Baltimore’s Tamara Shea (BlockPartyPress) celebrates city pride with this polymer B’more pendant.
Tamara has created and sold her distinctive woodblock-look polymer graphics on Etsy since 2006.
Polymer is sometimes a great way to step up quickly and speak your mind.
Arizona’s Carol DeJardine (dejart_creations) makes her earrings as light as a feather for the desert heat.
Three or four thin layers of polymer in various palettes and graduated shapes swing freely from a jump ring.
The loose movements of the bright colors make them an eye-catching choice for summer.
Albuquerque’s Gael Keyes envisions fantastical bugs in polymer. Since her retirement from teaching last year, Gael has branched out into dolls and sculpture. It’s her bugs that keep crawling onto her Instagram and grabbing attention.
Gael collects her scraps and twists the colorful bits into Natasha canes. Sliced in half, matched, and shaped, these canes become wonderful wings, legs, and heads. She adds a few beads and wires for legs and antennae.
Insects come naturally to Gael and her bugs are quite beautiful. Scroll down her Instagram to see her fall and winter creatures.
Poland’s Malgorzata Wawrzynczak (Moiko) mashes up Nikolina Otrzan’s methods with her own silkscreens to create a series of flat flower brooches with a mod twist and rusted finish.
Cutouts allow the fabric below to show through.
Gosia heads off on her own toward other flower and shapes. Those tab (half oval) shapes are popping up in more and more designs.
If you want to see what other ideas are catching fire for the fall, join us over at StudioMojo this Saturday when we’ll make sense of the designs and products that are showing up in the shows and exhibits.
Rome’s Diana Crialesi (Archidee) has uploaded photos of her latest summer polymer jewelry.
She was so engrossed with making work, shooting tutorials and teaching that she fell behind in stocking her online store. Now she’s caught up and has added photos of the backlog to her shop and Instagram.
One look at her YouTube channel and you’ll understand what distracted her.
In the video, Diana assembles this bright piece (skip ahead to 11:00) with its t-bar closure and square opening on a turquoise silk cord. Simple and summery.
Texas’ Deb Hart shows the start of these petroglyphs on Instagram but how she arrives at the small squares with caned petroglyph images in the middle is still baffling.
They are built into an extruded string outline. Wow, that looks labor-intensive. She’s releasing more photos of her progress on the new inlays as she goes.
Here, she shows a Zuni Bear petroglyph and a coiled snake. Maybe she’s gearing up for a tutorial about her newly developed methods.
See an overview of Deb’s Southwest and Native American-inspired sculptures and jewelry on Flickr.
Australia’s Marni Southam (Oleander Avenue) has an amazing ability to turn every scrap of polymer into a bird.
Her alchemy is mesmerizing. A circle, some stripes, a triangle, more bits of color and a bird emerges. How does she do that?
Combine her knowledge of birds with a love of earrings and you’ve got a thriving business.
The story of her Blue Fairy Wrens is touching and clearly explains her obsession with ornithology. I can’t help but think of Ohio illustrator Charlie Harper whom I met when I worked for Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources.
Florida’s Alice Stroppel follows where extruded strings of polymer lead her in the latest series of drawings.
She starts by laying the strands down to outline the shapes and features of her portraits. Soon the lines take on a life of their own and the picture becomes more complex and less predictable as the lines curl and wander.
Alice plays with wire-like drawing in an unselfconscious way to see where it will take her. Her bold curiosity shows us all the value of playing without fear.
New Jersey’s Donna Greenberg launches us into the weekend with one of the latest in her Biosphere series of small polymer vessels. Pinecone? Fungus? Her works are some combination of what appears in nature and come out of Donna’s experiences.
She says of her work, “Standing in the reeds and saw grass on the nearby Hudson River, watching a heron while viewing the Statue of Liberty is a perfect example of the kind of contrast that I look for to translate into my art.”
Donna’s polymer bio-systems flow across walls and make us more aware of our changing world.
On StudioMojo this weekend we’ll look at what appeals to us, what repulses us on the way to finding our voices. What do we have to get out of our systems? There are plenty of others on this path. You’re not alone. Come on over this Saturday.
This lovely picture of Kathleen Dustin’s World Traveler earrings is only half the story.
You’ll have to go to her Instagram or Facebook to see where she was working. Scan the comments to see how many others with restless hands work in their cars on their laps or with the glove box as a work surface.
That’s what I call being driven!
