This blog serves as an online gallery of my work and, hopefully, a place to connect with the similarly obsessed.

The learning curve just keeps swooping upwards and I'm madly following...clay packed under my fingernails and studio wall-to-wall slabs of clay and bits. I'm crazy about Mokgumi gane technique and experimenting. A show I've applied for has asked if I could do vessels as well as jewelry, as they are top-heavy with jewelry applications. My mouth (which is disconnected from my common sense) immediately said "yes!" And so, this long weekend, I began.

The pictures are of work in progress, two vessels completed and the tulip and fire bottle are work from a previous lifetime (back when I worked with polymer clay 10 + years ago.)

I'm trying out Sculpey's Studio Clay. It comes in mouth-watering colors and the ads describe it as having a "suede-like" finish. Working with it (aside from the soft fuzzy feel of the material, which is lovely) is a bit like working with mush, but I found that mixing it with 1/3 Kato clay firms it up enough to make it workable for jewelry.

These are the first two pendants. I like them, but I'm still trying to get things perfect. Clay is forgiving...but there always seems to be nick or fingerprint that all my careful looking doesn't catch.
Practice..practice...

I started out to make a chain for one inked polymer bead and although the seed beads seemed a match, they were a little too strong for the focal. The chain looked good though and suddenly I found myself whipping along making not one, but two. The outside chain is a triple-stitch spiral and the inner is double stitch - "fat spiral" as I call the stitch.
Ingredients: Japanese seed beads, Bali Silver, Onyx, Azurite, Fire-Polished beads, Sterling magnetic slide clasp.

Now, back to the drawing board on the focal!

This is the part I love...getting something new on the design board, pulling out drawers and drawers of stones and beads, trying to decide how to put everything together. I made these giant drum beads and their mates yesterday...and they have yet to be sanded and polished, but I couldn't resist playing. I got an interesting effect on the upper set by brushing alcohol over the base bead, then applying Precious Pearl Powder. The powder clumped and dotted...which gave the beads an aged look. When they dried, I brushed them with alcohol ink to bump the color up.

The accompanying stones are (pale green) Serpentine, Onyx and at the top, I'm considering using Turquoise and Carnelian with the blue-green set. Maybe throw a little Bali Silver in there too.

There are new beads. At the top "Ragtime" a set of ten beads down with layered translucent canes. And below, "Opa!" A set of five, texturized, with applied cane work.




Wow. It's been an age since I posted! Above is the Spirit Woman series, which is ongoing. None of these are transfers. The faces are rendered in colored pencil, ink and/or paint, directly on a cured polymer form. The surface is then painstakingly covered with translucent clay, some of it with inclusions of metal leaf or metallic powders and with partly transparent cane work. Each one is cured in stages, wet-sanded and buffed. Depending on how much glittery stuff is included or how little I trust the ink to be durable, I coat with liquid polymer clay at various stages.
From top to bottom: Dreamer Spirit, Mountain Spirit, Gentle Spirit, Vigilant Spirit.

I don't know how many years I spent making polymer clay "fabric"...I do remember saying, on Christmas morning, "Just an hour or so and I'll be done..."

Today I was trying transparencies, which are a whole lot tougher than they look. I'm not thrilled with the experiments in the top picture (uncured, not sanded or buffed yet) but I kind of like the funky "fabrics." It's 4:45 and I've been making canes for hours. My shoulders feels like a herd of Wildebeest have trampled over them - twice.

Tomorrow, I'll try assembling the fabrics and give my poor hands and shoulders a rest.

Second photo: "Lichen"
Polymer clay, hand-inked, with metallic gold leaf, wrapped in transparent clay, sanded with three grades of wet sandpaper and machine buffed with my new Dremel. The largest bead is one and half inches long and its' two friends are an inch and an eighth long. Photo taken in natural light. About 3 hours working time.

Top photo: "Copper"
3 Cabochons, no holes drilled.
Polymer clay, ink, copper leaf.
9:30 p.m. and it is time to quit!