Category Archives: Polymer Clay

Mokume Gane Earrings

I know, I know. I should be packing and getting ready for my trip. I decided to take a break and do something creative so I finished these earrings. Now I can bring them with me on my trip.

A couple of weeks ago I created a polymer clay mokume gane stack and started playing around with different shapes for jewelry components. Today I glued in some wires, fashioned some earring hooks from 20-gauge S.S. wire and these earrings were born.

I’m experimenting with weaving seed beads around polymer clay components. I especially like the freeform designs of mokume gane to go with freeform beadwork. My most successful color combinations have been when I’ve incorporated light, medium and dark colors. It’s fun looking around the house for various tools and objects to impress into the clay stack. Just mix your colors, create individual sheets, layer them to make a stack and then texture with your found objects. Using a tissue blade, slice from the top of the stack to reveal the patterns. I love watching the patterns emerge. You can make a “fabric” by laying the slices on a coordinating color sheet of clay. I like to take that sheet and run it through the pasta machine to stretch out the patterns so they swirl and dance around.

Ok, back to packing!

Mixed Media Demo

At our last guild meeting, my kindred art spirit and dear friend Judy, showed us how she creates her beautiful mixed media art pieces using various objects to create texture in pastes and gels. After creating that texture on the canvas and letting the paste/gel dry, she then showed us how to stamp and paint over the textured areas for depth of color. A lot of the supplies she used were made by Golden but you can also achieve texture on your surface as she did with regular household paste found at your local home improvement store. You can see the full demo here.

After watching Judy’s demo, several of our members were talking excitedly about incorporating small polymer clay pieces and canework into a piece like this. Judy makes stamped, textured and glazed polymer clay buttons and faces to incorporate into her art. You can see a face at the top of her canvas. To see more of Judy’s work, visit her website.

Oh, the possibilities!

The Birth of a Blog

Today a kindred art spirit and friend of mine, Dora, has written her very first post on her brand new blog, Dora’s Explorations. Dora is a polymer clay artist extraordinaire and a fellow guild member in the Rhode Island Polymer Clay Guild. Her passion is canework and the photo above illustrates her fabulous talent. She is also our demo coordinator and always brings the most delicious coffee and on special occasion her decadent to-die-for Palm Beach brownies. If you get a chance, please do pay her a visit.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Dora!

March Beaded Journal Page

Well, after 3 months, my March page is finally finished. I’ve gone through a lot of changes since my original idea and beading start, the biggest change being a physical move to a new home.

I’ve named this page “Looking Out from my Healing Place”. The tree represents a journey of healing that I took after my divorce 4 years ago. There were a lot of twists and turns in this journey but I was always reaching for the sky and growing. My tree has grown in strength and wisdom and now it is time to look out upon the world with awakened eyes and find out where this person that I have become will fit. I don’t have one face because there are 3 aspects of me, who I was, who I am now and who I will be. My past, my present and my future self. Which face is which? The tree roots are not yet firmly in the ground but I have hope that they will find their place, too.

Many thanks to Robin for her inspiration with this twisted tree branch stitch. The timing of receiving her new book, “Heart to Hands Bead Embroidery” was perfect for what I needed to express with this piece. I wrote about that here.

I have just begun my April page. The colors are much more vibrant than my March piece. Right now the title that has come to me is “Home is Where my Heart Grows”. Stay tuned for photos of this work in progress. I started this piece watching “Ethics and the World Crisis – a Dialogue with the Dalai Lama”. What an amazing human being he is.