My Work for Sale
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Boxes
I recently changed my web shop’s categories to allow shopping by colour which is pretty cool to me. I then had a small brain wave. Why not organize my pieces like that OFFLINE? I mean, they all lived in boxes before hand but it was somewhat haphazard and I waffled continually about what would go where.
Now, the boxes are arranged by my colour codes: top left is the yellow & orange and red & pink, below it are the blue & green and purple, to the right are the black & white and brown & neutral (plus cane components that usually live elsewhere).
The box with the bags in it is where my unlisted beads go and the bags are labeled the same as the canes: blue & green, purple, yellow & orange, pink & red, black & white and brown & neutral. So much simpler.
Making Bugs
Making bugs, as a post title, probably amuses me more than most people. Throughout college I had several friends working as assistants in fly labs so they literally *made bugs*. This is the closest I’ll get.
I got a bead order in that required some canes I was out of – so I got down to that today. One of those canes was another cream butterfly. This cane was not big as far as butterfly canes run – it was about 3″ across by 3″ long. The slice on the side of the picture is the first slice after the part that sucked in and I had very little loss or distortion, so I’m thrilled.
The first time I made a very complex cane – a face – I followed a tutorial. To this DAY I still have many, many feet of that cane left and while it was alright, it wasn’t great. After that, I did a little planning before doing complex canes.
One thing I learned was that you need tiny amounts of clay to make the individual parts of most of the fancy canes. In this butterfly, for example, the entire body of the butterfly is 1/16th of a package of black clay. All of the wings and brown detailing in them is another 3 oz of clay *in total*. The rest is translucent and there is about 5oz of that.
Where do YOUR Earrings Live?
I used to keep my earrings on their racks between shows, then tape a bag over the rack. Earrings would fall off the racks, get caught in each other and generally make a mess.
This year I bought packages of perforated business cards at the dollar store, drilled holes in them, punched them out and folded them. Then I hung one pair to each card and put the carded earrings, 20 pairs to a baggie. Voila! Less wear and tear on everything.
It makes setting up the rack and clearing it a little more time consuming but not as bad as you’d think. And when a pair sells, they go onto a card and into a little poly bag. Next year I’ll use branded earring cards for this.
Etsy Goodies
The site updating is going pretty painlessly so far! Yay! There’s a few more changes to be made but here’s a post that might be helpful for my Etsy-using friends:
I’ve been selling on Etsy the last 18 months or so and I like the place. It has it’s issues but overall, the price is right. Here’s a few off-Etsy tools to help with your Etsy experience:
More Info Please
- Unofficial Etsy News – these folks take the headlines at Etsy and put them in one spot instead of requiring you to sift through Etsy’s own chaotic and unreliable news services.
- Majaba.org – this site helps you sort through the somewhat complicated ‘favourites’ system at Etsy. It will count up all your item hearts or views for you and display them in a format that’s usable. This is a way to see what’s popular in your shop.
- Pricing Spreadsheets – by Chris Parry is a great answer to: How much should I price it at? There are other excellent posts on the site but this one’s an eye opener.
Help Me Sell
- Let’s Ets – will actually make the file you need to load up the contents of your Etsy site to Google’s shopping listings. Free, simple and super useful.
- We Love Etsy – is a social network (I know, you need another one of those) that is high traffic and regularly updated. In other words, useful. A way to make contacts, network and promote.
Using Those Beads
A long time ago when I first started with clay, I made beads to use in my jewelrymaking. Once clay had me in it’s grip I made jewelry to showcase my clay beads.
I’ve been enjoying a spot of jewelrymaking this month though. Most of it will go to my fall shows and it’s been a fun trip preparing. One of my challenges was figuring out some uses for pillow shaped beads. These are a bead shape I had never really used in my own creations and that I had only begun to make at the request of customers. I’m having fun now though!
There’s other things than pillow bead creations of course – I used a few older beads of mine to make silly cake earrings, bookmarks and some new, sweet roses to make bouquets for your ears and wrist.
And a fellow blogger (and super talented beadmaker) had a very good idea for how to display earrings at shows. Take a peek.
Making Candy Corn
I’ve never tasted the stuff. Yes, I know, I am missing a significant cultural part of my life. But I did MAKE some this week – clay candy corn that is. I wanted another quick, simple motif to add to the fabric of some pillow beads and this was just about my speed.
You need a lump of off-white, a slightly bigger lump of orange, and a little larger lump of yellow. I used Premo! for all three – white with a crumb of ecru, orange with a pea of ecru to dull it down and yellow with a pea of ecru for the same reason.
How Many Beads in a Tumbler?
Last year I invested in a double barrel Lortone tumbler – this model. I love it. It’s blessedly quiet compared to the little kiddie one and best of all it lets me tumble a whole lot of beads in one go. You can go one barrel at a time and place the other barrel on the rack with water in it to balance it (though the sales rep told me this was unnecessary, these machines are built to last). The specs say up to 3 pounds per barrel but you have to remember that 3 pounds of clay beads takes a lot more volume than 3 pounds of rocks and sanding grit.
What I usually do is get my bi-weekly load of beads going in the one barrel, then finish off the other barrel full while the first goes through the first two grits. That way I’m not faced with 400 beads needing varnishing at once.
Most of what is in this pan will fit in the tumbler for a run. I find that I get the best results if I pack without too much extra space left – that way everything is grinding together. There isn’t very much left after i fill up and layer with sandpaper, see? That’s about 150 small beads – I usually have more variety in sizes but this week the orders were for mostly the same shape of bead.
I start with 400 grit sandpaper for my first tumble and go for 18 hours or so. The next grits go for 8 or 10 hours. For beads that I intend to varnish, I go up to 800 or 1000 grit and a final spin in the tumbler with lots of white felt to shine ‘em up.
Year of Clay – Pillows for a Small World
Before I started with polymer clay I had never really heard of pillow beads. When I made my first few, my daughter ‘borrowed’ them to use as Barbie doll pillows so to this day they remind me of little doll minis rather than beads.
These are 2 each of beads I made with little clay fabric swatches I made a few weeks ago. They are all 5/8″ squares, plumply stuffed with scrap clay… and a fabulous way to use clay fabric. Since you can flatten sheets of clay in the pasta machine, to reduce the bumpy feeling, I often recommend pillow beads to new clay bead makers. If you are careful, there is minimal finishing to do, the shape is easy to hold to sand or varnish and does not roll away when being photo’d or worked on.
Clay Fabric Sheets
I have (easily) 200 different canes in my stash, of various size, design and colour. Sometimes, I dig out a bunch and make clay fabric. The clay fabric gets used on any sort of item that has flat surfaces like pillow beads, cutter beads and pendants or pens.
When I’m dreaming this stuff up I usually work from one of two directions. I either unify a sheet by colour or by pattern. I use the term ‘unify’ loosely here, the idea is to use canes that may not otherwise get out to play much!
First, here is an example of by pattern. One section is of my current stock of mums and the other of roses, sliced and placed on a black base. Though the colours vary greatly, the pattern still ties the sheet together. The shapes are similar and the eye appreciates that.
Second we have a few of my by colour pieces. Black and white, coffee tones and accents and blue-greens. The colours are picked from a variety of sizes and designs but limited colour ways.
To see some more of the clay fabrics I did with this run take a look at my flickr. Next up, a lot of items! These pieces look small but after the slices get smoothed in and the sheets flattened on the pasta machine, I imagine there will be enough to make many dozens of items just from these few sheets.
Year of Clay – Sandblasted Beads
When I make beads I use a tumbler to sand the smaller ones. I love my tumbler, particularly since I upgraded to a nice, quiet Lortone last summer (from Green’s Lapidary, the source of many temptations and wonders). With it I can sand hundreds of small beads in a few days with a little sandpaper, water and the tiniest dab of dish soap.
I started reading on the forums and hobby groups that people had begun using rocks or other grit to tumble their clay beads – faster and less wasteful than sandpaper – so I picked up a few bags of stones here and there to try out and tossed a load of scrappy beads in with the first bag.
Oops.
The result was sweetly smooth beads but the end appearance was like a sandblast, mottled and pitted appearing (they are smooth to the touch though). For most of the beads in the load, this was not good as they had bright shading and clear, specific lines and detail. However, one of the sets in the tumbler actually looks better – or at least more interesting – after a sandblasting go. You can compare it to the originals in this picture which were nice but a little ho hum.
I think a very gentle buffing and I will leave them matte and ancient looking. And, update, the ones that were damaged perked back up after a couple rounds back in the tumbler with regular conditions.
