So I tried messing around with epoxy putty.  If you’ve hung out with plumbers, you might have seen this stuff.  “Plumber’s putty” is available at the local hardware in the plumbing section.  Not very original name and it only comes in a drab gray color, but I supposed it serves the intended purpose.  When they two parts of putty are kneaded together, you can shape it like clay, but when it dries it is like a hard plastic.  Pretty cool stuff!  I’ve seen videos where people use epoxy putty to inlay designs in bowls and it looked really easy.  That should have been a warning!  The stuff is almost gooey when you work with it and really doesn’t WANT to be put in little channels on a bowl.  I found a company out of England that sells a version called “Milliput” that comes in yellow (when I say yellow, think a really ugly shade of grayish-yellow.  Like sinus infection in a toddler, yellow), white, black, or terracotta.  I ordered some of each, just to see what it would do.  Since I have the patience and attention span of a gnat, I got tired of waiting on the slow boat from London and went to Hobby Lobby looking for something similar that I could use right now.  Guess what?   They carry Milliput, but only the ugly yellow and the white.  I bought the white, thinking I could dye it some other color.  Then I looked to the right and there was a whole display of liquid dyes that were supposedly made to be used to color epoxy.  I’m pretty sure I heard angels sing for just a little bit.

I bought a bottle of “fire engine red” and went home to create red stripes around the rim of a cherry bowl.  What I quickly realized when I started coloring the putty, was someone at the dye factory has apparently never seen a fire engine in their entire life, is color blind, or is still laughing about the practical joke he played on everyone who bought this stuff.  After adding almost an entire bottle of the coloring to the white putty, I figured the color I had was the color I was always going to have.  This is what I was left with:

What the hell am I supposed to do with this???  Note to the color blind guy in the factory: that’s pink, not red!  Fire engines are NOT this color, because aside from a few parades in the San Francisco area, every kid expects to see an actual red fire engine.  Dalmation’s “pop” when sitting on a big RED fire engine, they just look annoyed and a little embarrassed sitting on something this color.  How about you call what you put in the bottle “Pepto Bismol”, “Baby Bop’s belly”, or “Barbie’s dream house” so the buyer would know what they were getting?  Fire engine red by ass!

Maybe I’ll just hold on to it for awhile and then try to donate it to some kind of breast cancer awareness raffle, where I can act like I did this on purpose…