My Work for Sale
Find Me On
Etsy
The Shop: On the way
Maybe Spring is in the air. I know that it influenced my cane making choice the last couple of weeks – pansy canes and now pansy beads. But I’m wondering if the cat has gone nuts.
Sam the Siamese is 16 or 17 years old. He spends most of his days like this:
Yesterday morning around 6 am he was skittering and darting around the house and even jumping a little. For long enough that I got up early to check what he was up to, wondering if we had a mouse or something. Because he was hell-bent on catching SOMETHING.
The terrible something turned out to be a vicious, feral hair scrunchie. The cat is crazy. End of story. But it was a fun start to my day.
My bead shop has a couple new pieces this week, including some cute rounds with my pansy canes:
You can pick the canes up in my Claychicks shop or both beads and canes all in one go from my ArtFire shop.
New Ideas
Every now and then, I have an idea. Odd, I know. So the other day while helping out with my production work, the boyfriend got ahead of what I had planned. I passed him scraps to blend. They made a pretty rainbow which turned into these pretty rainbow beads:
So there’s a stack of these with a little variation (depending on how they got rolled up). I doodled some of my brain waves -
We have earrings. I think some of them will have to be earrings. Bright fun earrings.
I don’t make stitch markers but one of my favourite teamies and customers, Heather of RyCrafty, makes stitch markers like these. So the idea occurred to me.
And finally, I think some will be buttons. because they could be really cute buttons.
When you all are brainstorming how do you go about figuring what you’ll clay? And if you, like me, make supplies… how do you determine what you’ll make as the end product?
Signs of Spring
Before I knew a thing about flowers – and this wasn’t long ago – I didn’t really realize there were flowers that were heralds of spring. I mean I guess it makes logical sense but if you’d asked me I’d have been unable to name them.
I started this spring off with a new order of pansies. I’m happy with how these came out.
Of course, another sign of spring is that we’re spending THIS weekend painting, too. The windows can be cracked open so it’s not even too fume-y.
Light Sage Green
This weekend started with a stop at the hardware store on Friday afternoon. A few more paint trays and a can of Light Sage Green, the slightly more subtle colour I’d picked for the yellow-green Goldenrod my guy figured was perfect when he did it 7 years ago.
We patched, sanded and TSP’d the walls and then got down to priming. The kiddo offered to help with priming. She had ulterior motives.
This is funny because my daughter has spelling problems. This should read Me WANT food. She tried again on the next wall, complete with crossouts and redos there. The guy meanwhile was painting himself as well as the wall.
The worst part about any home project is not usually the doing. Priming and painting only took us a couple of hours. The cleanup and repair and moving stuff however takes FOREVER.
Somewhere in there – before and after we got going – I finished up a custom order and made these guys so the day did end up with more than just Light Sage Green paint everywhere.
Weird Clay Trivia
I keep notes in list form everywhere, notepads full of it. One of my lists has weird clay trivia:
- Premo Alizarin Crimson has speckles in it. You can see this in this rose cane made with it
- Submerging clay items with translucent in them, in ice water right out of the oven really DOES seem to brighten and clarify the translucent. No clue why
- Yellow and black clay does not make darker or saddened yellow. It makes olive green. To make a saddened yellow use a browny-grey
- Liquid clay, a transfer medium, is much more useful as a clay glue, top coat and icing maker
- Baking some types of magnets decreases their strength
- Hot glue, the magic of crafts, doesn’t work well with clay. Use epoxy or super glue instead
- Clay tastes awful
- You can add a few drops of oil to soften stiff clay. A few drops of scented oil will soften AND scent clay
Any other weirdness you’ve noticed?
The Shop: Focal Beads
The best part about canes and beads? You get to collage and make pictures to your heart’s content. The larger, focal sized beads give you a bigger canvas so I like making them. The most recent batch just got posted to my Etsy shop:
For those following along on my new camera odyssey, these were taken with my old camera setup. I hate to ditch something that works while I experiment if it fools with my bottom line. Especially since the old one is fine or has the same issues it always has: it eats batteries and is very slow. Not so helpful when you’re chasing a moving child with it but beads for the most part stay* where you put them.
* Ignore the runaway rolling ones.
Pinch Me
As if the fabulous birthday weekend were not enough! I gathered my courage and went and spoke to the education coordinator at the Art Gallery in town a few weeks ago. What did I have to lose right? They have interesting classes and perhaps they’d be interested in some polymer clay related classes.
Long story short: they were happy to meet me and yes, clay class would indeed be interesting. I’ll start by demoing beads one afternoon and then teach classes for the older kids and adults. And if I was interested, there are shows at the gallery that even take complete newbies.
So if you happen to be in the small town of Swift Current, Saskatchewan on March 21st, I’ll be demoing caned clay beads at the Art Gallery. Until then you’ll probably find me hovering around cloud 9.
Of course, life would be TRULY grand if this were not still the view outside my window.
New Focals
This is the latest batch of my favourite elements: face canes and floral layering canes. These are all slim, smooth river rock shapes but fairly substantial in size. The smallest is about 30mm tall.
As a complete side note, the picture is taken with my new camera, in a halogen lit studio, with flash, at 12inches or so. So it’s not a macro picture, there’s no lighting correction. Not bad! The Ti1 is much smarter than my old Olympus but I guess 7 years of technology will do that!
Birthday Indulgence
I spent the weekend out of town, visiting family in Calgary. It was nice to take the long weekend off and do random, sociable things. We went to the zoo, tried out Mom’s new hot tub and shopped while we were in civilization. While the rest of North America does Valentine’s, I call it my birthday :p
I grabbed the clay for myself since I lucked out and found it on sale at the same time I was near a craft store. Mom, my enabler, bought me beads. I picked up a few spools of sterling silver wire to try my hand at. And last, but definitely not least, is my new camera.
The cat is already starting to slink away when I pick up the camera. I’ll have to find other guinea pigs.
One Heart One World Winner
Random.org tells me commenter #59 – MissMary of lilliansstitches.blogspot.com – is my winner! Thanks to everyone for visiting and saying sweet things!
