Jar art for your desk

Lisa Renner’s 10″ tall Jar Head makes a handy desk item that comes with its own feathered pen. Lisa sculpted this whimsical face over a glass jar and added details with inks and paints.

The feather-topped pen becomes a stunning hairstyle and it’s not likely someone would abscond with that. The container could be used to hold paintbrushes or other tools.

See more of Lisa’s pensive polymer people on her site, Instagram, Facebook, and newly on Etsy.

Lisa’s teaching in Phoenix at Art Unraveled in August (Laurie Mika will be there too).

Upcoming

There’s nothing like a class or conference to up your game. Registration has opened for this June’s French Lick Atelier in Indiana (featuring Libby Mills, Leslie Blackford, Ponsawan Sila, Tammy Dye and Lynda Gilcher.

The Northwest Polymer Clay Guild is accepting reservations for its May 18-22 Clay Camp in Washington. Synergy4 offers you an even deeper roster of talents and techniques at its August events.

In this weekend’s StudioMojo, readers will get an extra helping of eye candy and tool updates that were shared in Claire Maunsell’s surface class for NEPAG. If you’re needing a weekend boost, join us!

Flowery polymer teapot

Florida’s Pamela Carman makes a flowery pot of tea on a spring Monday.

A visit to her Flickr site shows you the vases, bottles, pots, birdhouses and fish shapes that she covers with polymer.

Usually she uses hundreds of slices of small canes to build her images. Her stash of neatly stored small canes makes us caners envious.

But for today’s teapot on her Instagram she grows a garden out of layers of larger textured circles and leaves.

Is there a bottle in your kitchen that wants to be covered?

Bottled polymer

It may not dawn on you that Joyce Cloutman has formed these polymer art dolls over bottles. They’re not the kind of bottles we’re used to seeing covered with polymer patterns. These blissful sisters cradle simple treasures in their hands.

Joyce is teaching this 2-day Bella Dona class at All Dolls Are Art (ADAA) in July in Austin, Texas.

In an interview Joyce talks about how important it has been to her to get together with friends and guild mates. Prompted by a magazine article she stumbled into sculpting and she hasn’t looked back.

Polymer pastiche

Russia’s Tanya Mayorova applies slices of extruded cane with layer overlapping colorful layer to create a bangle that is rough with color and texture. The design circles around one small stone.

As you flip through her Flickr pictures you’ll see that this denseness and a preference for jewel tones combine to make Tanya’s signature style.

Polymer is well-suited to this pastiche approach. Look at how Joan Israel has applied canes onto bottles to achieve a similar dark, rich texturing. Here’s Joan’s latest work.

Sweepstakes

Don’t feel bad about not winning this week’s lottery, you can sign up for the CraftArtEdu Sweepstakes! The odds are better (20 chances to win), the prizes are great and your ticket doesn’t cost a cent.

Bottled polymer

The peek-a-boo quality of Donna Greenberg’s polymer covered glass vase catches your eye. Rich colors and patterns with metallic sheen add to the allure.

Organic shapes and rough textures replace the flowers and frills we’ve come to expect on polymer covered items. Donna’s bottles shake up our expectations on this Cyber Monday. Be sure to visit Etsy and other online galleries as you start your holiday shopping. Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes offer this coupon for discounts on their tools and techniques today.

Here’s Donna on Facebook and her FB fan page for more browsing.

Disbrain’s color and our craft’s generosity

One lovely end-of-summer shot of color from a Russian site called Disbrain. Translation isn’t helping much and I hope that the picture says it all. NOTE: The link had lots of porn attached. Go to http://disbrain.livejournal.com/1652.html only if you’re virus protected. Thanks to those who alerted me.

Last week’s American Crafts Council salon that’s now online as an audio file got me thinking about crafts and activism.

Polymer clay has been mostly drawn to admirable charitable causes like Bottles of Hope and Breast Cancer Awareness (one of many sites) and Ron Lehockey’s Cerebral Palsy Kids Center support. (Click on his new halloween hearts.)

With our recent conversations about the perils of gold and diamonds, we’re inching closer to making bolder statements about our medium. The deviant art crowd turns away from the pretty and the comfortable to examine another viewpoint. Overall we’re a mostly tame and generous group. That tameness may change.

In his book Buying In, Rob Walker, one of the salon speakers, suggests the following.

Maybe in some sense, the craft idea is a kind of gateway drug to a different way of thinking about material culture – and about consumer behavior that doesn’t merely feel like being part of something larger than ourselves, but really is.

Thanks for listening today. I’m reading and thinking.