Holidays are a perfect time to try something fun, easy, and no-fail. Hello, mokume gane!
Problem is there are variations nine ways to Sunday! You’ve got your deep, shallow, scrap, ghost, and natural methods.
For your holiday polymer pleasure, follow this free link from the UK’s Jane Hewitt, who gathers a slew of approaches to the technique into one nicely-illustrated .pdf booklet to download.
If you feel like giving to Jane’s charity, that would be lovely. Donate on the LimbBo page.
As I layered up for the snow today, I figured out why I had these plain Jane earrings in my collection.
They’re the companions for this Karen McCorckle beautifully caned angel pin that I love. Oh, that goes back a couple of interesting decades!
Karen told us that she conditioned clay when she went to the movies with her family. In the darkened theatre, she could twist and knead the stiff version of polymer that we used back then. Her production schedule was so tight that she couldn’t waste any time.
When Ron Lehocky asked me several years ago who made this dotted square pin that I was wearing, I replied confidently, “Dayle Doroshow.” He corrected me. “I made that,” he said. This is a Ron Lehocky collector’s item!
Long ago and far away when Ron first started dipping into polymer, he made pins that weren’t heart-shaped and weren’t made from others’ scraps. That was 51,000 hearts ago! Hard to believe he’s raised that much for The Kids’ Center for Pediatric Therapies!
Ron pointed me to his 2015 tutorial on PCD that shows how to turn a heart into a Christmas tree. That was from when he had made a mere 30,000 hearts.
Oh, and Dayle Doroshow? She’s lived and taught in France (and Florida) for the past twenty years. And now she’s written a book about her art and life there. Time flies!
In my quest to bring more fun into what I do, I decided to refashion PCD into the “History Channel” for a while. The history of polymer, that is.
As I pinned Susan Hyde’s angel on my down vest this morning, I thought about the works and the artists who have caught my eye since 2005. I’ll be thumbing through my collection for pieces that moved me to shell out money and made me feel so good that I wear them over and over. This clever ploy requires less time online and reacquaints me with my collection.
Susan’s angels always call to me during the holidays. Her madonnas were dark-skinned before that was a statement. She and I met at a weeklong Kathy Amt class on Whidbey Island in 1997 and she’s high up on my list of favorite artists. Her polychromatic color sense and affinity for textiles, inclusions, and faces, get me every time. Click on the Instagram link to look more closely at her construction. If you put “Hyde” into the search box at the top of this page, you’ll see how she’s been my go-to girl for years. Here she is on Facebook.
Every once in a while a polymer artist like Vasso Tizma (ClaylandStudio) from Greece makes us think that we can all be polymer clay sculptors.
You’d think we’d learn that “making it look easy” is a trap. I’m trying to resist rolling out some red and green clay and giving it a go. Is there time to become an expert before the holidays? Hope springs eternal.
Ohio mother-daughter duo Keri Parker and Mikayla Beavan (kurumi_kodama) created these haunting, earthy walnut tree spirits using shells with round polymer bellies.
“I found some walnut shells on the ground back in our woods and thought they looked like little disembodied faces. I knew somehow I needed to give them bodies,” says mom Keri.
These magical creatures appear every week or two on their site and disappear quickly.
