My hypo cement needs to relax

I have to admit to having had a little bit of fear of the unknown, with regards to glue.  I realise how absurd this sounds, let's face it, I've been using glue in one form or another for decades without any real dramas.

First there was flour and water paste, which is even edible if you get hungry doing your pasting project. You can't really ask more of a glue than to be the snack too, can you.  Next came Clag, with its bright red, stiff plastic bristle brush that was also the lid of the bottle - a pretty clever concept all those years ago. Later on there were glue sticks, and then there were giant glue sticks when my children were young. I've never actually purchased a giant glue stick, mostly because the thought of all that glue let loose in the house with children was a bit daunting.

As I grew up, and less likely to plaster an entire room with glue, there were nifty glues that involved stirring two separate parts together.  I quite liked those - I always felt powerful mixing a potion that was going to heal a broken toy, or save my favourite coffee cup.  And of course the two part glues were ultimately improved by some enterprising person, into being in a single tube where you pushed the end up, and the right quantities of each part magically came out.  (Yes, in the olden days we had to actually judge the correct quantities and stir it together with a dead match).

Glue has really been my friend over the years, unlike sticky tape which is most decidedly my enemy.  Wrapping gifts for Christmas sees me spending eleven and a half months recovering from the trauma of having sticky tape everywhere except the present!  By the time all the gifts are wrapped I'm literally wearing a sticky tape hat, coat and mittens (they're not gloves, there are no separate fingers!) and cursing the inventor.  And I know I'm not the only one - why else would someone have invented the gift bag?

And then there was superglue. What did we do before superglue? And the question that plagues us all - how come it doesn't stick to the inside of the tube?  We all take superglue for granted these days, but it was just an amazing thing when it first came out.

Anyway, given my history of glue usage, it's sort of strange that I'd put off buying jewellery glue for such a long time.  Oh I've looked at it, researched it, admired it, and wanted it - just never quite got the courage up to buy it.  Because, of course, once you buy it you have to use it.  And what if I couldn't make a great piece of jewellery with glue?  It was like my original fear of making the first piece of jewellery with my lovely stash of beads, all over again.

But I've done it - bought the glue.  And I've used it too!  Just took a deep breath and jumped right in before I could chicken out.  What I didn't do first was read the instructions.  BIG boo-boo.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not a complete idiot, despite any evidence to the contrary.  I know that a glue that will stick anything to anything is going to need care so I wouldn't be forever carting a work bench around on my elbow (work bench is my artistic name for white fold out table from the local hardware!).

What I didn't read was what to do when you've finished gluing stuff and want to put the cap back on.  You'd think that would be the easy part really, however the glue kept oozing out of the top faster than I could catch it (we're talking a really minute nozzle here, maybe a quarter of a millimetre in diameter).  So because I was watching the ooze and popping things under it whilst trying to find an actual bucket or something to put there, I hadn't really considered the rest of the packing up part.  Like... a glue that sticks anything to anything might need something to stop it up before the lid goes on to prevent air getting into the tube.  And like glue ooze is probably not a good thing if you ever want to open the tube again.

 

 You need to understand something about the ooze - I wasn't squeezing the tube, you don't need to squeeze the tube, it ... just... oozes... and oozes... and oozes some more, all by itself.  It sort of rushes towards the light when the cap's off, as if it doesn't escape in a nano-second it might be trapped inside forever.  They should have given it the more apt brand name of Ooze.   It's actually got a boring name of GS hypo-cement.  You'd think being called 'Hypo' it would be fairly laid back rather than this frantic rush wouldn't you? Oh, light bulb moment - perhaps this is relaxed and if it wasn't hypo then it would be doing more than ooze out of the end.  (Now I'm imagining myself trying to catch a river of it gushing out, rather than the ooze... too awful to contemplate. Let's move on).

So, having found a bucket and having managed to balance this tiny little tube carefully on its pivot point over the rim (which was pretty darn clever of me!) so the ooze was going to go in the bucket, it of course stopped oozing. Figures!  But at least I can grab the cap properly, decide how I'm going to clean the ooze off the tube (tissue - and yes, it stuck to the nozzle, thanks for asking), then decide how I'm going to clean the tissue off the nozzle (dare I try a sponge?  And if a sponge, will a blue one work better than yellow?  Sometimes life's decisions are hard!)

I chose the blue which worked well.  Great decision making skills are necessary when you're a sole trader / jewellery artiste.  Yellow wasn't going to work for obvious reasons (i.e. there were only blue sponges in the cupboard).  And then came the fun part.  The inside of the cap has a teeny weeny filament attached to it that needs to be inserted into the teeny weeny nozzle when you put the cap on.  At least I worked out how it wasn't going to dry up before I used it again.

Many, many frustrating minutes later, at the point I was nearly in tears, I finally got that stupid filament in the stupid nozzle.  The nozzle hole is microscopic and therefore the filament is slightly smaller than microscopic and hey! I have old eyes - I don't do microscopic!  And the ooze had started again, because of course I had to pick the tube up to try and insert the filament and obviously woke it up.  So there I was, wiping ooze, holding tube, trying to throw tissue and sponge anywhere they weren't going to stick to something because I needed that hand to insert the filament/cap.  It was a race against the ooze, with the ooze winning.

All I wanted was one little drop of glue to make the perfect match of bee & flower

 You can't imagine the trepidation I felt the next time I opened the glue, wondering how the hell I was going to get the cap back on this time.  Although I did come prepared with bucket (and a spare, just in case), tissues, blue sponge and a yellow sponge for back up.  All for nothing as it turns out - the cap's gone on perfectly every time since!  Somehow I seemed to have passed the glue test.  So, now glue is my new best friend again.