The last class, in my last series, for the grade 3 to 5ers was about how to make small animal figures. One of my students is horse obsessed so I wasn’t surprised when she built a horse. However, this one has a full foil and wire armature, right down to her mane. I was so impressed!
Right in the middle of the busy season I’ve had the chance to play in two other creative places – the visit to the Ring Lord last week and then, yesterday, I got to visit Skyswept Designs the studio of Louise Perrin. Louise is known for her fibre art including all sorts of hand dyed pieces. She offers in studio scarf dyeing sessions where she provides instruction, all the colours you could imagine and a stack of “blanks” to use. Chloe and I took advantage, leading to us making a few scarves. I figure the aunts and grandmas will be happy to not get ONLY clay jewelry this year for gifts!
You start by figuring out your colours and mixing them up. Since Louise has every colour there is… this took a few minutes of thinking.
The process is simple – you dribble (yes, on purpose) dye onto your dampened and scrunched scarves. The dye settles into the hills and valleys of the scrunched fabric making lovely marbled patterns.
See? The scrunching technique is very technical. Ahem.
From that scrunchy pile, Louise ended up with the subtle browns and turquoises on this.
We got our first four done this session. I’m looking forward to making a few more – must try purples! Thanks for letting us come over to play Louise!
Before I got into clay – yes, there was a Before – I did jewelry with wire and chain. I STILL use wire and chain but back then the Wire was the big part of it. So this weekend when I moseyed on over to Saskatoon to do the 20th Annual Christmas Fair at the Western Development Museum I also got to visit the Ring Lord. The Ring Lord is a wire worker and chain mailler’s dream and it’s comparatively close to me. In Calgary it was 8 hours away.
We got to stare at the sheer volume of wire and rings everywhere…
see the industrial maille maker in action…
and even roped the very patient proprietor into posing with us (well, with Cindy) for a picture.
Everyone was very patient with my fan girl clicking away and ooo-ing over all the pretty wire. There’s a few more pics over on Flickr.
This week’s Smoosher is a special treat for me as it’s someone I know outside of the ArtFire Smoosher’s guild. My long time clay buddy and internet friend Ginger – we joined the message boards of Polymerclaycentral.com around the same time, years ago – of Rosedale, IN is also the talent behind Gingerbell’s Gifts on ArtFire.
There’s a couple items I’m partial to in her shop of course – she uses my canes on a few of them!
One thing Ginger is well known for is her beautiful bead weaving. She often surrounds her handmade polymer clay cabochons with intricate layers of seed bead weaving. This is one of my very favourite:
Outside of her jewelry, Ginger also crafts handmade soaps and candles. I know you’re not supposed to lick them but these look so tasty:
You can follow Ginger’s clay journey on her blog:
http://gingerbellsgifts.blogspot.com/
Visit her ArtFire Studio at:
http://www.artfire.com/users/Gingerbells
* last week was my turn to get “Met” by the Smooshers! They wrote such sweet things!
The Smoosher of the week is PositivelyCharmingThings. Niki, of Phoenix, Arizona in the US, is a long time crafter though relatively recent clayer. She’s a great fan of Christi Friesen’s work and has a fondness for cutesy beads as she says in her bio.
Some of my favourite pieces in Niki’s studio includes the little blue bird earrings:
or this non-clay paua shell set:
Niki really DOES make absolutely adorable “cutesy” beads though:
Visit their studio at:
http://www.artfire.com/users/positivelycharmingthings
Follow their clay journey on their blog:
http://www.positivelycharming.com/