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.
In search of inspiration
Now that I’ve finished the 7MSN laserschnitt piece I am wondering what my next big project should be. But <…sigh…> nothing really leaps out and grabs me like that one did.
So in the meantime while I continue my quest for a new major subject I am just going to keep playing with paper and polymer clay and see what I can discover.
The other day I bought a copy of “Art Nouveau Flower Designs” by Polly Pinder.
Polly Pinder book as seen on Amazon
I’ve made some papercuts adapted from some of her line drawings:
rose on black paper
rose2 on black paper
rose3 on black paper
It is very relaxing and therapeutic, cutting paper with a craft knife.
More Mica Shift Experiments
Woo – I think I’ve already started to improve my mica-shifty skills, after a couple of days of exploring the technique a bit further (click into the photos to see them in more detail):
Some of the patterns are a bit indistinct, but they are definitely getting better! Since making these pieces I have gleaned a few hints and tips from the Flickr group called “Mica Shift”, and in particular their discussion topic of “Tips and triks…pls add yours…”, so I intend to try again later.
100 Days of Polymer Clay: Necklace “98”
98 more days to go until the polymer clay cruise…
Today’s necklace is another one which acts as a ‘benchmark’ for me to compare against the future work that I do. It’s made up of a selection of many of the basic flower cane designs that I have made over the last couple of years, and every single flower bead is completely different to the others. However, very few of them make me go “Wow” when I look at them – so I hope that by the time I have finished my polymer clay quest I will have discovered some cane designs that really stand out.
So here are the beads that I currently make:
…and let’s hope I improve over the next 98 days. I would like to make lots of lovely millefiori designs, and create some really big and bold pieces instead of the small round beads that I currently make.
Latest Designs (Polymer Clay Flower Canes)
Here are more of the items I created while I was in Spain earlier this week:
Naturally I like some designs more than others, but no matter what the end product looks like, it is still fun actually creating the canes in the first place.
Polymer Clay Daily
As always I am WAY behind everyone else in the polymer clay world, and have only recently discovered Cynthia Tinapple’s Polymer Clay Daily website. However I am making up for lost time by attempting to read through all of the archived articles on the site. I love it! In the space of a few weeks my work has already started to evolve.
I was particularly blown away by the entry for 20 April 2011, which featured the work of Cathy ‘dumauvobleu‘. I think her jewellery is amazing.
Here is an example of what some of my pendant-designs used to look like…:
Pink Flower & Swirl pendants
…but since seeing Cathy’s work I have been experimenting with texture and with using repeating patterns instead of randomly layering of cane-slices:
Pink Heart Pendants
Pink Heart
I think my work is really improving. Thank you Cynthia and Cathy!
New Polymer Clay Creations
I’ve been away on holiday for a week, but just before I went away I finished photographing a collection of the most recent items I’ve been making:
fuchsia earring
fuchsia earrings
blue basic butterflies
goldfish earrings
hibiscus buttons
wild violets
wild violets next to the real thing
At the moment nobody seems interested in buying my jewellery (or at least, not on Ebay), so I’m a bit scared of spending time and money on putting them on a craft stall and then finding out ‘for real’ that nobody wants to buy my stuff.
On the other hand, if I don’t start showing these things to people then I definitely won’t be able to sell them. I need to bite the bullet and go to a few galleries and try to do a craft stall. Eek.
