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Catching Up!
I’m getting ready for my next class, coming up just before Halloween. For quite a while now, jewelry artists in the metal clay classes have been adding many new clay skills. Along with me, they must from time to time feel the longing for the satisfaction of sawing, filing, soldering and hammering (SFSH!). As soon as I made a pair of earrings as a model for the upcoming class, ideas for other projects bubbled up. I made three more pair of earrings, two little drop pendants, and completed a drawing for a dendritic opal that would be pretty dusty if I didn’t lovingly take care of it in all the…
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Our Firing Schedule for Fast Fire Bronze clay
My next class is on October 29, when we’ll make a pair of earrings using FASTfire BRONZclay and a selection of beads from Lisa’s Two Loose Beads shop. To my eye I have an unnervingly huge selection of beads, so I had to narrow down those choices and put together a rustic, end-of-summer theme. The pieces are fired as seen below, and to the right is a pre-fire pair Lisa made that’ll be fired early next week. So cute, so rustic. I love the color of this fired clay and have little desire to do much else for this project except to burnish on the petals. It will polish to…
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Papoose Update
Let the weaving begin! This part took patience. I have made progress on the papoose pendants. Other projects have distracted me, but hopefully I will persevere and get these finished very soon. One is farther along than the other, because I like the woven part better (below). It is made from copper wire that was textured as it passed through the rolling mill. At right is a photo of the beginning of the weaving process. Right: 18-gauge copper wire was passed through the rolling mill, with various textured plastic and metal sheets on top to vary the surfaces. Below, the “scarf” around the face displays a texture also achieved using…
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Collar Tip Earrings These were my Dad’s collar tips and I love them! I wanted to be able to wear them so it made perfect sense to make them into earrings. These turquoise cabs were set with sawdust beneath them, which is how it used to be done as a matter of course. I removed the stone, used a different material to raise the stone and re-set it. I also tightened up the rest, although they weren’t rattling like that one stone was. Anyway, I’m proud to wear them. Our Dad was a silversmith, too, along with so many other artistic talents! Sure do miss him! ❤️
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On to other things…
‘PAPOOSE’ PENDANTS Since my last project I moved on to the papoose pendants–call them what you like, but they remind me of the Fayum mummies of ancient Egypt. Here is an image of my one and only, sold to my friend, Kathy White (of Posey & Fern, wonderful soaps & balms, etc.), who bought it because the face resembled her son when he was a baby. This photo shows a printed image of the pendant with some new polymer faces and one “scarf” copper cutout laid on top. I am making two of these for now. At least one will have the woven copper strips and a silver cap at…
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On Lisa’s Bench … In addition to working with sheet metal, I still love working with metal clay. I started this on Saturday and have finally finished adding this and that to it. Waiting now for it to finish drying so I can refine it. Oh, and add a bail. Then it’s into the kiln to fire into a beautiful fine silver pendant! I will post the finished product here and on our Etsy site once the pendant is polished to perfection and a chain is crafted to go with it.
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Hello on this Thursday evening. It has been a busy day at work and at home, part of which involved finishing the Butterfly Girl Pendant. ↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝ Here is a look at the back: After painting the background with washes, butterfly cutouts were glued down with glitter tossed on top. Mica sheet covers it all. As with any beauty, it has a flaw here and there, but such does not detract from the overall effect. I hope you enjoy it! ↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝ Now I can move on to the other two pendants I want to make. One will also have a polymer face, what I call “The Papoose” but the other…
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….As promised
The face is painted now but will sit overnight. Already I see changes to be made. When done, this will have a varnish of clear gloss acrylic, Varathane, the most recommended product I have seen for a protective finish for polymer clay. If I didn’t want the surface shiny I would leave it, because they acrylic paint is sufficient.
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On the Bench….again
Greetings! This is me in my little studio. I have a guest bedroom in my house that’s been converted, much to the chagrin of the visiting members of family. Here is one side of it… I love that room. Last post I tacked up a drawing of this pendant….here it is with the unpainted face, unsecured cab and unfinished and unpolished setting. It’s just “un” as this point. But….things are looking up! More work was accomplished on the setting, and I began the polish and the back work. Yes, I have another job that has been kicking me around lately…so despite things looking up, they are looking up…
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I Love Turquoise … Yes, it’s true that I love turquoise, but it’s more than that. I get swept away by the blues and greens that remind me of the ocean. To me they are happy colors and they just draw me in! I try hard to work with a range of colors but always seem to come back to these. These Kingman turquoise cabs are a stunning matched set! I’ve had them for a while and just yesterday they popped into my head so I went and dug them out and started drawing. I had, at that moment, decided in my head what to do with them. That’s how…
