Archive
Sutton Slice Success!
Last Wednesday I was lucky enough to attend one of Lisa Pavelka‘s brilliant workshops, which was a master-class on using the “Sutton Slice” technique, which she developed (accidentally!!) with fellow artist Pete Sutton.
I had attempted the Sutton Slice technique before, but was only partially successful.
But as of Wednesday, I am now able to create the Sutton-iest of slices. Yay!
“Swirly Q” stamp:
Blue swirl Sutton Slice
“Bloomin” texture stamp
Multi-coloured butterfly Sutton Slice experiment
“Garden Glory” stamp:
garden Sutton Slice on yellow clay
garden Sutton Slice on yellow and black clay
garden Sutton Slice on black clay
And my favourite piece so far:
purple Sutton Slice box
I love Lisa’s classes, but if you can’t get to one yourself don’t panic — she has put an instructional video onto YouTube.
Laser Cut Wooden Butterflies
I should have been filling in my tax return this week, and instead I’ve been doing all sorts of other things to try and avoid it*. I’m always fascinated by the “task avoidance” exercises that I perform at this time of year – my house ends up really clean and tidy and I get a year’s worth of filing and admin done, all so I don’t have to sit down at my computer and fill in forms.
Eventually I end up doing task avoidance on the task avoidance as well, and suddenly get very creative. This week has been no exception, and my laser cutter has been helping me to avoid all of that other stuff. We have made some wooden butterfly beads:
They’re actually surprisingly robust, despite looking quite fragile. They make great necklaces all by themselves, but I’m going to experiment with adding other beads and findings to necklaces. I’ve put a few on ebay/etsy, but I’m also able to sell them in larger quantities if anyone fancies becoming a re-seller.
(By “it” I mean avoiding filling in the form – not avoiding tax!!)
101 Days to go until the 2011 polymer clay cruise
101 days to go until the polymer clay cruise. Ohhh, I am so excited about it. I really feel like I should do something to commemorate the occasion tomorrow, because then there will be exactly 100 days to go until the cruise. What should I do though? I’d love to try making a new flower cane for each of those 100 days, or a new bracelet every day, or a new bead every day, etc..
The thought of going all the way from the south coast of England to the west coast of the USA for a set of polymer clay workshops is a bit daunting, especially as we’ll be meeting up with world-class polymer clay heroes when we get there. Still, I guess that is another good reason to try and make 100 items between now and then – because hopefully if I make something every day then my skills will improve by the time I go on the cruise.
Ooooh – what about making a necklace per day? That might work! It’s a big challenge, but it should actually be possible to achieve. Between now and the polymer clay cruise, I will make 100 necklaces which feature polymer clay in some way. So not only will I be counting down the time to my dream holiday, I will also be improving my polyclay skills as I go along.
…In the meantime, here are today’s quick experiments. Some leaves and butterfly wings:
I preferred the darker (simpler) leaves to the stripy ones:
And the butterfly wings were OK, except that they all had small cracks in them and so they are all likely to break:
I’ll try to make some better ones soon, I hope.
