In few words: A creative type living in Calgary, Canada who is currently obsessed with polymer clay and all it's sticky wonderfulness.
Wow! It’s been a productive month! My final thing is one of the several brand new canes i whipped up today on a spur of the moment brain wave.
In clay, the ‘translucent mum’ cane is one of the first people do. I was looking for a more realistic version of it or a peony / marigold / carnation for a while. Now, I’m on the way! Yay!
So I neglected to post the last few days but I’ve been busy making things despite that!
The bookmarks I prototyped earlier in the month are done now, and flying east:
My daughters bridge project for her grade 3/4 class:
And a tool to use to make more even cuts in my clay bead making. The spaces between the blades can be widened to make tube beads instead of heishi beads (which they are set for now) and it will make precise sized cuts!
Today… more beads. Here’s a pic of just a few of them, fresh out of the oven and ice bath:
I was happy with how plump the pillow beads look - I sometimes get the flattest pillow beads. And the swirlies are kind of neat done this way, as discs. Much easier to drill holes in, too.
Still working through the stack of blends I made earlier in the month - today was the deep purple and the orange. A violet, a rose, a sort of tiger lily and a random orange flower. The orange was retina burning bright and will be lovely on summer pieces.
I painted the rest of the beads, used a brush. So they’re cute:
And to help with pics I made a poor woman’s light box out of cardboard and tissue and my hot like the sun desk lamp. The resulting pics still needed photoshopping but were much more consistent and less shadowy than others i’ve taken. I’m told the ambient brightness in the room made my pics too dark (so now the correction washes it out) and that i should take the pics in a darker room so that the light of the lightbox actually LIGHTENS the pic. Stay tuned.
I started painting the little lentils from yesterday. The ‘paint’ is actually coloured liquid clay and these are the 3 larger lentils as try outs. The smaller ones are for a project and I will use a paintbrush instead of a toothpick so they look less like scrambled eggs.
And because I was productive today, I made two more canes, a blue flower and a blue rose.
I got a little mini tripod for my digital camera today. I could kick myself for not doing that years ago. Made the low light / bumped up white / macro pics much simpler!
I made the blank beads to paint tomorrow. Some little candy coloured lentils. The colours are actually alcohol inks added to a translucent clay. My daughter tells me they look like candies in the same sweet treats theme I did last week.
Today I got sick of slicing inconsistent little slice beads so I jury rigged a slice bead cutter by putting some of my test blades into a lump of clay at even intervals (it’ll make about 3 1/2 - 4mm thick beads). This should work until I get a flexible tube / slice bead cutter figured out! The pic really isn’t an alien bug.
Most of my ‘crafting’ had little to do with real clay today. I spent the bulk of my making time, fixing up and finishing up a tutorial for sunflower and aster canes. A few more pics to edit and I will be so done that mess.
I finally baked a few of my rose attempts. And in a bit of a clean up I used the last few slices of an old kaleidoscope cane on a bead. Yay beads!
Still on the baked, faux foods theme here - a little sandwich cookie and a cupcake. Working on the techniques but back to the regular stuff tomorrow, as production for upcoming shows calls!
Some vanilla scented donut beads just in time for Valentines. They are about 11mm across. I made the tiny sprinkles first, baked those and then set them on my little donuts and homeade (plastic) pink icing.
And the little sweets:
Still on the bead-making run. Actually, I’m almost always on bead, cane or jewelry-making crazes if I’m happy… sort of if you’re happy and you know… make beads. Building millefiori canes in clay makes scrap pieces of otherwise fabulous shades and designs. So two fun techniques are to swirl them into the little spiraled UFO shapes or to make mirror-image beads by cutting and opening bits of scrap up.
Here’s a few from today’s batch:
And on the blog post of mine there is a picture of all of today’s scrappy beads plus a better view of the ones I made yesterday. Phew. Serious beads!
Day 10 being Sunday I was going to do what I wanted. I read Stephen King’s Duma Key, made a cane and made beads, now cooking.
The beads use the canes I’ve made the last few days. The small lampwork round shaped ones in the main focus are about 12mm across. In the edge of the picture are larger pea pod shaped beads made from the scraps of the cane making - the design is called ‘natasha beads’ and each face of the bead (the edges are rounded but they start rectangular) is a mirror image. They look like inkblots. After they’re done getting toasted, they get holes drilled then they get the heck sanded out of them in the tumbler, then buffed and polished.
OK, so not beads yet. More canes. The leaf was a try at a sawtooth edge like a real rose leaf has, the pink rose matches the crimson one from my start of the month item. Tomorrow they all go on beads!
A little bit of slacker-ness tonight - I made the earrings to match the necklace I wired up last night:
Back to beads this weekend! Many beads!
I sliced my hand making the day 6 bookmarks so I figured I would give it a day or two before I made things from clay. So, back to jewelery assembly. I scrounged in my Cupboard of Wonders and found a box of beads from a swap two years ago.
The blue kaleidoscope patterned beads are by a Dutch artist, Muriel (last name escaping me) and the ‘faux’ wood tube beads are by Bob Wiley, an artist with several articles and an appearance on the Carol Duvall Show.
Oh and my daughters says: I also made monster cookies today.
I joined a swap for polymer clay bookmarks and today’s thing was some prototypes of one of the bookmarks. These use some bits from my glass bead stash - the ones for the clay swap will use my clay beads.
Maybe even thread a few flattish beads on the thong or in the middle of it? The jury is still out.
The next step after I decide what canes I will make for a big production run is to start pulling colours from my shelf or my colour list. So today that’s what I did, a bunch of colours, both custom mixed and straight from the pack Fimos:
After I had those, I began making basic Skinner blends (the gradient mixes that are the basis for ‘realistic’ millefiori or cane designs in polymer clay). Here’s most of them, very blurry because daylight was gone by the time I got these photo’d:
All together, these will make about 30 different flower canes like what I did on Day 1.
