In the August DH&MS magazine there was a review about a glass fibre brush - £4.95 plus p.p. from the Hobbies catalogue. It sounded like a useful piece of kit for smoothing things and cleaning things and getting in all those nooks and crannies. Indeed I had a couple of nooks and a few crannies on a fireplace that I wanted to clean up.
Swift search of the web netted me what looked identical pens this time two for £2.99 and free post. Forgo a cake this week and they are mine.
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| looks and works like a propelling pencil |
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| the working part of the pen - glass fibre brush |
As the photos show they are like propelling pencils but with glass fibre 'bristles' at the working end. If you keep them short like this they scrub harder. You can just lengthen them if you want a softer approach.
I had painted a fireplace to look like a black-leaded one. Now I am back in 2015 my residents have stripped the original fireplaces back to a shiny sort of pewtery look and added a gas flame-effect fire insert to them. I tried to remove the acrylic paint but there was a ton still left in various indentations. I was OK with that as it gave an aged appearance but as I had the magic pen I might as well see what it could do.
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| before |
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| after |
It's not bad and will do fine for my purposes but if you wanted to totally clean it up I think you'd have to put in some time. This was just under ten minutes of brushing away at it and quite a bit of paint is still there. It did burnish the metal nicely though and gave me the look I was wanting.
The Jury's out. I'll let you know if I use them for anything else.
I read the article too ~ I may have to indulge in a glassfibre pen at some point :-) I adore browsing through both the Hobbies and the Hobbys catalogues, they both have such interesting-looking tools and gadgets in them ~ and for some reason, I particularly enjoy looking through the "materials" sections just to see if anything in there prompts a dolls' house idea! Yes, I know ~ I'm a wee bit weird LOL
ReplyDeleteWelcome to the 'weird' club - bet there's a lot of us. Just say the word catalogue to me and I am there! I blame my mother she used to give me a huge one (name escapes me) when I was a tot to cut out things and stick them in my home made brown paper (sewn with string) scrapbook. Hours, nay years, of fun. never looked back. Marilyn
DeleteHI Marilyn,
ReplyDeleteOn this side of the pond, for me in the 50's and 60's was the giant Sears catalog. So much fun dreaming!
Indeed, in fact the name of the catalogue has just come back to me....Kay's and was known in our family as the dream book!
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