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.
Well, I decided to use the sheet of sculpey III translucent I made in the tutorial from day 20 to make a mokume gane slabusing some Pearlescent Liquid Acrylics.
It came out very nice.
I thought….hmmmm that would make a great scarf for a new mask. But I didn’t remember my own lesson and even though I used Kato Polyclay as the backing for the scarf, I didn’t cover the top with wax paper. I was spared the agony of swearing s I cleaned clay out of the rollers…but the clay did stick and the pattern dragged. So it’s not longer mokume gane. It is however a pretty marbled pattern. Miss Thang is in the oven baking right now. Once she’s sanded and sealed, I think it will still be a nice piece.
Duh…I seem to be having problems all around this morning. Ok now the pics should be there. Going back to bed.
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!
My kreation of the day is a tutorial.
Someone over at polymer clay central had a question about getting Sculpey rolled through a pasta machine with out ending up with a sticky mess. I use sculpey all the time in my mokume ganes. Wax paper and letting the clay rest between passes through the past machine are the keys.
How not to gunk up your pasta machine with Sculpey III tutorial
Ok, I’ve been a bad girl and not blogging, but things have been kinda hectic for me at the moment.
So here’s a wrap up of the past week:
Day 14….worked briefly on some swaps that I had to get out and into the mail the next day.
Day 15 & day 16. Played around wit Maggie Maggio’s Color Scales Tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD4_gkZ226c
http://www.maggiemaggio.com/color/
Now whether or not you use polymer clay, it is certainly worth while picking up a few blocks of clay and playing around with color mixing. (Michaels’s Arts & Crafts has it on sale for .99 this week, btw)
Day 17: Made an orange cane to use for a matchbox swap.
Used this tute: http://www.polymerclaycentral.com/candy_citrus.html. Of course I can’t follow instructions to save my life, so I missed the step for wrapping the log in the medium orange sheet before wrapping in the darker sheet. Oh well.
Cane before reducing:
Day 18: Playing around withPosh Inkabilities inks. Haven’t made anything yet, but probably will make some beads tonight.
Day 19: Faux Stained glass…or something like that. Rubber stamped clay and painted with liquid clay mixed with powdered pigments. Baked then topped with UTEE.
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.
But I have been working!
Friday my 8 year old daughter and I made polymer clay beads and baked them, then made jewelry. Her beads came out WAY better than mine and I’m currently wearing a bracelet she made me.
Saturday, we did our cookie booth and sold 30 more boxes for her Girl Scout Troop!
Sunday, I made it a point to carve out some special time with my husband. We snuggles on the couch, ate sushi, and watched the LOST episodes we have missed this season. We really, really needed that.
Yesterday, my daughter and I delivered all the cookies ordered in the neighborhood. It was a feat. I stacked all the boxes in the stroller and strapped the baby to me in the Snugli. We walked probably three miles that way. It was an undertaking, to say the least, lol. I was overly ambitious…but we did get them delivered to all but three houses!
And today I made this as a promo for my shop:
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:
Feeling kinda lazy today, so I decided to create some new polymer clay texture tools. I used a piece of decorative moulding for this texture.
I think this would be pretty antiqued and highlighted with mica powders. I’ll probably play around with that this weekend.
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!
