Well not literally, it’s not.

I’ve been experimenting with ideas for backing the keys, since even with rocks on the key tops, you can still see quite a bit of the ugly plastic underbelly of these keyboards, and that’s just unsightly.   One of my brilliant-yet-oddly-stupid ideas was to cut the metal mesh you can buy in copper, gold and silver colors.  It seemed smart, because I could lay the mesh over the keyboard and easily mark the squares for the key openings, then snip those sections out.

They don’t make bandaid boxes that big.

And being a writer, I need these fingers in working order.  So that went right out, and I thought to myself, “Hey, self, you’ve always been curious about that liquid epoxy resin, how’s about you try that?”

Well last night I did try that, and it’s disgusting!  You mix equal parts of this crap with this other crap, then it pours way too fast to control, and leaks through the innards of the keyboard through spaces you swore weren’t even there when you checked first. Not to mention the 72 hour curing time AND the fact that if you screwed up in the first place, it will never, ever cure from the sickly sticky stinky goo of this morning to a nice solid hard clear shiny surface.

So poop.

I’m back to the cave walls with my marking rock. I believe I’ll try the steampunk method of black felt, and see if that gives the backgroud at least a solid, black surface.  If I can just eliminate the sight of the ugly plastic bits, I might be happy.  And I’m meeting someone at Starbucks this Saturday to pick up a donated keyboard – then I have supplies for making a Stone Age, and Ice Age and either an Industrial Age or Bronze Age keyboard next.  And I’ve had some emailed promises of keyboards to come in the next few weeks, so I’m pretty stoked.

Next weekend my sister and I are going rock hounding on the Hoh river, and the weekend after that is a rock show in Edmonds (or Bellevue somewhere) so I’ll be giddy and posting photos of the slabs I’m buying.  I have a lady lined up to sell me a full bucket of Brazillian rough slabs at $4.00/pound which is amazing.  I’m all geeked-out over that.

I’m all geeked out over next weekend’s trip up the Hoh river, with a stop at Ruby Beach where the flat skipping stones breed like bunnies.  They don’t polish, but they’ll make an amazing Cave Man model of Stone Age Keyboard