You may not be ready for the holidays but Jenny Sorensen (WishingWellWorkshop) won’t let you forget.
What really got me about this cardinal in the snow ornament was the unexpected element — a cinnamon stick perch! She often adds a rock or wood or some other natural element to ground her work.
The polymer is smooth and whimsical. The cinnamon adds a natural and fragrant touch. I love the holiday combo.
Italy’s Marko Lovrenski puts together a circle made of smooth and subtle blends. It reminds me of the television news playing in the background as I listen to election reports trickling in.
Marko’s assembly is much more soothing so I’ll try to concentrate on that. He has scads of videos YouTube.
Too close to call is making me too jittery to write so I’ll send you to Marko’s Instagram to explore on your own.
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.
You might think that Shulamit Raanan creates her most exuberant stars and stripes in a small town in a midwestern American flag-waving state. You’d be wrong. “The magic takes place in a little studio, on the second floor of a house standing at the top of a hill overlooking the Yzrael Valley in the north of Israel,” she admits. She’s a prolific maker of buttons, beads, and jewelry as you’ll see on her FB page.
If you need a soothing, meditative polymer technique, try bicones like Shulamit’s. Carissa Nichols shows you how to rock and roll bicone beads from scrap in this video. It’s like learning to ride a bike (without the skinned knees). Once you get your balance you’ll be hooked.
Fill out your ballot, check it twice. You’re all set to vote!
My brain’s all mushy and there’s nothing better than this cane reveal from Australia’s Robyn at Kaori Studio to capture a tired mind. That first slice is the equivalent of a cat toy for caners.
Robyn has pumped out one big batch of extruded dots! She has a baby so she works at night which accounts for the lighting. Doesn’t it make you want to try it? This is what we extruder types dream about. Watch her upcoming jewelry to see where this pops up.
Get the full slicing effect on Robyn’s Instagram (@shop.kaori). Now wasn’t that satisfying?
Virginia’s Angie Wiggins starts every year with a palette of colors that she sticks to for 12 months.
Ribbons of violet run through leftover Skinner blended circles that will become coasters. The colors are easy on the eyes and invite us to explore and enjoy the gradations.
Angie sticks to her plan. There’s something comforting and smart and reassuring in that. Her use of blends is mesmerizing. Check out her Instagram.
Delaware’s
Joseph Barbaccia first drew this Notorious portrait using a digital pen and Photoshop. Then a client commissioned it as a 15″x15″ polymer work.
Watch how Joseph sets up his extruded string palette and gets to work.
He glides smoothly between digital drawing and polymer string mosaic. As you come closer, strokes become thin lines of polymer transformed into a stunning image.
Even his business card uses a polymer thread for a logo.
I like the bags of “inchies” swapped and then squirreled away in ziplocks in the back of the bottom drawer. They make me nostalgic and bring a smile. But much better to do what the Kentucky group did this year and create arty trinkets that you can wear or drape from shelves.
Swappers received short lengths of ball chain onto which they add their beads. Members amassed their trades and snapped the lengths together. One look and longtime friends know whose work is whose.
It’s a way of touching base, waving hello, saying something comforting or sassy or silly.
We’re still here and with any luck, we’ll be together again.
Joan Tayler shared this swap idea some years back. The Kentucky guild whose members are sprawled across the midwest decided to use it in a year when this is this is the closest we can get. Ron Lehocky heads up the group while Mary Clyde Sparks and Francie Owens (and others I’m sure) made it all work.
This piece from Switzerland’s Enkhe Tserenbadam (@enkhethemaker) made me gasp. I try to keep track of my body when I’m looking at art. A gasp tells me that I’m close to paydirt. It’s like that “hot and cold” game we played as kids. This was warmer, warmer, HOT.
Enkhe drills each of the holes in her hollow pieces. It’s luscious to browse her site and consider how she works.
Speaking of warmer, warmer, I spent the week in an online gathering where gasps and astonishment surprised us again and again. Somehow our troubling times have moved some of us to “hot, hot, hot.” Come on over to StudioMojo to see some of the cool tools and sizzling art that we shared. Who knew a Zoom conference could be this much fun?
Puzzle night has always been a hit at an annual gathering in the mountains that’s been going on for 20+ years. Though we’re online this year, the puzzle was still a huge hit orchestrated by North Carolina’s Julie Eakes.
Each player created a 3″x3″ polymer tile based on the line drawing that Julie sent via e-mail. Anything light on her black and white clue drawing must be a light value, darks must be dark. We had no clue about the theme or the color scheme.
Julie secured permission to use Thomas Wimberly’s poignant and powerful Global Forefront sketch. We submitted jpeg photos of our square tiles to Julie via email.
She based this ingenious group project on the im-a-puzzle.com site which meant that Julie had to upload our 30 files to them. Today we each tried to solve and assemble the puzzle virtually on our computer screens. Usually, we elbow and jostle as we crowd around a table to figure what goes where. We missed the cheek-to-cheek jostling but the laughter and competition were undiminished.
Now, each of us must mail our actual tile to the puzzle winner. It felt liberating to have creative good times. Click on the photo to see if you can pick out any artist just by her style.
