I don’t think I’ve blogged about this, but I hit a wall with my crafts a while ago and just stood there staring up at that wall for a while(and occasionally banging uselessly into it over and over like one of those malfunctioning androids you see in a lot of sci-fi)
I have ideas, but invariably my fingers will refuse to cooperate, or the clay/glass/wire start doing things I don’t want them to (on a side note, I’ve lost count of the number of times I jabbed myself while trying to cut and manipulate 1.25mm copper wire. I have a lot of respect for proper wire-workers *G*)
So I’m just plodding: making tiny plain lampwork spacers in the hope that the practice will benefit me in the end; clearing out my clay table; mixing polymer clay colours.
Anyway, in the spirit of clearing my head, I’ll be posting some polymer clay work I’ve been doing over the last few months that have been hidden away in my bead tins. They’re variable in quality and concept; I’ve been thinking, ‘I’ll just perfect that, and then I can use it in jewellery’ but I can’t seem to get past doing more that prototypes.
I don’t know about anyone else, but sometimes I hold so tightly to something that it begins to almost suffocate me and being stilted in that way is anathema to getting work done.
I’ve also come face to face with synchronicity in ideas – I purposefully avoided reading about carving when I was making my own take on carved beads, but I’ve just now come across the same idea, documented, I would guess, about 10 years ago. I’ve never looked into carving except for a few comments people have made about lino cutters (which are apparently scary tools, prone to slipping, and with a tendency to gouge more than just clay.) And I guess the reason I didn’t look into it is precisely because it’s a pretty simple idea, and I didn’t want to know that it was already in use. No harm done, I never thought about claiming it as My Very Own Special Technique (who would want it, for one thing?), but it’s always funny to see this happen…especially when you’re apparently a decade or two behind everyone else *G*
Hey, you know how some people actually write in their blog when they’re on another person’s blog?
Yeah….I forget to do stuff like that.
Aster of Seedy Beader very kindly asked me to do an interview about my craft, and even more kindly published it on her blog You can go Aster’s blog to read it. She came up with some terrific questions which were so much fun to think about.
PS. Check out Aster’s astounding seed bead work while you’re there, or over here; she was resonsible for the beautiful turquoise necklace on the cover of the July 2011 Beads & Beyond.
Eeeeehehehehe….Another lampworking post. By the way, I really do giggle like that when I lampwork, because I loves it. Certain steps are becoming easier, and it’s really great feeling like I’m learning something again, doing research and practice, and seeing the improvements (however slight!)
From left to right –
Gaia encased in clear – I’m really pleased with this encasing because there’s no apparent bleeding of the core glass into the encasing layer. On the other hand, the core glass was meant to be a reactive glass, and instead it stayed a lovely but plain emerald green, and I also used Effetre 004 clear for the encasing; the scummiest clear known to the glass world!
Colbalt Transparent rolled in silver foil with a Pale Blue Transparent encasing – I love this effect, even though there’s less encasing, and more intermingling of the glass! The silver foil has also fumed a bit, I think, where the ‘encasing’ is shallower, but where it’s silvery, it’s lovely.
Colbalt Trans rolled in silver foil with clear encasing – same as above, but the encasing is better except for a few spots where the clear layer had gaps in it, and the base colour was drawn up through them. Quite cool appearance though; I know some people do this on purpose to get a more dramatic effect.
I’m not neglecting polymer clay though – I made a kaleidoscope cane a few days ago and produced these (and as you can see, I may be learning lampworking and kaleidoscope caning, but my photography skills are staying pretty level at the ‘what on earth is that in the picture?!’ stage):
And I’ve put them up at Continuum Designs
I’ve mostly stayed away from kaleidoscope (or mirror-image) canes because getting an aesthetically pleasing colour mix *and* mix of components has proved quite challenging. However, I was reading through Carol Simmons’ blog (a master of complex caning) and found an older post about experiments using only a monochromatic colour scheme. So I forgot about colour and stuck to tones of blue, with some white and black, and concentrated instead on putting together the canes – and it really helped, thank goodness.
