These mismatched black and white striped cutout earrings are lightweight, fashionable and show a clever use of graduated templates. They’re from Connecticut’s Libby Mills who shared a work table with me in Virginia.
Libby’s fond of clean, simple designs and all last week I admired her growing collection of canes. Look at more of Libby’s works on Flickr, Pinterest, and Instagram while I catch my breath after a lovely road trip.
Of course you’d guess that Baltimore’s Linda Pearl was a dog lover from her bowls in the swap at the Virginia conference. You might also sense that her background is in pottery. And her shapes and treatments have a distinctly Japanese feel to them.
She showed me how she cut a shape and let it slump inside a hemisphere cake bowl creating a graceful shallow dish shape.
She transferred her images from toner copies and played with various textures and metallic finishes.
Linda’s Facebook page is pretty sparse and she swears that better online presence is on her to-do list. Click on the images here to see more.
This crop of bowls was a particularly good one and we’ll cover it more completely in Saturday’s StudioMojo.
Lindly Haunani opened a box of her new “Spring Gelato” tinted translucent beads ready for stringing and our mouths watered at their lusciousness. The edges of the canes were accented with embossing powders. The petals are gently pinched, and shaped. They’re drilled after baking. More on Facebook.
Lindly works mise en place, creating all the components for her limited editions before she begins the assembly process.
PCD will unveil a bit more from Virginia tomorrow and reveal a more comprehensive wrap-up on this weekend’s StudioMojo.
France’s Nadege Honey telegraphs messages through her Dots and Dashes jewelry. This necklace says “Life is beautiful.”
“I wanted to create jewelry with meaning, where the piece itself is not the main focus, but rather the message is,” says Nadege. Decipher the Morse code of Happy Birthday, Thank You and other phrases in her Etsy shop.
You don’t need to know Morse code to enjoy the clear colors and graphic combinations in Nadege’s pieces which are best seen on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and her site.
Here’s a springy page of brooches from her design journal.
No matter how hard you try not to catch it, Translucent Fever is in the spring air (in this hemisphere anyway).
Once you come in contact (Marie Segal got it going) then you start encountering glassy pastel examples everywhere. These stacked petal earrings are from Spain’s Manon van Kempen on Instagram. Manon has a feel for flowers and these look just challenging enough.
Though you may not feel you have time to get sidetracked, resisting the urge to play with translucent is futile. Go ahead, get it out of your system. Enjoy!
Here in the US, Marie Segal is creating a buzz with her experiments with Cernit’s translucent clay. Look at how the layers from these sample canes read through each other and retain their vibrancy.
Marie has put together a 12-bar translucent starter kit of Cernit if you’re in a mood to try something new. The kit contains 8 bars of translucent plus one each of Cernit’s four translucent colors –amber, emerald, ruby red and sapphire.
Usually Marie starts by mixing 2 parts translucent to 1 part color and adjusts from there to create the desired effect. Here’s her recipe for the colors used in this piece. You can examine more of Marie’s efforts on Facebook.
You may also be interested in the Cernit color mixes that Spain’s Ana Belchi has been sampling in her studio. You’ll find them on Instagram. If you need to know more, Ginger Davis Allman (BlueBottleTree) discusses the properties of Cernit in this review.
No matter how many times I watch Rebecca Watkins dust her bright unbaked polymer work with her special mix of dark PearlEx powders, it feels so wrong. There’s no way you can pull this ugly gray thing back from disaster.
But she does. With a bit of sanding she reveals a dramatic tile for the Fimo50 World Project. Read all about Rebecca’s methods in my book and catch up with her online on Facebook, Instagram, her blog, and Etsy.
Boxes of tiles have been sliding through my mail slot at a furious pace and I’m afraid to talk to the postman until next week when the package tsunami ends. You still have time!
France’s Stephanie Kilgast has found a way to keep the cat that she had to put down recently. She created a palm-sized polymer version of Arya that can be popped into a pocket or gazed at on a window sill.
This was a heartfelt departure from the fruits and veggies that Stephanie usually creates. She documented the sculpt with the video below. It’s a love story in polymer.
There are more videos on Stephanie’s YouTube channel and Facebook as well as her site.
Lots of us have gelli plates stashed away in our studios wondering how to use them with polymer. Enter Syndee Holt hobbled by an injury with time on her hands. The happy outcome of her mashup – not the ankle, but the combination of rubber stamp, polymer, paint and gelli plate – is the technique used on these darkly subtle metallic pendants shown on Facebook.
Syndee will be teaching her method at Fandango in Florida in May (not sure if there are open spots). While she’d much rather not have had the injury, it’s given her a double shot of creative juices.
And no, a gelli plate is not the serving dish for jellyfish.
Since I’m going to the beach next week, I found myself gravitating to all things sunny and warm. Rather than fight the urge, I headed to Deb Groover’s (Debortina) Florida site where I knew I’d find what I was looking for.
Deb and Tina’s big clay paintings are filled with bright slabs of polymer. Here the umbrellas, surf boards, beach chairs and bathing suits (plus a few dogs, balls and towels) are flat pieces of pre-baked polymer affixed to a wood background and painted around. (She explains how on this StudioMojo video.)
Deb and Tina hop-scotch between art shows in the south, next week in Tallahassee. On Facebook you can see how their clients love to integrate the paintings into their homes.
This is also my way of letting you know that I’ll try to write some posts but delivery may be sporadic.
