A Kathleen Dustin class I didn't get to take

Hi Everyone,

Kathleen Dustin (see her websites here and here) was here a few weeks ago to teach our guild her amazing technique. Unfortunately, due to work committments, I wasn't able to take the class. My local clayer friends were able to take the class and enjoyed gloating their luck to me as apparently she's an amazing and wonderful teacher (aren't all clayers?).

Kathleen focussed on technique and from the photos I saw, everyone came away with beautiful beads that they can make into pendants. All of them were absolutely wonderful.

My friends showed me their beads and it inspired me to play and make my own creations. Both my friends were careful not to divulge too much out of respect for Kathleen and I won't post anything about the creation other than to say that it was nice to finally achieve the translucency that I'd been wanting to see. The cane overlays were made from canes when we tried to reverse engineer Kathleen's technique before she came to teach the class, as well as one that we made after Marla Frankenburg's class.

My surprises on these were that the gold dots in the green portion of the reddish sample (are you following?) ended up giving this piece a watermelon feel since the gold dots went black. Also, you can see the brown flowers in the centre of this piece - that's due to overheating though I doubt that anyone would notice unless I pointed it out. The reddish piece is the first piece that I created, the blue one is when I went back to my typical colour patterns and was the second piece.

I forgot to put my penny on for scale. These pieces are about 2 inches long at their longest.

The one thing I will say since it's common knowledge is that there is a lot of sanding involved to finish the pieces. I haven't sanded these ones yet and since we all know how I feel about sanding, it's unlikely that I will.

Kathleen uses a lot of black for contrast in her images - I don't care for black and I was surprised at how Marla Frankenburgish these felt to me once I had created them. Obviously though, given the beauty of Kathleen's work I am missing out by not using black. I'll have to give that more consideration.

It was fun to try and I might make a few earrings out of the technique. But it's a lot of work.

I still have a lot of other things to post. Unfortunately it's still crazy at work and I just get moments where I can do this.

Next up (possibly), Cindy Leitz, Polymer Clay Tutor has given me an idea (though she doesn't know it yet) that I'm trying with the Pinata Tinted flakes. I found Cindy's site through one of the comments she left on my blog. Please go read her Polymer Clay tutor blog - it's got all sorts of information and I was quite relieved to find out her scented ideas didn't extend to the title of her blog from last week.

Cheers,

Sandy