Thing-a-day.com

So, my wife and I exchange hand-made valentines as our tradition.  For the past three years, she’s given me a mosaic piece that are all tied together through an encrypted message that I have yet to figure out.  It’s like “Happy V-day…dummy!”  :)  Anyway, because she’s making the final of these connected valentine mosaics, and mosaics are big projects, she’s way behind.  So we haven’t done our exchange yet.  So I’m still fiddling away at elements of my gift to her.  Today, I made a copper valentine.  It’s about three inches across.  I cut it out of thin copper sheet with tin snips, rubbed a texture into it using a form below and a sharpened dowel above, rubbed ink in, dried it, and then adhered UTEE (plastic granules) with Versamark ink pad to the raised bits of the texture and melted the UTEE with my heat gun.  Once that was done, I rubbed bright-pink colored mica dust into the raised plastic design.  The idea was that it would fall to the low areas, but it did the opposite and stuck to the plastic parts.  Then I remelted it to set the color/texture combination.  Oh, and I punched holes for later application before I started coloring.  I was rushed, but I quite like it.

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.

Today I made a sterling silver band. I applied a super-secret finish that makes the surface texture both shiny and matte.

This one is a size 7 and it’s available here: http://tinyurl.com/2mut2m

Anyone that plays with polymer clay, knows you have a treasure trove in your scrap box.   (If you don’t have one get one.  Don’t toss the “waste” from your clay project. )

I also have a huge box of textures, but have neglected to use them much.  So why not grab the two and play around.

another day, another maybe berfday card.. second attempt at something mom would like..

This time I scrounged up a bunch of yarn in different colors and sizes and had the brilliant idea to throw them all together on some paper with my trusty old elmers glue.  Don’t underestimate the difficulty involved in coaxing yarn to stick to paper instead of your finger (or practically anything other than what you want it to stick to) like I did.  Yarn is an ornery mistress indeed.