Monthly Archives: February 2010

Light Sage Green

Posted on by
4

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.

Stuff of Nightmares

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.

Spelling Issues

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.

Painted!

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.

Afterwards

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.

Custom Order

Weird Clay Trivia

Posted on by
5

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

Posted on by
Reply

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:

etsy beads

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

Posted on by
2

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.

Gallery Fussing

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.

STILL Outside my Window

Of course, life would be TRULY grand if this were not still the view outside my window.

New Focals

Posted on by
1

Focal Beads
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!