Working hollow

I said on my last post that I'd be back to talk about bracelets...

It seems like a timely post if you are a follower of Polymer Clay Daily, as Cynthia Tinapple is showing the new work of Ford and Forlano.  Based on using hollow tubes with multiple layers of colours (shown by slicing) which are then sliced into beads and assembled, this new work is exciting to me personally because working hollow is my preferred way to use polymer!  There are so many ways to use it, although, like every technique in polymer, it is not without its difficulties.  I just can't seem to do solid stuff and this must be a result of working with inflated forms in glass for 18 years..(I couldn't work sculpting solid glass either but if you're interested look here at the work of Pino Signoretto!)

I also want to thank Maggie Maggio for most generously sharing her 'split ring' tutorial with the polymer community.  It planted a seed in my mind about how to make hollow bracelets smaller, by enabling them to stretch over even my ham hands (18 years of  working glass has some fallout - oh the scars!) without breaking!  Being smaller, they look better on and don't clunk annoyingly round on your wrist.  Being hollow, they have a lot more flex than solid polymer, although there is a limit and you have to choose your polymer carefully.  I wonder what clay Ford and Forlano use?

My interest with these bracelets is to make this natural, tendrilly form present a canvas for decoration - colour and more particularly - texture.  It is easy enough to make a stretched smooth hollow form, because as you stretch and elongate polymer, the textures blur, so I've found the initial lump that forms the bracelet is quite (hideously) different to the final piece. It is not like reducing a cane, where, if you are good at it, you confidently expect everything to be the same but in miniature!  The thought process is more, 'How will this 4 inch piece of polymer look when it is elongated to 1 and a half feet?'  You have to be prepared to go with the flow on this....Of course, you can then fire the piece and add things to it, but those marks and additions can be really out of sync with the form unless you are careful.  I'm getting better at adding things that don't jar the final feeling.

I think of this one as driftwood for your arm, I like the minimal colour (a little odd for me).

Altogether now!

 

I'm still testing the durability of these - I'll be wearing some white blanks that I've made over the holidays and taking them on and off a lot so, we'll see.  Meanwhile, think hollow!  I've got a lot of new ideas for thinning out the wall thickness as well.

I suspect I won't be back to blog until the new year, so I'm sending out a very big thank you to all of the people who've taken the time to read my blog and follow it.  I have over 100 followers now (105 to be pedantically precise..) and I enjoy reading your comments and suggestions so much!  Ah, idea!  I'm going to have a giveaway in January for one these bracelets and one of you lovelies can road test it for me. ( Let's hope it doesn't end up as roadkill...)  And on that note - happy holidays and a huge rest to all of you - particularly jibby and juna, whose fingers are sore!
                     

Voila is good to me!

Yesterday I found out that I was a 'polymerista' for the month of December on the European Clay site Voila!  It's always exciting when these things sneak up on you, when you suddenly recognize your work staring you in the face on another site.  All the more exciting as it was for a set of beads that I'm particularly fond of - another in my series of beads using metallic paints and finishes, and tiles.  This set resulted from consciously limiting the clay and colours I could use - blue and gold metallic and white clay.  Well, some black acrylic paint did creep in there, but that's where I'm at these days - enjoying the look of applied time, I guess!  (Time in a bottle..)

These beads vanished from my Etsy shop the day I posted them, so I'm thinking further experimentation is required.  Let's hope I don't start to complicate these, I'm famous for adding layers of unneccessary fussiness that kills the visual effect.  Think simple, simple....
I'll be back in a couple of days to tackle the bracelet brigade.

Ingredients of a challenge

It's not hard to challenge me, I do find lots of stuff difficult.  Lately, though, putting jewelry together has been the hardest thing of all, as I seem to have momentarily lost my eye for what works.  Sadly.  But when Erin from Treasures found put out a color chip challenge, it seemed like a good springboard to gently launch myself in the right direction!  All well and good if you don't leave things to the LAST day, but I digress...

I asked her to give me colors that I'm not always unconsciously gravitating towards and she sent me these:

Working feverishly this morning I mixed these colors in clay:

 

At least these colors are in the ball park!  The green I mixed is actually greener than this,  it's a  rotten shot...

Then these jumped into the picture:

I started rolling out a hollow tube with the four colours in it and later, much later, I had my hollow collar... It's difficult to photograph , so I indulged myself by making a mosaic with many, many (too many) details!  Oh well, it's really the only way to show that I actually used all four colors and melded them discreetly with the judicious use of gold and black.  (Everyone looks good in black,  gold maybe not so much...)  It has an interesting amount of strength and flexibility.

Now I'm going to cheat and use words from 3 of the colors I was given to name it.  As I look at the details and the colors, a lot of great veldt herd animal horns and colorations spring to mind so, of course, Africa has to be there...here, then, is the 'African Getaway Collar'!

Of course, if I had to do it again, I'd do something a little different.  But that, my friends, is the beauty of a challenge like this!  No pressure ( except my nemesis, time) to make production or list it or sell it.  It doesn't have to be successful or even practical!  Just a big jump into something you've never done before....with colors you usually ignore.

Thanks, Erin!  Now I'm going to treat myself and go look at the other leaps...

Please, everyone check them out!

• Amy Freeland
• Beth McCord
• Brandi Hussey
• Cary Scholes
• Catherine Pruitt
• Cindy Wimmer
• Claire Maunsell
• Courtney Breul
• Cristi Clothier
• Cynthia Riggs
• Emanda Johnson
• Holly Westfall
• Janea McDonald
• Jeannie Dukic
• Jennifer Cameron
• Karyn White
• Keirsten Giles
• Kelly Morgan
• Kristie Roeder
• Kristin Stevens
• Lisa Godfrey
• Lisa Tracy
• Lori Anderson
• Mallory Hoffman
• Marie Voyer-Cramp
• Mary McGraw
• Nicole Keller
• Nicole Valentine
• Paige Maxim
• Patty Gasparino
• Rebecca Anderson
• Renate Stark-Krammer
• Sandy Richardson 
• Shannon Chomanczuk
• Sheila Summers
• Stefanie Teufel
• Yelisa Rojas

While the iron is hot!

Yesterday was fun.  I was again excited by my work appearing on Polymer Clay Daily, which is like jet fuel to feed the ideas going through my head!  Thank you to all of you who became new followers on my blog and most importantly, thank you for your positive and thoroughly encouraging comments - to Cynthia most of all.  I have been sifting through the possibility of doing a tutorial and this seems like a great technique (for the metallic mosaics) as it opens up the possibility of many variants and so, scope for great personalization.  It will be a while, and I have to sort out the best way to present it (will seek advice here..).

And this brings up a topic I should have posted about ages ago (there is no excuse, except it  required me to organize my thoughts).  If you follow Christine  Damm's blog,  Stories They Tell, you will have read her thoughts on  plagiarism. ( Oh, that word,  you are always saying that word....thinking it anyway!)  It exists,  for sure.  We ALL are influenced,  lift elements to some degree, want to make work like that master craftsman...or do we?  Personally, I do want to learn techniques to enhance the ideas that are in my own head.  I know from my many years in glass that the forms made by a master can never be fully imitated, and imitations always have something lacking.  Isn't this why we value these people? 

But we can learn from them.  I also don't believe in re-inventing the wheel every time.

I think when we read a book or take a course, we have to make a conscious decision to say 'I've learned a technique or an approach that I couldn't have imagined before -  now, how does that change the physical expression of the ideas that are in my head?'  You have to ask yourself this, because, perhaps it cannot work with your work, even though you admire their results wholeheartedly. Then, you will have learned something that may be useful to you over time as it gets filtered through your experience.  If you take this view, then I think it would be impossible to simply make other peoples work and sell it as yours.

To illustrate this Christine asked Rebecca Watkins (blog, artybecca on Etsy ) and me to participate in a collaboration to make jewelry.  We will be using each other's components, and making elements to integrate these in the final piece ourselves as there are many aspects of our work that share a similar approach.  And yet, we do have distinct styles...For me, it will be a big challenge!  Not because I will be using someone else's beads, but for the reason that resolving a jewelry design is the hardest thing there is.  But, like everything, it gets easier with practice.  1000 hours, I hear you saying....too true.

Here is the first piece which Christine made in October.  She used some carved beads (black and white and grey) from me and a beautiful focal bead made by Rebecca.  I love this piece because I don't look at it and see disparate elements, but a whole story that only Christine could construct.  Not sure I can be so successful, but time will tell.

Rebecca is up next and I'm looking forward to her piece.  In my Flickr set there is an extra piece on its way to her. Psst - don't tell...

Giving in

Sometimes you just have to give in to the urge to work something through - even if the timing couldn't be worse!  In the last few days I've been struggling with the ongoing paint job at the house (enough said), listing on Etsy, making some custom orders and helping the kids finish their Halloween costumes (required for school tomorrow).  I swore I would not help them this year, but somehow last night I helped my son make a matador hat and today I have to finish the edges of a bird costume that my daughter has almost finished.  She is actually becoming quite handy with a sewing machine - an essential life skill in my little world...

When those serendipitous things happen in your work, it is such a gift that you should just accept it and work with it instead of struggling.  Sometime ago I bought a set of metallic paints to use with polymer, but every time I tried them the result was so disappointingly garish that I would throw all the results away and curse my inability to resist temptation in art supply stores.

These new beads came about as a result of using up scrap bits of transfers and putting them onto the surface of my hollow beads.  It occurred to me that this might be a good way to use metallic, because there is some movement in the action of applying the metallic tile to the bead which removes the static quality of painted metallic.  It's this quality that I think I've identified as being the one I dislike.

It started late one night (after cleanup) with this set of beads -

You can see the tile and the random texture I used to fill the intervening spaces - nature abhors a vacuum and so, apparently, do I!

Then a couple of days later I dragged out the metallic paints...do you ever have an idea you think is great and might work but you are almost afraid to try it because  you will be so disappointed when it doesn't work?  That mindset, that's how it was...this little fellow popped  up because stripes are on my mind.

I liked the fact that the metallic paint was visible, starting to break up, and married well with the texture.  So then these followed, all  taking little tiny steps towards other ideas.

I do like the painterly landscape quality of this particular set.  What's fun is learning to control the degree of spread of the tiles, and you do have a LOT of control - which I like.

This is the last one so far -

It has a quietness about it because the metallic is buried under translucent. Just one of the literally hundreds of possible variations for this technique.  I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a tutorial on this technique, or if it is just my current enthusiasm that is making me a little blind here?  Do let me know!

Sorry for the long post - if I could discover how to put photos side by side on Blogger I would be a happy woman!  I think I must be missing something very obvious...

and the winner is...

Early morning.  Must make lunches for school - must unload dishwasher to get rid of this breakfast stuff...

No, must rush to the computer to print out the names for the draw and fold them them up wee small so that the kids can pick one this morning!  Son refuses to get up.  Daughter a little grumpy when asked to stick her hand in the bowl....

But then relents, because she is a lovely child at heart....

Can you see it yet?  Son staggers into the room in the midst of the excitement...he is completely at sea with all this and is only concerned with convincing me that hot chocolate would make a nutritional breakfast!

Thanks for pandering to your mother's morning whimsies - job well done, YOU deserve that hot chocolate!


Here it is.

Lovely Veerle from ne vous installez pas!  You must check out her blog, she has an amazing way with crochet and necklaces, among other things...Thanks all of you for commenting and now I'm sorry you all didn't win.

I just couldn't resist - perhaps next time I'll use the random number generator to minimize the drama.

Last day...

This is the last day to enter my celebration giveaway!  Can you tell I'm excited because it's my first? Three more beady type things have jumped into the bag as I clean off my desk for the start of the week - a star with a cutout, a kind of amulet with a mysterious tile and another transfer bead.  So, please do enter by posting a comment on this blog entry here:
http://stillpointworks.blogspot.com/2010/10/time-waits-for-noone-nor-does-giveaway.html

 My last fall day for painting exterior woodwork as it will be rainy for the next few days - oh joy!