More on the Starter Kit for my Mom

Hi Everyone,

Just thought I'd let you know that Mom has received her starter kit and has some comments on it.

Her biggest frustation is that she doesn't have any bottles to cover. I have over 100 that I'll be bring up to her in a couple of weeks but she's been looking in her house for other things to cover.

The Donna Kato books were more intimidating than inspiring for her - she feels she's got a long way to go before she can achieve that level of skill. Of course, she immediately flipped to the more advanced sections of the books so that could be part of it.

I told her that Donna Kato is one of the greats and many of us will never achieve her ease with clay but that we're often happy with our own work and to be patient.

She also refused to anchor her pasta machine to the dining room table because she didn't want to damage the dining room table (understandable). But she found conditioning the clay difficult with the pasta machine jumping all over the place. I've persuaded her to use one of her more beat up end tables as her pasta machine processing area.

The Kato red that she first tried is very crumbly and she thought there was something wrong with it. When I told her how to condition it properly it went much better for her.

She's decided that the other essential piece of equipment is an extruder and I'm to order one for her from Shades of Clay. I'll get her the good green one, not the cheapo ones that are so difficult with the Kato. She did like the figurines with hair that she saw in the books and realized an extruder is the way to go.

She's started making flowers because she's quite talented using fondant and gum paste for wedding cakes and seems to be getting more at ease with the clay. But to work with flowers she wants a needle tool. I will order her one of those as well but told her to raid her cake decorating stuff since she's adamant that she's retiring from decorating cakes (and besides, if she doesn't have the tools for cake decorating then it's a very good excuse not to succumb to others requests).

I've decided that she could benefit from some simpler polymer clay books and will lend her some from my library.

And that's the update. She'll be travelling for the next several weeks so she won't have a chance to do more, but she's looking forward to Morrisburg.

Cheers,

Sandy