Polymer persistence

France’s Irene Hoiles keeps a low profile online. The snippets and clues she leaves on Facebook and Pinterest point to someone who knows how to persist until she finds a solution.

About the earrings at the left Irene says, “When you’re not Julie Picarello and your mokume gane doesn’t go quite as you planned…dot it.”

Consider how those dots salvage the pattern and take it in a new direction. Sort of aboriginal.

Fine extruded strings wind around to make dramatic caps for Irene’s mokume gane beads at right. They needed another element for drama.

What a good way to start the week. Let’s channel Irene’s no-fail approach to her polymer designs. What’s on your work surface that needs a little TLC to make it sing?

Grab a rope

These bracelets from Ukraine’s Lela Todua (Leland) have an urban tribal vibe.

Big hole tube beads strung on thick rope or multi-strand cording make them a favorite for both men and women.

The beads are polymer stamped with ethnic patterns or graffiti art highlighted with paints.

Catch up with Lela’s rough and ready look on her Etsy store and on Facebook.

Blooming barnacles

Barb Fajardo is from New Mexico, the dry southwest where they don’t have many barnacles but she’s smitten with them anyway and she’s making them bloom in polymer. Her organic clusters sprout into earrings and brooches. She groups and stacks and gathers them into all sorts of colorful formations.

Even if you can’t head to the seashore, you can encrust your neck with some ocean remnants.

See how Barb uses hers (she teaches a barnacle class) on Flickr, Pinterest, her site, and Facebook.

Graffiti trends

Graffiti is all the rage and Petra Nemravova gives us some terrific tips on how she makes these trendy scribbled earrings in a free tutorial. The translation’s a bit wonky but it’s easy enough to figure out from the photos.

Her background rubber stamp (from IOS stamps she says) is very cool and it wouldn’t be too hard to carve one of your own. Need more? Here’s another of her freebies. Check Petra’s Facebook page and website.

And if you’re on Facebook, take a look at what Petra and the Ubersee gang were up to at their June retreat.

Cellular winner

Maryland’s Eugena Topina unveiled her Openwork tutorial back in October (here’s the PCD post). Now her cellular-like designs are winning prizes.

Her Openwork Necklace (the white one at right) won top prize in the polymer category at Bead Dreams 2015.

Staci Louise Smith picked up the other two top prizes which you can see on Bead & Button’s page (scroll down to the polymer category).

Breezy polymer batiks

Lorraine Vogel (WiredOrchid) brings us more breezy summer batiks. You can feel her home’s Florida influence in the leaves and flowers in her designs.

Lorraine’s been perfecting her own methods using inks and stamps in ways that go beyond shabby chic beads which rely on paints. She’s tried other rustic glazes and effects. She’s dabbled with carving polymer and coloring with washes.

After all that Lorraine has come up with a dyed fabric look that combines the techniques in a new way. She hints that she’ll develop a tutorial that will divulge how she uses inks to mimic the wax batik process so convincingly on polymer.

In the meanwhile, you can admire how she’s refined and evolved her methods on Flickr, Facebook and on her Etsy site.

Weekend witch watch

LA’s Caroline McFarlane-Watts is an English girl from the Oxfordshire countryside pursuing her dream in films. She helped build a miniature model of Hogsmeade village for Harry Potter and since then has worked in miniature scale sets for a wide range of projects. Her miniature works are sold in over 40 countries.

Caroline’s first experience was as a polymer miniature crazed 8 year old who wanted to win a scholarship to study art. “It took twenty years for this miniature hobby to become a big career move,” she explains.

Lately she’s been fixated on witches – Good Witches Bad Witches. So far she’s created the witches of Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland and France. Germany’s up next.

There’s so much fine work to look at on Caroline’s sites that you’ll thank me for saving this artist for your weekend reading.

You’ll want to travel through her world and admire works in progress on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and her own site.

Stories in polymer

Germany’s Eva Thissen tells enchanting stories with the littlest bits of polymer. This Story of a Little Girl series is told on beautifully muted base beads.

Eva uses the same colors for the girl’s dresses with miniscule contrasting bits scattered in the background as raindrops or flowers.

For the process, her only tools are her hands and a needle. When Eva first started, she painted on polymer but found that she preferred the dimension that applique provided.

The charming group of girls makes a great header on her Etsy site where she sells these and her more densely flowered garden compositions. Her gentle touches of color may make you sigh with pleasure. Enjoy them in detail on Flickr.

Shibori summer

Debbie Jackson rolled out her new polymer Shibori Workshop in our hometown Columbus, Ohio this month. We in the midwest are used to being a test market and two different weekend groups put Debbie through her paces.

Always a textile artist, she’s been experimenting and developing her ink-to-polymer ideas for years. You can see from the class pictures on Facebook that her students “got it” and a new way of working is about to begin.

Don’t these polymer samples from the class look like flowing summer caftans and seaside afternoons? Keep your eye on this technique. Debbie is easiest to follow on Facebook..

Remarkable bits

It’s not easy to salvage that sweet bit of polymer veneer and turn it into something wearable and delightfully designed. That’s why these earrings from Minnesota’s Jan Geisen caught my eye.

She has a way of putting geometric shapes together in a way that makes them both simple and remarkable. She leans toward muted imitative stone patterns or watercolor-like washes of color. These earrings measure 1/4″ x 1 3/4″. The black rectangle attaches to the earwire and surrounds the patterned slab.

On Jan’s Flickr pages you’ll see more examples of her mix-and-match stacking style. She’s compiled a great stash of inspirations on Pinterest.

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