A great class can help build your skills and sharpen your design eye. I’m traveling to join a wonderful group this week (we’re just getting set up today). If travel isn’t in the cards for you right now, there are loads of other amazing opportunities.
Two new online classes from Craftcast bring the UK’s Debbie Carlton and Melanie Muir to a computer screen near you. Check out Debbie here and Melanie here.
Can’t attend on the day they’re scheduled? No sweat, you can purchase the recordings (including mine) and listen again and again.
One nice thing about learning at home, you don’t have to haul your tools. I’d better go choose my seat and get unpacked!
This Champagne Pendant by the UK’s Nadege Honey looks appropriately festive for a Friday. The mokume gane bubbles rise to the top to celebrate the weekend.
Nadege is a French silversmith living in the UK countryside and working in polymer. You can sense her delight as she jumps from one idea to the next in the polymer project pictures on Flickr and Etsy.
I’ll be floating off to Virginia this weekend for a gathering in the hills and a week of fun. You can ride along and share in the fun from the convenience of your own computer. Join me here next week.
How about this reverse mokume gane from Bulgaria’s Maria Ivanova for a Friday brain teaser? Maybe you’d call it a combination of mokume gane and backfilling. Maria calls it painting with mokume gane.
Look at her quick visual tutorial and you’ll get the gist. That’s how this simple flower and her Lady with Flower pendant were done. Does this twist on a familiar technique start some wheels turning?
All your resistance to carving polymer will vanish once you thumb through Page McNall’s latest examples of her work and pictures of her tools.
Page shows how she often makes silicone molds of her carvings which simplifies creating subsequent similar pieces.
It helps that as a dentist, Page has plenty of access to drills, sharp tools and mold-making materials. She has a painterly way with color that’s stifled at her day job.
