Faux stone experiments

I recently snagged a new book (Making Polymer Clay Beads by Carol Blackburn) that has a project for making faux marble. It's certainly not the first time I've seen this technique....but it's the first time I've tried it.

I seem to be incapable of following the color recommendations for a tutorial. ANY tutorial. It's like a mental block. HA! The book called for white, translucent, and black. But I've been experimenting with other colors. My very first experiment beads turned out so cool. Unfortunately, I can't get a good picture of them. They are these earthy green, copper-ish jasper like beads. Hopefully I'll get a picture to share soon.

For now, I want to show you the others! I used gold mica powders for these.

My very first reaction to them...after they were freshly sanded: "Hey honey! Want to see what happens when a can of cream corn and a block of marble have a baby??" LOL! Aaron and I refer to them as 'the cream corn beads'. But after I finished all the different grits of sanding and buffing...I love them. In real life, the mica powders are gorgeous. The layers seem to move in the sunlight....they are gorgeous.

These little guys are cute.

They did not turn out as vivid as I had hoped...but I still like them. A good jewelry designer could pair them with other beads that make them pop, I think. I have more that are waiting for buffing.

And these poor little fuglies...

Did NOT turn out like I had hoped. I have too many of these little guys. LOL! I'm sure in the right piece of jewelry they would be adorable. But I just don't have the imagination to make that happen.

I have many more colors of mica powders to experiment with! I'm sure you'll see more of these in the future. :)
Btw...click on any picture to visit my flickr album and see more. If you want to. :)

Leaf cane

Saturday I got the privledge to teach a cane lesson at our guild meeting. I get all nervous and fumble around with the lesson. I mumble to myself and change my mind half way thru the lesson. I'm a real pro! HA! Not. I'm lucky to have kind guild members who don't seem to mind too much. :) Anyway...we had a great time.

I was worried about the reducing process. To me, reducing is the hardest part. You can really screw things up with bad reducing. LOL! Sometimes it takes lots of practice to get the hang of reducing without lots of distortion. But apparently, our guild is full of natural born reducers! :) We had 6 out of 6 perfectly reduced canes. It was very cool. Here's mine.


I hope everyone shares their own cane pictures on our group flickr page. Penni Jo has already posted one. She took her leaf cane, added a Donna Kato style petal cane and made beautiful flowers!

What should I do with my caribbean vaca leaves? (That's what the colors make me think of. LOL!) Maybe a new set of summery jewelry for me? Maybe a caribbean color tree art picture?

Sloooow Etsy?

Is Etsy loading painfully slow for you? It's been getting slower and slower, for me, for days now. At first it was just the search feature but now it's the whole site. Slow slow slow!!!
The rest of the internet works fine for me. I just ran AdAware because I thought maybe spyware was bogging me down. But Etsy is still dragging. I can not get ANY pages to load.
Am I the only one? I wanted to just surf and window shop today. WAH!!!!

Silver Leaf Jewelry

If you are interested in using metal leaf with polymer clay, you might check out the new video tutorial I uploaded.

It demonstrates some very basic techniques that you can build on and turn into your own style! I hope you enjoy it. :)

Swap activities

I recently joined a clay bead swap group. I even signed up for two swaps. Which is sad because my own swap group hasn't swapped in over a year. *hangs head in shame*

One swap is for rainbow bead sets. I loooove rainbow themed anything. I really enjoyed making these.

The little white flower petals have irridescent white glitter on them. Which turned out looking more like texture than glitter. SO..I added pearl mica powder also. I still wasn't 100% happy with them, but they are still cute.
There's not much story behind the tire shaped beads. I wanted basic B&W spiral beads...but didn't want the typical round shape. So they got a light squish. :)

I also signed up for a MG pendant swap. I planned ahead and made an extra set of rainbow beads, just in case. But I didn't make extra pendants. Two more people have signed up since I made these.

I don't know if I should make a different style or keep going with more of these. These are not terribly time consuming...just wire consuming. :) But aren't they cool?! I'm going to make one for myself eventually.