Extruding is my studio warm-up exercise. Polymer hoop earrings are selling like hotcakes and look easy enough. Since I’ve been peddling red, white, and blue all week, the palette was settled. I was off to try out hoops.

Lynda Gilcher’s repeat angle wedge extruder disks are perfect for striped canes. She does the math and each disk indicates how many you’ll need to make a complete circle. I assembled my 12 extruded wedge strips of color into a circle.

Insert the resulting cane back into the extruder to produce any shape you want. For the hoops, I extruded the cane through Lynda’s Arches #3 disk. Voila! Hoops!

The messy scrap is the beginning of a brooch (see Jana Roberts Benzon’s idea here). Something about this textured mess seems apropos of our current red, white, and blue. It needs an element that says 2020.

Did you notice that I slid right into tutorial mode? Friday is my day to scoop up the ideas and products that have floated by and turn them into juicy stuff for StudioMojo. Sometimes it’s a how-to, sometimes it’s a looky-looky. Come on over and see what’s in this week’s grab bag.