Year of Clay - Chrysanthemum Cane
I had this belated brainwave the other day, staring at a piece of clipart. Like a lot of us, one of my first flower canes was Elissa Powell’s translucent mum cane. And a little later, a friend of mine challenged the caners on a forum to make peony canes. I made one. It stunk. Cat made one and wrote a tutorial for it.
So now I’ve made a mum cane that could easily be a peony or marigold or carnation or dahlia. I’m looking forward to some obsessing!
More Experimenting
A couple little bottles of Adirondack inks snuck into my birthday stash so I used them to colour some translucent lentils. The colours are bright and springy. The little flowers are TLS mixed with oil paint to make a raised detail, vaguely lampwork like.
Year of Clay - Sweet Treats
This week I played a bit with my clay-food. I made donut and cake beads, experimented with a sandwich cookie, tried out a cupcake. It’s still all in the early stages and needs some of that practice thing but it was fun.
One other thing - some of these have different scents added to the clay - varying strength essential oils in vanilla, cinnamon and something else sweet (chocolate? mocha? not sure) . I’m testing to see how long the smell stays - I didn’t make it strong to start - among other factors. I need to work on the sprinkles and icings and all the nitpicky details. What fun!
Year of Clay - Remnant Beads
A friend scolds us when we call our cane ends, bad slices and sheet leftovers scraps. She calls them remnants. I’m not sure it’ll change my habit but here’s some of my cleaned-off-my-desk beads:
Flickr will show you much larger versions if you click on through. The green / pink / gold ones are Natashas that I rounded the edges on and I have a half vision of an odd bracelet with those. The rest… I’m not exactly sure. I have so many more cane ends though and it was either toss them in the mud bucket or make scrap.. er .. remnant beads out of them. I hope by the time I process the pile I’ll have some inspiration.
These are heading for their dance in the tumbler! Maybe inspiration will visit while they get smooth and shiny.
DIY Clay Tools
The other day Lisa of Polka Dot Creations wrote about some of her DIY tools she uses in her clay work. I plan on nipping a few of the ideas - like the button hole placer! - and I had used a few others myself, already. She goes on to challenge her readers to show their own.
Well, I’ve done the handles for tools like she has. I have a stack of transparencies I use for measuring skinner blends and cane segments - I’ll put those up as a PDF download one day. I have colour chips. I have templates for covering pens like she does for bracelets. I have a string of ‘beads’ that are the beads made from a specific cutter size on a pasta machine sheet setting - say, a 5/8″ circle cut from my #1 setting on my atlas.
One that I actually took a picture of is a rack I made to help cook items bigger than my beads or that may have texture on them. I’ve never had much luck with fiberfill or cornstarch. The plus side is, I use this rack for drying items I’ve varnished, as well. In my poinsettia ornament post you can see the ornaments on the skewers in the rack. I baked them on it then varnished them there and then baked the varnish on. A very similar, albeit shorter, rack is sold by PolyTools and was the inspiration for mine.
The rack is made from aluminum flashing - essentially, glorified aluminum foil, in the flashing / siding section at your Home Depot, pretty cheap - and I’ve included a really basic how-to for this thing below: Read more
Swap Beads = Win!
I sliced a finger up so was putting off diving into the ton of mixed clay blends I have while it heals. Instead, I went and dug through the tub I keep my swap items in. Buried in there were two sweet strands of beads - one by Muriel from PCC and another by Bob Wiley of Faux Wood fame - from a swap hosted by Rebecca Wells a few years ago.
The faux wood beads were simply restrung on black stretch cord for myself - it’s a super change from flowers. The ’scope beads were wired up. I’m not sure where they’ll end up! But what fun!
On a side note, this is the 100th post on this blog!
Year of Clay - Chain Earrings
This is the fifth day of the Thing-a-Day project which I’ve faithfully kept up with - my projects are pretty prosaic but I figured at least one of them would make a good Year of Clay item as it’s different from my usual:
It was a different sort of deal than what I usually do with swirly lentils - I’m hoping to refine the design a bit and enter something into the Art Bead Scene’s Chains of Love Challenge.
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