Polymer Clay Daily

Thanksgiving house tour

Take Lindsay Black's tour of homes on PolymerClayDaily.com

Happy Thanksgiving! Nashville’s Lindsay Black (oddlyandcompany) will finish this season’s orders before December 1. Isn’t that impressive?

Her custom home ornaments, small replicas of houses are highly sought after and she limited her production this year to have more family time. Give her a hand for making a plan and sticking to it.

If you’re like me, you’re telling yourself that you’ll make yourself one of these someday. I think we’d all be surprised at the skill and dexterity required. But it is tempting to try.

On a lazy Thanksgiving afternoon, take the tour through Lindsay’s houses on her Instagram.

Simple pleasures

Rhonda Walker spells out pleasures on PolymerClayDaily.com

The Etsy site of Oregon’s Rhonda Walker (walkercrafts) is full of simple pleasures.

She bends strips of extruded polymer to spell a wish or a word, mounts that on a backing and surrounds it with small decorative embellishments.

Accents of paint and/or texture make for a dreamy message that becomes a hanging or a magnet or a dish. What word would you like to be reminded of each day?

Festive polymer

Shelley Atwood’s brooch is a festive combination of gold pods, gilded needles, and red leaves. Alien meets suburban Texas but in a good, friendly way.

I hadn’t checked on Shelley’s work lately and it felt like going home for the holidays. Her colors are muted and slightly dark and her shapes change. The clay leads and she follows in a curious, unforced way.

Shelley created a slew of earrings for her gallery’s ArtWalk. Her UK fan, Carrie Harvey pointed out what I’d been missing. Shelley demos on Facebook and shows her work on Flickr.

On a roll

Let’s ease into Monday with Oklahoma’s Katie Way (bullseyestudioart) rhythmically rolling polymer veneers for salad servers. At the top of the video, you can gaze at Katie’s supply of extruded circles just waiting to be sliced and applied to the next solid color backing.

Browse quickly through her Instagram and you’ll see how she covers switchplates, kitchen utensils, card cases – most anything that can take the heat. She works from her own distinct palette adding textures and paints to enhance the hand drawn effect.

Katie reminds us that polymer work can be rewarding even during Thanksgiving week. Go have some fun.

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Cutting loose

Cover girl Doreen Gay Kassel rips and tears on PolymerClayDaily

Doreen Gay Kassel lets loose with some torn polymer and vivid color experiments. She rips and tears with an abandon that’s refreshing.

Cover girl Doreen Gay Kassel rips and tears on PolymerClayDaily

I’m guessing that Doreen is giving herself some playtime after months of hard work including her feature on the cover of Cloth Paper Scissors. The November/December issue is dedicated to creating gifts with meaning and you can preview it here.

Mojo working…

If you want to know what other artists are trying and how they chug through the winter doldrums, join us at StudioMojo on Saturday morning.

Finishing touches

Debbie Jackson adds polymer jewelry to ceramic sculptures on PolymerClayDaily.com

Debbie Jackson stands proudly beside a sculpture by master sculptor Woodrow Nash. He commissioned Debbie to add her necklaces as finishing touches to his tall ceramic tribal art.

The sculptures sold so quickly at the Columbus, Ohio King Arts Center that Debbie didn’t have time to photograph her newest imitative ivory African designs.

Integrating Debbie’s strong tribal jewelry with Nash’s striking Africa Nouveau figures has been a natural collaboration. As with most successful collaborations, each enhances and balances the other.

Who would you choose as your natural collaborator?

Stringing and shopping

Katya Karavaeva’s (nikamiart) pendants glow with colors that are both dark and clear. Her pendants often have rings buried on the top from which she strings them to flatter each design.

This is not your usual drill-a-hole-and-grab-a-cord approach. Look at the multi-strand and braided cords that she’s paired with her beads on Instagram.

On sale now!

The catalog from the Into the Forest exhibit is a keeper, a souvenir of a monumental event. You can now order one online by following this link.

You might also want to click on Dan Cormier’s new online Single-Slice Mokume MasterClass which debuts in January. The pre-launch, early bird pricing ends at midnight tonight (Wednesday).

The Sculpey.com store is now open and PCD readers can get an extra grand opening discount by using the promo code PCD20%

Exploring cutting machines

Sabine Spiesser layers machine-cut pieces of reef on PolymerClayDaily.com

Australia’s Sabine Spiesser has been learning the ins and outs of cutting, using a Silhouette machine and coming up with new designs. Layers of lightweight jointed pieces are slightly textured to resemble felt.

Sabine shares more of her samples on Facebook.

She credits the classes on Craftcast for getting her over some humps. If you’re intrigued by this technology there’s a new machine etching class online with Cindy Pope this Saturday. Instructions for metal clay apply to polymer as well.

Cutting machines offer new possibilities for polymer and we’ve only scratched the surface.

 

 

Wakeup call

Aric Verrastro moves beyond the forest. Care to follow? on polymerclaydaily.com

Is Aric Verrastro’s necklace too Energetic for you on a Monday?

Our Into the Forest weekend keynote speaker, Brigitte Martin from Crafthaus, asked, “What comes after technique?”

The answers have to do with expression and a bigger vision of what your craft can do.

Aric’s steel, spray paint, tool dip and polymer necklace (actually it’s sculpture with a hole for your head) points one way to art. What happens when you walk out of the forest into the larger world?

Facebook is awash in photos from the grand weekend in Pittsburgh and some of the lovely gallery goers are pictured on Instagram.

Drawn squiggles and dashes

Mouna Cadra has a keen eye and steady hand on PolymerClayDaily.com

This dish from France’s Mouna Cadra waves gently on the tabletop. Its vertical patterns make your eyes trace up and down the lines.

Mouna cured the white clay and then added the designs with pigment markers. The thought of drawing on baked polymer sounds refreshingly uncomplicated, It must be a challenge to draw those squiggles and dots with precision and without smudges, however. Read more about Mouna on her site and Facebook.

Speaking of things being harder than they look, I’m off to Pittsburgh’s Into the Forest weekend and will compile all my snapshots and first impressions into a report for tomorrow’s StudioMojo. I hardly know what to expect! Join us to see the results on Saturday morning.