A wonderful Bottle of Hope and some sad news...

Hi Everyone,

I've been browsing the clay websites and came across Polymer Clay by Silastones by Ponsawan. I quickly scrolled through to look at the photos and then realized that the last couple of entries dealt with a family tragedy. Apparently her daughter is in a coma after being hit by a drunk driver. While I don't know Ponsawan and am just learning about her work, my heart does go out to her and her family during this time.


Speaking of hearts, here is a photo of her bottle of hope (you can go directly to that link here) that won one of the categories from the Amaco challenge. I am looking forward to trying one of these bottles. I like the idea of tumbling hearts. I did a letter canes a long time ago with the letters of the word "hope" and I'll use those instead of the hearts in my playing with the style.

So it's a mixed blog entry - incredible beauty mixed with some sorrow. I spent quite a bit of time on her site and love her style. I hope she can at least get a small glimmer of happiness knowing that her artwork is appreciated by many.

Sandy

Next project - Trillium cane

Hi Everyone,

I'v spent the last six hours making a trillium cane that I've been designing in my head for a while. I've had several sources of inspiration for this cane. This photo is from one of our Bruce Trail hikes

I also saw an artist on one of the daily blogs who has a unique way of packing canes and I've been wanting to try her technique for a while. Unfortunately I've lost the link and have spent an hour trying to find the site. I thought it came out of polymerclaydaily but I don't see it. If anyone has a link to her site, please let me know since I'd really like to give her credit.



I went looking for stained glass patterns on trilliums and came across this wonderful site http://stainedglass.on.ca/Canada.htm which provided me with some nice trillium options. One of the patterns features Delph Glass' streamer glass (see photo on right) and I used that pallette and pattern as well

So, add it all up, and a trillium cane is born. I haven't reduced it yet, I'm actually being good and letting it sit overnight. If you look closely in the cane you'll see a smaller trillium on the upper left.

The cane is about 2.5 inches tall, 1.5 inches wide, and just over 2 inches thick so it's not as big as it apparently looks in the photo.




While I was packing it I got nervous and wasn't sure how it would come out. So I cut some out just of the trilliums. I'm not sure how I'll use those yet - probably decorate some bottles of hope, particularly now that I know that I'm happy with the cane.

I've made the related tessellated canes with the scrap clay and I'll post photos of those later.

For now I'm patting myself on the back. The cane is a nice antidote to the mounds of snow that we've still got hanging around.

Cheers,

Sandy

Darn, darn, drat, drat...again...

No photos for this post. Spent the afternoon trying another nightlight for my friend. It came together really well. Here's what I did different:

Used Fimo soft translucent - I'm going to try to use up my stash of non Kato clay for things that don't involve caning now that Kato has gone softer. Fimo appears to be a little less translucent than the Kato at a setting of 4 on my pasta machine.

Baked it between two tiles in my calibrated oven for 40 minutes - no plaquing. Maybe baking it between the two tiles did that or maybe it was the Fimo which I didn't overly condition. Or maybe a bit of both and the oven and that it's a different time of day and that I was wearing a different shirt... plaquing is so hit or miss with me.

Cut in the antiquing lines before I baked - much easier!

Didn't bend it until after I had done everything that I wanted to it.

But, it was brittle and broke on first bend. It broke in the same place as the other one, along the balloon and down the body. So that screams design flaw to me.

Did I make too thick a slice? I used a 4 setting. Could have gone to a 5 very easily.

Oh, and I baked it between two sheets of white paper, which I also used for burnishing because I love the finish on that. But maybe I leached too much plasticizer out of it but there was no film on the paper...

Who knows.

It's time for a re-design - I'll make it a three panelled flat job the next time. But that means that I've got to come up with some kind of armature to support that. Probably easier to buy a night light that will allow me to do that.

Oh well...

Snow and more snow

Yesterday the whole East of US and Canada got hit with a massive storm. We were no exception. This is the view from our window yesterday afternoon. The camera doesn't do it justice but it's blizzarding out there. According to the news folks we've received three times more snow this year than we've had in any year in the last 30 years. This storm just piled on what had been there already.


Here's the view this morning with my husband shovelling the sidewalk. We've got some beautiful neighbors that share a driveway with us who did most of the shovelling yesterday so Joe is putting on the finishing touches but he's still been out for over an hour. We have a very small front lawn and most of the snow is from the driveway.

Normally this time of year we've got crocuses starting to come up, anemones and snow drops blooming, and more green than not. I'm ready for that to start happening.

The weather is providing inspiration for my next project cane - a trillium flower. Details next.

More Be Still...

Hello Everyone,

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been claying, just not posting. And since we're under our second winter storm watch this week, I'm hibernating with clay things. I decided a while back to try and do another "Be Still..." plaque. This first photo is from my first attempt. I was unhappy with the roller marks on the clay. A couple of people wrote me, including Marla Frankenburg, and suggested that I could eliminate the lines by brayering the clay with something.

I tried it this time and it worked beautifully! No roller marks at all. I've still got to varnish this so that the Daniel Smith powder doesn't rub off (or maybe I won't bother with varnish since it's only going to be hanging up somewhere) but I like the result.

Thanks to the clayers for their wonderful suggestions.

Cheers,

Sandy

Darn, darn, drat, drat...

A friend of mine is getting ready to have her first child and I thought I'd do something nice and home-made for the baby. After realizing that a knit afghan would take way too long and after attempting to learn to crochet an afghan (I don't know how to crochet) I came back to clay. She had mentioned that they were planning on decorating the room in a Winnie the Pooh theme.

I remembered that I had a stained glass pattern for a Winnie the Pooh and thought that I could make it into some sort of night light. I scanned the pattern in and brought it into Microsoft Powerpoint. I had also bought a nightlight with a wire frame and used it as a template. An hour of playing later and this is the pattern.


I was finally able to use up the Pinata ink coloured clay from my failed snowflakes for the background and started cutting out the shapes. I free-form cut out clouds from the blue clay, placed them on the translucent white clay and was able to make the shapes of the clouds match almost perfectly.

For the Winnie the Pooh portion I put the template onto the clay and ran a ball point pen over the Winnie the Pooh and balloon. Once I had the pattern in the blue clay I was able to cut it out and use it for the template for the yellow and red clays.

Here's the final design and clay shape. I was so impressed with it until I realized that the legs and ears needed some definition. I'm not good at antiquing and ended up futzing around (what colour, how to antique, how thick should the lines be, etc) with it for another couple of hours until I was happy with it. Finally got the antiquing done the way I wanted it and then decided that I didn't like the cornstarch finish I had used on it (the antiquing mucked that up) so started to sand. It was coming along so well!


But, I forgot, somehow, that it's winter here and that the water I was using to sand with was cold, and it made the clay brittle. So when I went to see how I would like the light (at this point smiling happily to myself because I was so pleased with what I had created) and I tried to bend the clay to the light shape, it snapped! You can see the crack following the shape of the balloon and the bear.

Oh well, lessons learned. One thing that doesn't show up here but I'll watch out for next time is that I had put a small tile on the clay while I was baking it. It didn't cover the entire piece and the areas not covered by the tile were quite heavily plaqued. I had originally not intended to antique the words in the clouds but the ones on the right were so heavily plaqued that you couldn't see the words through the light.

So, darn, darn, drat, drat. I'll have to make up some more blue clay but I have enough red and yellow to do another one. It should go much quicker this next time.

More posts to come. I've been busy, just not posting.

Paw Prints finalized...

Hello Everyone, Ju-Li from Germany left me a comment about her paw canes. Once I saw her beautiful work, I had to finish mine. I had already picked the colours and had a general idea.

So here are the steps to the finished cane. I've got a lot of the single claw cane and realized that I hadn't made enough brown to finish the cane the way I wanted to so I have enough of the double prints to work with the project (I hope) but not a lot to spare. The scanning removes a lot of the green. The cane is actually more green than white inside the paw prints.

I took a long time deciding what colour background to use. I really liked the Kato metallic gold as a background but couldn't figure out how to make it without metallic in it. I was worried for two parts, the mica shifting and the softness of the metallics.

I tried pale backgrounds but they didn't offer a lot of contrast. Ultimately I took another look at Jon Anderson's work and decided that having some dark colours would work well for the type of project that I'm doing.



I used the remnants of the clay to make some Judy Belcher canes. The canes on the left are the pure canes from her technique. The canes on the right are the canes generated with a scrap clay technique that then takes on Judy's technique. I'll use all the canes in the project, the darker ones on the right will be useful for around the paw prints. These are small canes, less than a half inch in height.

I've figured out my next cane, at least in concept, and I should be able to use the paw prints there. It'll be based on Dagoli clothing, the Mystic Bear pattern. I don't have a decent photo of it and anything I can pull of the web doesn't enlarge well.

That one will be a couple of weeks in the making.

The theme for the project appears to be inspired by the North. Hey, maybe I'll start calling the project Northern Inspirations. How cheesy is that?

Cheers,

Sandy