FFFriday: Martinis!

Happy Fake Food Friday everyone!  It's time for part 2 of our revisit of Anna's Dirty Martinis!  In part 1 I went over my olives, and now it's time for the fun part: The liquor!

Materials: Gel Wax, acrylic martini glasses, olives on skewers

Tools: Hot Plate, small pan, spoon

Anna used acrylic water for her martinis, but for ours I used one of my new favorite materials, gel wax!  I'll be doing a Materials Monday on it because it is so nifty and has so many uses.  In this project I used ArtMinds Gel Wax from Michaels.  
A quick run down of Gel Wax: it comes in a tub, and you can get it at pretty much any craft store in the candle making section.  You can color it with wax dyes and you can heat it on a stove top.  It's solid once it cools, so it's much quicker than the acrylic water.  

Hot plate set up

Because I didn't need to dye the martinis any color, I didn't bother to measure how much gel wax I was using.  I just put a bunch in a pot and let it heat up.  Because I wanted them to be as clear as possible, I made sure I heated the wax until all the bubbles were out and it was very liquidy.  The big risk in this is if you're pouring into an acrylic vessel (as is the case most of the time for theater) is that it might melt.  I didn't melt any glasses this time around, but I've definitely done so in the past (and will gladly share in my gel wax post).  I also read that you want to make sure to use a metal stirrer, not wood, because wood can introduce bubbles into the wax.  My skewers definitely did!

The cool thing about gel wax is you can pour it in layers and not get stratified lines because the wax just melts into itself.  These are my first two half pours.  I noticed that I was getting bubbles, both from the wooden skewers and from the cool air.  

They became more pronounced as the wax cooled.  

Heat the wax, heat the glass!

I tried to warm up my area and the glasses a bit with a space heater, and that did seem to help some.  

In the end, I couldn't get rid of my bubbles.  I did find that pouring the wax, then placing the olive skewer did help to make sure the wax got all the way around the olives, but bubbles still happened.  This wasn't a huge problem for us, as our house size is huge, and the bubbles actually made it look like there was liquid in the glass.  

Two of my best pours

I never did get a shot of all of them together, as we were rushing to get these to rehearsal.  I think they turned out pretty well, despite the bubbles.  If I were to do it again, I'd probably seal the skewers and olives in hopes that they wouldn't cause as many bubbles, but I'd want to do a test to see if a spray sealer would react in any way with the wax.  

Shortly after this project, (and after I had finished this tub of wax), I did a round of champagne with a different brand, Country Lane Gel Wax from Hobby Lobby, which barely bubbled at all!  That was unfortunate for the champagne, but would have been perfect for these martinis!  Ah, well, live and learn.  

I'm not really a martini girl, so I can't say this project made me want one, but my summer boss Randy is a big fan, so I'm going to end this with a quote from him.  

"It's like a salad if you get it extra dirty" 

Cheers!