Moving on :)

While I am trying to get the hang of my new blog via Wordpress, I thought it would be good to leave this blog up to allow all my readers to follow me as I hop from one system to another.  Hang on tight!
You can read all about the Achaderry Craft fair on my new space: The musings of a Polymer Clay Addict

Hope to see you there :)
Chris

Chris' Shiny Beads Process

My blog has moved :)  Please read the details HERE

Chris' Shiny Beads Process

After a few seconds with the dremel.

Emotional Creations

First of all, apologies for not keeping up my weekly postings.  But I think you will understand WHY I did not write for so long when you are finished with this post :)

I NEED to feel happy in order to create.  That goes for claying, writing, trying out a new recipe, anything creative in my mind.  Unlike my husband, who can turn his anger with politicians and the general state of affairs in the world, into a high energy song, I need to be calm and rather without worries before I can handle clay and a tissue blade!  Or so I thought.

So, a few weeks ago our swallows returned from their long trip to South Africa.  They are the most amazing fliers, and hearing their twitter when they arrive is one of the most enjoyable sounds in the world.

The first two to arrive, taking up residence above our door.

Ever since we moved here I have kept a diary about them, logging when they arrive, when they nest, when the eggs hatch, etc.  We even installed a small infrared camera to check on their progress and watched it for hours. It has been a new and intriguing journey.

This year, unlike the 10 years before, they arrived a week late :( and they had to come back to completely destroyed nests!  When we had the storms before Christmas, some sparrows took shelter in the nests and completely made a mess of them, leaving only a few bits and pieces intact.  But within 2 hours, the swallows created a completely new one :), decorated the inside with white feathers and laid their eggs over the next 3 days, one each day.

The newly build nest

The joy these little birds bring me gets my muse going.  I am so grateful and happy  they return and trust us enough to build their nest so close to us. I felt invigorated, I felt the urge to create something new.

Last year's youngsters :)

But then we got the bad news of  my sweet mother-in-law who had given up, she quietly slipped into her eternal sleep.  The pain of her passing, the grief on my husband's face,  it opened up the wounds and memories of losing my dad several years ago.  I could not translate this pain into claying.  My mind went numb and my automatic pilot kicked in.

I HAD to make things for my first summer craft fair, so I sat down and started conditioning clay, adding inks.. making beads... slowly but surely, tears stopped flowing and the more I concentrated on what I was doing, the better I felt.  With that feeling came more ideas for other pieces to make and heaps of beads further, I have realised that I CAN create while being sad.  The starting process is different but the result is the same.

I do not necessarily make sad or angry items when claying.. but I MAKE things.

And so life goes on... while waiting for the eggs to hatch, the sheep in the field behind us have started lambing and we are now joined by those little woolly creatures who cry for their mom day AND NIGHT.. and who hop so funnily around the field.

Venturing out in the big wide world.

Resting after a tiring day of hopping around.

Brother and sister asleep in the field.  They do like a soft pillow :)

The world around us scares me and sometimes I feel totally overwhelmed by it all, but I know now that if I put my head down, with a piece of clay in my hands, in a few hours, I can make sense of it all again.

I hope that you can do the same :)

Till next time,

Becoming an alchemist

As most of you may have read, I have been experimenting with Swellegant over the past week. Great fun!
Imagine, crazy looking woman, with multiple brushes in her hand, looking at several pieces of clay and metal on a sheet in no particular order... bottles open in front... and big grin on her face! woohaaa.

I needed to try out these products on other things than clay and after seeing what Diane Laurence did to a cheap looking metal bracelet, I dug out the filigree and laser cut thingies that were gathering dust somewhere in the dungeons of my cabinet.  Did I mention before that I really have a problem with throwing things out?

So I gave them the same treatment as the tiles:
Swellegant brass + rust + dye... and then I walked away and checked Facebook :), as you do...

Brass and copper filigree pieces treated with Swellegant
brass and rust +... another ingredient:

I wanted to play with the Inka Golds I got from my friend Teia
and the combination was fabulous!

I cut the butterfly apart to make earrings :)

Rubbed a bit of the Inka gold on the rusty looking pieces.

Now I had all these much nicer looking pieces.  Now, what to do with them??????

I figured that the green/blues would go well with amber/red, so I decided to combine roll out a sheet of red Premo and press the filigree onto it.

Et voila', my earrings for this week of the 52 earrings a week challenge :)

So I got this lovely surprise box in the mail from Teia (you got to love the girl :))))) which included, among lovely other things, samples of Inka Gold!  I used a bit on the filigree but I had MORE experimenting to do!!!

And then I had another idea.  I was not particularly keen on the Swellegant iron at first because it did not give me the results I was looking for. But.. having played with the Inka gold on the pieces (above).. I decided to give it a fair chance :)  I make flowers with the leftover from the red I used for the earrings (also above).
I put a layer of Swellegant Iron on it, then used the Darkening Patina.. let it dry, and added a few strokes of Inka Gold to the raised areas.  It looks soooo metallic and old now and I am rather pleased with the result :)

When I saw this red flower transforming into this antiqued piece, I felt  like the alchemists must hve felt hundreds of years ago:)

Got tired and had to stop playing... one of these things... but not without sharing a few results with you :)

Have a great creative weekend,

Chris

Swellegantissimo !

And yes, I could no longer resist and bought some of Christi Friesen's new Swellegant products.
I LOVEEE antiques, verdigris, rust... so you can well imagine that I nearly fainted when I saw these products used by others for the first time.

In my mind, I knew what I wanted to do and the effect I was after.  So, like a good student, I decided to approach this very methodically and made heaps of textured scrap inch tiles to play with.

Following the easy peasy downloaded instruction from Christi's website, I painted the inchies with the metals.

Copper - Iron - Brass

Then I applied each of the following patina's to each metal (the top 3 tiles are untreated)

Rust - Darkening - Verdigris

Patinas added and dry (after a good 25 minutes)

I also tried the 3 dyes straight onto the metal without the patina added to check the effect.

 And finally I applied the Rust Patina and the dyes onto Copper and Bronze.  I did not like the Iron (for what I have in mind - this may be the one you are after.. but I did not test it, sorry)

On the left you have the tiles with Rust Patina and dyes, on the right with some brass and copper rubbed over the highlights.  It is quite a nice effect!

You can find the detailed colour chart of this experiment on my website.

I went to sleep, my head buzzing with ideas and I was barely awake when I rushed to my wee corner in the living room and let my muse go wild.  Well.. sort of... because, to work with this product, you need to plan a bit in advance if you want to make a multi-layered item.  Remember, I never try the easiest things first!

So I made this:

The brass colour on this pendant/brooch is done
with Mona Lisa powder (which also contains metal)

And turned it into this:

I gently brushed a few strokes onto the Mona Lisa  powders
and it gave a lovely "old" effect as well :)

The base with Mona Lisa Brass powder, a layer with CF Copper on top, a striped layer with powder again and finally the centre button with CF Copper again.  The original idea being of colouring ONLY the copper segments.  After doing that.. I did not like the shiny parts in between so I gently dabbed some patina onto the other circles and let them "oxidate" a tiny bit as well.

I initially chucked this in the bin because it was not what I wanted it to be, but today (digging it out from between the wipes and scraps) I liked it a bit more and as a result I decided it was fit for a picture - if only to show you that I can make hideous things as well!

And OBVIOUSLY, my earrings for the 52 earrings in a year challenge HAD to be with Swellegant:

and for good measure, I added a pendant to it.

Have a great weekend :)
Chris

Mood Earrings :)

Well, it does not happen to often that I get to meet a fellow clayer "in person" but yesterday I did!!!Cara Jane and her lovely family came for a brief visit.  It was great to finally be able to add a "new dimension" to that smiling picture on Facebook :)  A shame we did not get to clay together but who knows what the future brings!

So, two days ago, in a slight panic of trying to tidy up the place a bit more - as cleaning can be only be found as item 17 of my to-do list - I realised I had a blog to write, earrings to make, food to prepare for when dear son is visiting for the long weekend and panic struck!

What to do? What to make?

I went rummaging through a few boxes and came across this pile of beads I made ages ago.
For those of you who have not done this before, these are easy to make and can be strung on a necklace cord to finish off a combination of beads.. or they can simply be used as spacers.

You use the Makin's extruder with a core adapter to make long hollow straws, which you then slice into the tiny beads. Easy peasy.

So I strung some, well.. a bit more.. on a wire, finished with a hematite bead.. 

and attached them to handmade and hammered earring wires.

I call them my MOOD earrings :)
When I am in a happy mood I use them in a funky curl.

When I feel grumpy, I roll them flat and use them in long straight strands!

And obviously, throughout the day.. when some lovely people change my mood with their quirky comments... I fidget with my earrings and become one happy curly girl again.

Hopefully this week will be a Curly one for all of you!  Have a great Easter weekend :)
Chris

and now for something totally different....

After a few weeks of making colourful big textured beads, I felt it was time to clear up a few of the things I had lying around and work on something non textured :)

I had a stack of mokume left over from making these beads:

Moccha beads necklace (available in my Etsy shop :))

So I turned the left overs into a Stroppel Cane with light Premo Gold layers in between.
Flattened the whole stack, rolled it through the pasta machine, and stacked it again... then sliced it.. et voila.  A totally new pattern.

The sheet ready to be used

Now what to do with this?  More beads? yes.. but I wanted to do something a bit different.

When I saw this post  by Cynthia Tineapple, I rather liked the white/colour combination of Melanie Muir's necklace and thought I'd try my hand at white beads.

Having 2 lovely dogs makes that a bit more difficult!  No, they do not eat the beads.. but they surely get their hair everywhere!

So I made these:

Highly polished beads

Matching earrings - matte on the left, polished on the right

Rather enjoyed sanding and buffing them - can one really miss sanding soo much???  or is it just me?

And as there was more left of the sheet, I thought.. why not make a black version as well.

Improvised bead rack

Freshly out of the oven

After lots of sanding and buffing

Now, after making these two sets, I made an observation:

White is difficult to keep really white as the slightest speck of dust will look terribly amplified when it lands on white clay.  But, with a bit of elbow grease and all grades of micromesh to sand, that is reasonably easily remedied.

I usually work with Fimo Classic - because I am used to it and know how it reacts in the oven, because it is easier over here to get hold off, and because I simply love working with it.
However, I had run out of white and black and decided to make these beads in Premo instead.
Two things: Premo white really buffs up to a high shine very rapidly, which is a bonus and it has a lovely ceramic look both in matte and polished version.

Premo black is not as black as I would like it to be - you know.. that really dark dark jet black look - so that was a bit of a disappointment and I am debating sanding them down again and leaving them matte (they did look pretty cool like that too).

I also had one of the big beads cracking and since I am not used to anything cracking with Fimo, I have no idea what caused it.  Conditioning was done properly, oven temperature was right... It puzzles and annoys me in equal measures.  No amount of sanding would sort that out so I resorted to brute force and carved the portions that were cracked.  It has now become an "artistic" feature :)

And now for the fun part : stringing!  I will post the pictures on Facebook soon.

Have a great Sunday,
Chris