Eva Thissen’s Blue Bird earrings are part of her perpetual spring collection. They’re also perpetually puzzling. How can she work so impossibly small?
The earrings measure 2cm (3/4″) in diameter. Eva uses a needle to apply and texture very dainty and bright pieces of polymer.
Her new things on Etsy and Flickr make you feel that spring is just around the corner.
The news this Friday is full of talk about the cold, snowy weather in our neck of the woods. My eyes went hunting for something hot and colorful to warm the white weekend. They landed in Australia – Barwon Heads, Victoria to be precise.
Jemima Kingston (kingstonjewellery) uses a palette of sea and sun colors on her polymer jewelry. Her edges are roughly carved and splashed with wave-like paints or edged with dots and lines. All fresh and breezy.
You’ll want to spend some time first on her Instagram page to get the feel, then wander over to Facebook and Etsy for the full tour. Oh, plus stop by Pinterest to see her inspirations. I hope you’re warm, cozy and in the studio this weekend.
In this season of ribbons and bows, Sharyn Neuwirth (NewEarthCraftWorks) demonstrates how you can shape ribbons of polymer. I’d guess the strips are extruded and dusted with metallics.
This Washington, D.C. artist bypasses social media pretty successfully but she offers quite a selection of variations on the ribbon theme on her Flickr pages.
These polymer clay earrings from Lindsay Locatelli (WazoDesigns) are all lines and angles and not quite matching in a thoroughly modern way.
Lindsay sometimes carves wood and her expertise shows. We usually think of faceting using triangular shapes. Here she cuts straight down to form rectangular planes. Her use of climbing ropes for stringing beads is another favorite departure for Lindsay.
Go check her out on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s an earlier PCD feature.
This picture from Sylvie Peraud’s sketchbook stirs up feelings of admiration touched with jealousy.
Isn’t this how you meant to work? Draw your idea and then render it in polymer? Yeah, that’s how we mean to work but it doesn’t always work out that way.
Sylvie shows us the results of her careful planning in this earring design. She drew the suspended pod (it began as a pin) and colored it in weeks later.
You’ll be relieved to know that even with this level of intention, Sylvie had to modify the earring to make it hang properly.
She worried about making two matching pieces and (if I’m translating correctly) opted for the second earring to be a post design. She admitted in an earlier blog post about how she spends too much time on Pinterest. (So she’s not too different from the rest of us.)
Enjoy this look over Sylvie’s shoulder and see more of her work on Flickr and Facebook. Learn more from her on CraftArtEdu.
Perhaps we should call the first posts of the week Matchy Mondays because it’s on Monday that I’m most drawn to polymer works that coordinate with PCD’s colors.
Consider these beautifully graduated and sharply creased beads from the Czech Republic’s Dana Phamova. She plays with the light and shadow caused by the bent surfaces. Here’s another of her light/shadow experiments.
Her beautiful Skinner-blended colors are accented by a few judiciously placed light colored dots. A close look shows that the texture is created with hand-applied pin pricks. She shows a work-in-process shot here.
Dana calls this series Dreaming Cucarachas. Cockroaches? That title breaks the zen mood, doesn’t it? You can catch the vibe again (lots of polymer scratching and distressing) on Facebook and Pinterest.
A trip to a local quilt festival prompted Vermont’s Mags Bonham to go all rainbow. The colored paperclips used as findings take her Skinner blended swirls a step farther. The resulting Love Wins earrings make for a simple and striking project.
Usually Mags is busy with Beer Gear (she and her husband are brewers) which she cuts out on her Silver Bullet or Silhouette cutter.
But occasionally Mags likes to move out of her hops-centered world into something different. Follow her on Facebook, her site, Etsy and Pinterest.
Short summer hair may have you looking for dramatic stud earrings and Croatia’s Nikolina Otrzan presents a whole series of deeply textured compositions. Dots of color lure your eye in for closer inspection.
They’re domed polymer circles of varying sizes sliced in half and set next to each other in various positions with small contrasting balls in the crevices. Her textures and colors are strong and varied.
It’s as if Nikolina is testing herself to see how many interesting variations she can imagine and she’s on a roll. See more of them in her Etsy shop and Pinterest. She shares some of her methods on CraftArtEdu. Does your signature design want to be expanded into a series?
France’s Irene Hoiles keeps a low profile online. The snippets and clues she leaves on Facebook and Pinterest point to someone who knows how to persist until she finds a solution.
About the earrings at the left Irene says, “When you’re not Julie Picarello and your mokume gane doesn’t go quite as you planned…dot it.”
Consider how those dots salvage the pattern and take it in a new direction. Sort of aboriginal.
Fine extruded strings wind around to make dramatic caps for Irene’s mokume gane beads at right. They needed another element for drama.
What a good way to start the week. Let’s channel Irene’s no-fail approach to her polymer designs. What’s on your work surface that needs a little TLC to make it sing?
Graffiti is all the rage and Petra Nemravova gives us some terrific tips on how she makes these trendy scribbled earrings in a free tutorial. The translation’s a bit wonky but it’s easy enough to figure out from the photos.
Her background rubber stamp (from IOS stamps she says) is very cool and it wouldn’t be too hard to carve one of your own. Need more? Here’s another of her freebies. Check Petra’s Facebook page and website.
And if you’re on Facebook, take a look at what Petra and the Ubersee gang were up to at their June retreat.
