Thing-a-day.com

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!

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!

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.

Someone posted the Thing-a-day site to the Polymer Clay Central forum and I figured - what better way to get me back into the making-tons-of-stuff habit! So, look for a lot of polymer clay related things: canes, beads, squished messes, perhaps more canes (sorry, production period right now), some finished jewelry.

I’ll stuff bigger details into my blog or flickr as I go!

Any other clayers going to keep me company?