat them, and the little cubes still popped right out. And these are plain old ordinary plastic ice cube trays, which dispels the belief you need those heat resistant ice cube trays for this fun technique. The roses were fine, but the paper didn't do what I thought it should. I just threw the cubes, paper all, back in the melting pot. When melted, I used the Kool Tweezers to remove them from the pot. They were perfect and not too heavily coated.

It wasn't too long and I burned my finger (did this several times, but the first time caused a big blister when some molten UTEE splashed on my finger). Kathy poured the UTEE into the "T" cookie cutter because I could no longer be trusted :>)

We soon discovered that the craft sheet was not as heatproof as we thought. We decided to put the parchment paper UNDER the craft sheets because the table was getting discolored. We also learned that masking tape doesn't stick to parchment paper, so we had a fun time trying to get the parchment paper taped to the table.

Plastic cookie cutters are not the best thing to use with UTEE. Kathy is struggling to get the "stencil" part of the "T" off the cutter without breaking it. Even though we inked the cutters with UTEE, the metal ones worked far better than the plastic.

Kathy was not deterred, though, as can be seen by this photo. Success comes to those who have patience.

And successful we were. You can see most of what we did today. I don't know why the photo that shows all my goodies came out so red shifted, but you can get an idea what we made. Kathy took the same things home with her.










You can also see that I have my plastic cover back on my table and all supplies put away.

As an aside, this is not a cheap hobby. Kathy and I figured up that we each had about $18.00 in UTEE and FLEX in what we made today. That doesn't include the cost of melting pots, Kool Toolz, and craft sheets you need in order to make these goodies.

The one good thing about UTEE is there is NO waste. If you make a mistake, just throw it back in the melting pot and reheat.