Need a little bling as you slide into the first December weekend?
Take a look at the glittery polymer bead experiments by Greece’s Klio Tsaliki on Facebook and Flickr.
Klio applies glitter with joyful abandon and the beads radiate celebration!
Maybe it’s time to break into your own sparkle stash. Don’t you feel a “gltter weekend” ahead?
Are you thinking cranberries? Even if you don’t like the taste you gotta love the color. The UK’s Clare Lloyd captures mouthwatering berry colors beautifully.
From deep pinks through reds, burgundies, and dark currants, each of Clare’s colors is luscious.
A look at her palettes on Folksy, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook may prompt you to mix your own batch of winter reds.
Can you imagine cutting these polymer pieces by hand? Today’s die cutting machines make delicate cutting much easier. Join me for a Craftcast online class this Saturday to see how.
The way these beads join looks impossible and all wrong. But that same unexpected construction makes the necklace from Greece’s Arieta Stavridou look so very right.
Her polymer patterns are a jumble of color and shapes as well with the lines clearly scribed and then accented with paint.
She has lots more examples of her upbeat, off-kilter combinations on her Big Fish Facebook page and on Pinterest.
It’s just the thing as we cruise into an upbeat, off-kilter weekend.
Join us for more behind-the-scenes frolicking through the polymer world on StudioMojo this Saturday morning.
Look at the scratches and scribbles on LaLa Ortiz’ beads. She digs right in and gets to work.
While we sit here thinking about what materials she used, she’s carved (maybe…and/or drawn) with abandon. Energy and spontaneity make these beads interesting.
LaLa picked up the technique for these big hollow beads at Sandy Camp. There’s more on Instagram and Facebook.
It’s Monday. Let’s not think too much and dive in.
One benefit of teaching is what the students teach you. Look at this imaginative Miro-like polymer inlay from Florida’s Lynn Yuhr (TheFlyingSquirrelStudio).
My class in Georgia focused on making polymer art for the domestic environment. Students quickly embraced the concepts and happily dressed up sticks, covered paper forms, and drilled holes in whatever wood they could find to inlay. You could see their attitudes change as the possibilities expanded.
Lynn brought wooden jewelry components with her to our class. She and her Florida friends at Banyan Bay are tinkering with wooden beads that can be inlaid. While they were originally thinking of designs for bead weavers, Lynn urged them to consider polymer inlay as well. The new products should be available soon.
Once you enter the land of what if, a whole new world of possibilities opens up.
Alaska’s Katie Way (BullsEyeStudio) took the summer off from her Etsy site. Let’s hope she’s out foraging for acorns.
Don’t caps filled with Katie’s signature beads look fabulously fallish? She made them earlier this year. You can keep tabs on Katie on Facebook.
Polymer acorns would be great for next spring’s Into the Forest exhibit too.
Check out Melissa Terlizzi’s nutty variation on this theme!
These dotted circle beads by the Czech Republic’s Eva Haskova may stump you. Zoom in and out and still you’d have to guess. Caned? Carved? Extruded?
The disks are part of a new “energy topography” class but the translation doesn’t explain much.
All that aside, Eva’s mind works in interesting ways and this new work is an extension of some of her distinctive earlier works that you can study on Flickr and Facebook. Can you follow the dots and unravel the mystery?
Each side of Cecelia Leonini’s (ImpastArte) leaf-like beads provides a separate canvas. She uses very different geometric patterns on each surface to create her Leaves of the World necklace.
You may like her in-process photos that show how she shaped each of the 3-sided beads on a single gently curved wire. Here she is on Etsy and Facebook.
This more complex and updated worldview of fall leaves is right on target today. Have a great fall weekend.
Is it the reminder of another way to use scrap clay that attracts us to Carol Beal’s (BeadUnsupervised) newest marbled domes? Or is it Carol’s unsupervised, no-holds-barred approach to jewelry-making that pulls us in?
No matter. It’s inspiring to see how she turns bits of fall colored scrap into stripes and then drags a stylus in zigs and zags across the surface to marble it. Carol’s good at messing things up in delightful ways and this is a great example of how effective cutting loose can be.
See more of Carol on Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest and Etsy.
Cut loose with me in a class at Creative Journey Studios in Georgia, October 7-9.
Even though you can detect the echoes of teachers and tutorials in Kathy Cannella’s polymer jewelry, her own voice comes through loud and clear. She puts her juju on each piece, zigging when you thought she’d zag. It’s a cool trick to retain your own aesthetic when you’re following someone else’s instructions. Kathy shows us that it can be done!
Kathy crackles, veneers, textures and distresses with confidence. It appears that she has a background in sculpture. She keeps a low profile and all we know is that she’s from New Jersey. There’s more to come so keep her on your radar.
