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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!
Featuring ASecondTime
In my wanderings on Etsy I’ve lucked out in meeting up with some really neat people. Joan, of ASecondTime, is another member of the Alberta Etsy Team. She’s based in Calgary, so I’ve even had the good fortune to meet her in person!
Her work has a lot of elements of steampunk style – a mix of intricate Victorian detailing and industrial components such as gears and watch movements – mixed and matched with beautiful glass, stone and, yes, even a few of my own beads.
Here’s one of her recent pieces with one of my own sea garden lentils. Joan also has a variety of other, more contemporary, pieces in sterling. She also has a sweet sculpture in her Treasure section:
Making
I’d been hurting for a little inspiration and motivation at the end of 2009 so I took the advice of the experts and took that first step: I started making things. Sometimes all you need is a little motion to get you going in the right direction. I’m still lacking the solution to some projects but I have a growing pile of ‘productive procrastination’ projects. Here’s a few:
A customer challenged me to make them bright roses in the colour of my citrus canes. So I did. Some of these canes are in my Rainbow of Roses listing. The bracelets are basically wrist candy to get myself using my own beads, especially the swirlies. How else do you sell the things if you can’t convince people they should be essential parts of their art?
