Sandra Trachsel’s works will have you squinting and scratching your head. How is that kind of precision possible?
Sandra (ST-art-clay) explains that she combined an illusion quilt pattern from Caryl Bryer Fallert and Dan Cormier’s matrix cane idea. For her mud cloth bracelet, she credits Donna Kato for the cane ideas and Dan Cormier for the forms.
A trip through Sandra’s recent work shows that while she’s been inspired by great teachers, she’s veering off on her own path which we’ll happily follow.
Polymer caning keeps changing and improving as these two recent examples show. The first is clear, bright and very complex kaleidoscope patterning from Anastasia Arinovich of Belarus.
Her colors remain remarkably clear even at such a tiny size. Anatasia offers a master class on her blog. Here’s her Facebook presence.
The second example is this dove cane from Maine’s Jayne Dwyer. She controls the flowing lines of a bird in flight with remarkable control and precision. Here’s her Facebook location.
Caners like these are raising the bar for caning in polymer.
Mary Anne Loveless has been working on conical bead designs for a while and they keep getting better and better. This Tribal Elegance set is alluring in its rythmically repeated stripes interspersed with graduated strips of color. A textured gold strip adds a highlight. Her colors lean toward autumn and you can scan through her work on Flickr.
And the winner is….
Mariona Salvadó wins the Flower Academy giveaway from Iris Mishly described in Monday’s post. Congratulations and thanks to Iris for her generous prize.
France’s Isa Maria Noella Castellano combines a couple of flat, subtly textured polymer feathers with a bead and a metal charm, suspends them on a ball chain and comes up with a very trendy pendant.
The translation software calls them Giraffe Feathers…does that sound right? She used this soothing photo as her header on Facebook.
Super raffle
If you missed last week’s online I love tools, you can read the recap, follow the tool links and get in on the door prizes. (Alison’s new Craftcast site was loading and the raffle had to be delayed until all the pixels were in place.) A $10 raffle ticket helps the Samunnat project and gets you in the pool for some great prizes. Winners announced on October 27.
Speaking of prizes, the cutoff for Iris Mishly’s Flower Academy drawing is Thursday night. Make a comment on Monday’s post to enter. Good luck!
These art deco polymer earrings from Germany’s Bettina Welker make me want to run and build graduated canes. These beauties are samples from a class that Bettina teaches on CraftArtEdu (which happens to be available on a 25% off sale until Thursday night).
Bettina’s website, Etsy shop, FB page, Flickr and Ipernity sites are classes in themselves and lately she’s been percolating with loads of new ideas.
Country connections
I have to walk down the lane to the small adobe wifi hut this month while I’m vacationing out west. I have to carefully schedule (and limit) my online time. Which is my way of saying, don’t be surprised if my email responses are slow or posts show up late.
I find that my head is full of polymer ideas and my hands are itching (in a good way) to get to work. But I haven’t forgotten my faithful readers.
This pile of fall leaves from Meg Newberg is her latest cane discovery. (They’re all from one cane.) She loves to experiment with canes and find new patterning methods. She stumbled on a way to make soft-edged designs that are great for glowing pumpkins, spooky spiders and organic shapes. She calls them her Painterly Canes.
Maybe you can figure it out. If not, she sells her tutorial for a very reasonable price on Etsy. See more examples on her blog.
Layl McDill’s complex cockapoo cane starts out looking like a fantastic jumble of paw prints and hairy swirls. This Minnesota artist’s millefiori canes are fearlessly big and full of patterns that reduce down to marvelously rich images full of color and meaning.
Her designs are made with 8 to 15 pounds of polymer that reduce down to 10 feet of canes that she sells or makes into sculptures. “Sometimes it seems that these women and creatures just climb out of my piles of polymer clay,” she says.
Layl doesn’t back away from size or complexity and teaches classes where students revel in producing plate-sized flowers. See more of Layl’s on Facebook, her site, Pinterest, and her Etsy gallery.
What would happen if you went bigger and more complex with your work?
Ponsawan gave the drops their blingy pop by using Speedball Caligraphy Ink. She outlined the cane designs and spattered the background with blasts of bright gold. The Facebook crowd erupted in a flurry of comments and questions and Ponsawan shared what she’d done to add the perfect finishing touch.
Maine’s Jayne Dwyer took a $5 thrift store plant stand, covered it with her signature polymer canes and turned it into an objet d’art.
Every once in a while she moves away from jewelry to larger pieces – tables, wall pieces and other furniture – to stretch her artistic muscles.
Jayne’s way of working with canes might appear very loose and free form. The results are quite remarkable, dramatic and very distinctive. You can see her canes on her website and on her Facebook page.
Carol Simmons and Rebecca Watkins are sharing the fruits of their recent collaborative work with you!
Carol wanted to experiment with big polymer beads and Rebecca wanted them lightweight and textured. Rebecca came up with an ingenious solution to make them hollow. Paper!
Since paper’s burning point is 451° Fahrenheit, it works as an armature for polymer. Rebecca researched and redrew various shape templates, printed them onto cardstock, cut them out, and taped each shape together. The constructed forms were covered with a thin layer of polymer (see the black forms in this picture) and baked.
Carol and Rebecca covered the baked forms with slices of kaleidoscope canes. Rebecca incised deep lines into Carol’s densely patterned canes. They tried a variety of methods – deeply or lightly textured, highlighted with dark powder (see Rebecca’s project in Polymer Clay Global Perspectives) or not, covered in sheets of pattern or with small sections. Each test bead was then rebaked.
Here are her shape files for you to download free, print and play with. “They are free because I did not invent geometry!” says Rebecca. Still, it was generous of the duo to share their secrets. Thanks to them we have another great way to create hollow forms with polymer.
