Holiday Colours

Peach Sorbet - Fushia and Orange

 Flushed with success from the purple and green I thought it would be fun to try some more colours.

Greece - Blue and Gold

My holiday has got me kind of all laid back and casual so a range of chokers on leather thongs with slip knot fastenings to make them adjustable and uncomplicated.

These are all made using mokune gane and the scraps extruded to make the bead caps and stringy beads or blended with white for the earthy pastel spacers.

 Can you guess the holiday was in Greece?Crete to be precise?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time I got to the Rock Pool choker I had decided to try Skinner blends in my mokune gane and I am really pleased with the faded/underwater effect it creates.

 

 

Rock Pool - Cream and Blue

The same technique with the pink and green looks like a watercolour painting. Well happy that me.

Floral - Pink and Green

Glorious mud

Purple and wasabi polymer clay choker

Purple and green polymer clay beads

"What?" you say "back already?" yes back with more blending of colours.
The choker is purple (mixed from premo navy blue, purple and white) and it is  combined with wasabi (just purest wasabi). The mokune gane beads are skinner blends of my purple with white and the wasabi with white, with a translucent and silver leaf layer (couldn't resist) the little beads are then either purple or wasabi muddied with the other colour. All quite harmonious I feel.

The beads below I made some months ago and as much as I love purple and green I have to admit they are a bit of a poke in the eye. Which explains why they are sitting about unused.


Next up fuschia and orange after my hols maybe.

Colour me inspired

 I didn't mean to leave it this long but stuff got in the way like it does.

After seeing the Polymer Clay Guild's stall at the hobby fair at the NEC I decided I needed to up my game a bit so I have been working my way through Polymer Clay Color Inspirations by Lindly Haunani and Maggie Maggio.

The necklace and brooch are the first things I have made other than colour swatches since starting the book.  Its not a huge book, but boy is it meaty. I have still not got through all the excercises in fact, I am still working out my personal colour palett (pallett? pallet?) yes learning to spell it would be a good start.

 But I am amazingley pleased with the colour combinations on this necklace and I feel like my use of colour is already improving though I say so myself as shouldn't.

The brooch is also a playing with gold leaf after all why concentrate on one thing when you can muddy the waters with something else? That is nearer to my personal colours that I thought I was selecting untill I went off on the earthy tones of the necklace.

Oh I have also downloaded Donna Kato's millefiori book but not got round to any millefioring yet. Watch this space. But don't hold your breath obviously.

Fee-Fi-Faux

Faux ceramic polyner clay necklace

 The faux ceramic beads found their way into a necklace. The design is simple but there is so much squirlyness (as we say in the trade) going on with them that I feel its enough. After all one wouldn't want to be over squirly oh no.

texture

 

The failed attempts at quilling with polymer bottom right of the texture photo I used to make . . . yes . . you guessed it some texture with some moulding putty. I used a couple of bits of net curtain too but they are waiting in the wings for another day.








I then combined it all to come up with something that in no way looks ceramic but it does look squirly and organic and like it belongs on Dr Who according to the husband so maybe its Sci-Fi-Faux (see what I did there?)

organic squirliness

All kinds of stuff

Copper Leaf Earrings

Wasabi Free Form Polymer Clay Earrings

Faux Ceramic Beads

Yes that's me over the last couple (three four?) weeks.

So first re-visiting the copper leaves, it was such fun I did it twice. These are fold-formed and the lovely autumnal colour and veining is a by-product of that technique. The colour gradation is due to the centres being folded over and protected from oxygen while they are being heated and they get darker nearer the edges where more oxygen can get to them. I've protected the patina with a smidge (technical term) of Renaissance wax

Faux Ceramic Polymer Clay Earrings

The new extruder called for more than just bangles and retro cane and I'd got a book about quilling from the charity shop . . .  so voila polymer clay quilling. That was fun to do especially since they are ASYMMETRICAL and IRREGULAR which really scares the husband.











Then more stuff with the extruder making tubes (thanks to a pinterest poster who linked to austinpolymerclayguild.blogspot) with my homemade make your tubes hollow contraption. And doing a faux ceramic thing on them (again from pinterest but I did not to my shame re-pin so can't give them credit but just so you know it was not my idea). Having extruded (getting my money's worth out of it oh yeah) some thin strings.

Pause for breath




 Which lead to some more earrings

The end 

What I did on my holidays

Stroppel cane

Well I mainly got the knack of making bangles that were round as opposed to lumpy.

I also tried a few cane techniques Stroppel cane, Bettina Welker's Retro Pixelated cane and the Swanwalk cane which kind of merges the two. Caning experts may at this point begin to suspect that my canes didn't exactly turn out too well as all these techniques are ways of using up failed or scrap ends of canes and clay.

They might be right then again I might have deliberately made lots of scrap canes to try them out.

Stroppel cane

Swanwalk

 I made a few heart brooches too in fact an embarrassment of heart brooches but I thought I would just show my two favourites for now.

I also made a huge pile of muddy scrap clay but at least it is easier to use up than scrap copper which I also have a drawerful of.

So now I have run out of words before I have run out of pictures but at least they are here and no I didn't get the knack of the tablet this post was crafted on the trusty PC.

Swanwalk but used as pixelated

Stroppel

Pixelated with just two colours

Swanwalk and Pixelated

Pixelated

Clay all the way

Kind of like jingle bells in so much as it is vaguely connected to Christmas in that that is what I have been doing on my holidays. OK I know it's tenuous but I'm out of practise.

 The heart and the bangle were just pre Christmas and I sold them at a craft fair so now I am busy getting ready for my next one in the Spring.

So now I am busy on new stuff which I would show you but I have not quite mastered the blogging from my tablet enough to upload the pictures mmmm well maybe tomorrow I'll work out how to get them off my flickr page.

Maybe I'll just use the big PC ah well enjoy