:sparkles: Miniature Orrery! 001/100 #100BottleCapsChallenge | Collab with One Crafty Cat! :sparkles:

Hi everyone!!

I hope you're all having a great week! :blush: As you can probably tell from the title, I have a very special post for you all! Last month, my very good friend December's Edition :tada: :tada: The winner of the puzzle gets to choose a member of the leadership team to collaborate with and I'm honoured to say that she chose me to collaborate with!! :scream: :tada:

Our theme was space/cosmic!! :heart_eyes: As you can imagine, I was over the moon with this theme! :wink: :joy: Therefore I decided that I'd make a miniature orrery in a bottle cap! Keep reading to find out exactly what an orrery is! :blush: Amanda made this beautiful cosmic-themed wallet, you can view her fantastic craft here! :point_left: :heart_eyes:

Now for those of you who haven't seen my most recent wiki post, I've created a little crafting challenge for myself called the #100BottleCapsChallenge :sweat_smile: I've linked my wiki post to this blog if you're interested in having a look at it. The basic premise of this challenge is pretty self-explanatory: Make 100 bottle cap creations! Today's post will be kick-starting my challenge! :muscle: :tada:

:sparkles: Miniature Orrery! :sparkles:

So what exactly is an orrery? An orrery is a clockwork model of the solar system! It can also be a model of just the sun, moon and Earth, but all of them follow the Heliocentric Theory (as in the sun being at the centre of our solar system). These models are often mechanical and are designed to replicate the exact movements of our planets (around the sun) in real time! I find them absolutely fascinating and I truly ire the intricate beauty of them :heart_eyes: I'm also entering this little craft into the #TickTockCrafts weekend challenge as it is a clock after all, just not one for telling us when it's time for a cuppa! :joy:

Given our theme for the collab, I thought I'd stick to our home galaxy that is the Milky Way and making an orrery seems like a nice way to celebrate our beautiful galaxy and solar system :heart_eyes: As much as I would have loved to have made it possible, I'm afraid my little orrery is a static one that doesn't move. However, to compensate for this lack of movement, I did position the planets in the exact positions that they are currently at on this very day! Even though the proportions weren't calculated down to a precise scale, I still made them moderately accurate to their respective sizes. Similarly, their distances from the sun aren't scaled exactly down to size, but they are placed in their correct order from the sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth (and moon), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). For those of you wondering where Pluto is, it was reclassified as a Dwarf Planet back in 2006 and is no longer featured on an orrery (in my heart it'll always be a planet :smiling_imp: :joy: ).

This is very much a mixed media project in which I've used polymer clay, glitter, jewellery wire and acrylic paint to make the orrery. The "base" of the orrery is made of polymer clay, using my own colour mixing (with the help of some glitter). The gold details on the base were hand-painted in gold acrylic paint to show the orbits of each individual planet. The ring of dots on the inside of the bottle cap (between Mars and Jupiter) represent the asteroid belt that we have in our solar system. The planets are made of my own translucent polymer clay colour mix, I chose to make them translucent to give them a gemstone-esque appearance. To position the planets and the sun onto the creation, I used gold jewellery wire (26 gauge) :blush:

My apologies for such a long post! If you're reading this then I congratulate you!! Here's your free pizza! :pizza: :pizza: That's it from me and I hope you like it!! :heart: :heart:

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