I'm Still Around

Well it has been awhile, but I haven't been idle so I thought I'd show you some of my first attempts with polymer clay....no laughing allowed or aloud (snickering is ok). What started off as a small plastic lunch box sized container holding a couple of packs of clay and the odd cookie cutter has grown exponentially in just days. I'm now up to a large deep drawer sized plastic container with more clay, cutters, tissue blades, acrylic rollers, stamps, texture plates, a ceramic tile and numerous other bits and bobs and now I think I have to get another very large container to keep it all in. Oh dear!!! Not to mention 3 books. And with DH being on holidays it's rather hard to keep it all looking like just a very small extension of my jewelry making stuff. He just looks at me and shakes his head as if to say "now what's she making".
So below is my attempt to make my own texture plates using clay and stamps then baking it. Not terribly successful, if you look carefully you can see where the stamp has shifted as I rolled it over the clay and there are double and sometimes triple lines. Oh well, practice makes perfect.

This is white clay with black embossing powder mixed in. Not quite how I expected them to turn out, I thought the powder would sort of melt and run and I'd have this wonderful kind of marbled effect. But not bad. The texture on some of the pieces has all but disappeared after baking and the piece in the top right got squished too much on one side.
I was trying to make some disc spacers for beads but they turned out a bit wonky too.
This is part of the latest batch that will go in the oven sometime today. I'll see how these black and white discs and a few pendants turn out. The grey discs and pendants were supposed to be marbled black, white and translucent but I over mixed and ended up with grey with the odd white splotch here and there and basically just blah.
Some of the tools of my "trade".
The pasta machine is the only thing I didn't buy, it was given to me a few months ago and has been hidden because I knew once the family saw it they'd get all excited thinking I was going to make home made pasta. In their dreams! When DS saw it this morning he hopefully asked was I going to make home made ravioli for dinner, well I just gave him one of my withering "puleeeze! do I look like the kind of mother who makes home made pasta......are you insane?" looks and he just shook his head (a bit like his father) and left for work. Terrible thing to disappoint your family in such a way I know, but they'll get over it.
Now this is the type of bead I'm aspiring to. This is from a book called Ancient Modern by Ronna Sarvas Weltman and she makes the most gorgeous contempory jewelry using polymer clay and wire.
Hopefully one day my stuff will look even half as good as this, in the meantime I'll just keep practising and learning and I'll enjoy the ride.