Another Year Gone By

So last week I turned 58. Good grief, how did that happen? The slightly depressing part about the whole thing is last year I thought and told people I was 56 until my daughter pointed out to me one night when we were out to dinner that I was actually 57, thanks Brighita! So I somehow lost a year.

Now I’m even more confused because according to the candles the kiddlets put on my cake I’m 72,579 years old…egad! Some days I feel that I old.

Moving on to other things……my wonderful friend Tish and I are doing a little bit of a collaboration. Tish does the most wonderful things with wire. My wire working skills are mediocre at best and I wanted some fancy bails so I emailed her with a very rough (and I mean rough, my drawing skills are less than mediocre) sketch of what I had in mind. Well they arrived in the mail a couple of days ago and I couldn’t be more thrilled because they are exactly what I wanted.

So I this is the sort of thing I wanted to do with them.

One of my Landscape pendants with a bit of steampunkary added to it. The postman will be delivering some of my pendants to Tish very soon.

I actually made some jewellery the other day (apart from the necklace above). The polymer clay stuff is starting to build up so I thought I’d better put my jewellery panties on and get cracking.

Hand stamped triptych? necklace….

….and a free form pendant with some pc beads and spacers.

I have a few more things I photographed this morning but I’ll save them for another post.

Technorati Tags: polymer clay pendant,wire,hand stamped

Polymer clay Image Transfer

Image transfers, the bane of most artists life and we are always on the lookout for the best method. Since playing with clay I have only had a brief lesson with Pam on transfer onto clay and that was quite a few months ago and of course I’ve forgotten most of what she showed me. I know you can use gin, yes gin, as in the gin and tonic gin. And you can us liquid translucent sculpey. Well I have every conceivable alcoholic beverage in the house you can think of  except gin (and I don’t even drink) and I just find the LTS hard to work with. It’s very viscous and sticky.

So I thought I’d go back to my Artist Trading Cards and art journaling routes and see if I could adapt one of those techniques to clay and I’ve had some success.
Now the only down side to this techniques is the clay has to be baked, raw clay just isn’t going to work. So if you want some texture or pattern around the edge of your clay you must do this first then bake.

Here I’ve just used the back of a pendant that I wasn’t really happy with for the purpose of this tutorial and the image is printed on plain old computer paper with an Epsom inkjet printer using Durabright inks.

Golden’s Soft gel medium.

I smeared the gel on the front of the image making sure it was completely covered then placed in onto the pendant. Be sure to place it in the right spot because once it’s down it’s pretty much impossible to lift and re-position. I then burnished it really well and then left it over night.

Then this morning I soaked it in water for about ten minutes so the paper is really wet.
Now the fun begins. Very gently start rubbing so the top layer of the paper starts to peel off being careful not to rub too hard or you may start to loose the image.

 

When all the top layer is removed (you should be able to feel if there’s any left) and you think it’s all gone, well it isn’t. Once it’s dry you will see tiny little “fuzzies” all over the image. To eliminate most of these, while the image is still wet dampen a small piece of Magic Eraser and very gently in a circular motion rub the eraser all over the image, at this point it’s very easy to rub off the image with the eraser so gently, gently as you go.

The fuzzies.

Once it’s all dry and mostly fuzz free I glaze with dimensional glaze. I’m still experimenting with brands. This one I used ranger Glossy Accents but when it dried there was a large crack down the centre.

The one below I’ve used Dimensional Magic.

So that’s my tutorial on image transfers. Hope this has been of some help to you. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to email me, I’m more than happy to share my thoughts and ideas.

Technorati Tags: image transfer,polymer clay pendant,gel medium,inkjet printer

Bulgari Inspiration

I was watching Private Practice a couple of weeks ago and Adison’s mother was marrying her gay lover. (you may have seen this episode) and she wore the most gorgeous necklace.

It looked much better on her than in this picture. Anyway……I used it as the inspirations for this.

Ok, so the Bulgari is probably made with white gold and precious diamonds and mine is made with polymer clay and and pan pastels, no comparison I know.

But mine is a heck of a lot less expensive.

Plus I had a lot of fun making it. Although I think next time I’ll make the pendants a bit smaller and shorten the chain so it sits higher up.

Joanie and I are off to the craft and quilt show today. Every year I say I’m not going again and every year I change my mind in the hope that there will be new and exciting things to see and buy. I may even attempt photographing some things.

 

Experimenting with hand drawn pendants. Back to the drawing board I think.

Technorati Tags: polymer clay pendant,bulgari,pan pastels