Polymer Clay Daily

Celebrating 70

When Karen Lorene, the owner of Facere Jewelry Art Gallery, was approaching this milestone birthday, she decided to throw a party for herself. She had “…the idea of inviting seventy artists to each pick a year during my lifetime and make a piece of jewelry based on that year. Some pieces have made us double over in laughter and a couple are so moving they make me choke up even to talk about them.”

Follow this link to Celebrating 70. You will recognize several artists from the polymer world and some others may inspire you take the what if road to a new design. I will be featuring many of the non-polymer artists on ornamentalelements.com in the future posts.

guest post by Laurie Prophater

All in the family

Rather that looking at classic images, this time I searched my family tree for inspiration for a polymer face cane. I never knew my maternal grandmother but I cherished a pin that captured her beauty as a young girl.  I decided to recreate that image in my latest mosaic cane.

The cane, which I built from extruded squares in six sections, measured 5″ x 7″ x  1-1/2″.  Read more about it in the post, Grand mama, what big eyes you have!, on my blog.

guest post from Julie Eakes

Mixed media mosaics

Susan Crocenzi mixes polymer clay elements with her unglazed porcelain, tempered glass, glass and mirror mosaics as in this 8×10″ Architecture Healer (Hundtertwasser).

Artists can match polymer to the color, texture, shape, and thickness of other tesserae without the need of a kiln. Recently Susan’s been teaching mixed media classes that focus on integrating polymer into traditional mosaics.

“Mosaic art offers the sweet possibility that the random, disparate bits-and-pieces of our lives can yield peace, beauty, and meaning,” she explains. Read about Susan’s classes and study her glittering works on her site and her Facebook page.

Piling on the polymer color

Laurie Mika has taken color to opulence and beyond! She’s piled on the layers of polymer, stamps, paints, metallics, inks and jewels to achieve a whole new level of splendor. This mosaic was inspired by the Indian sari trims Laurie found on her recent trip to Sydney.

When you examine the large version of this snippet from a piece for her Petaluma, CA, Wild About Tile class, it’s hard to know where to look first. Explosions of color detonate in medallions and fire across borders.

Laurie snapped this picture with her phone on the way to the airport and posted it to Facebook where it was met with an immediate uproar of applause. (Randee Ketzel first alerted me to the ruckus.)

Don’t you wish you were in her class? Have a splendid weekend.

Pieced polymer

Israel’s Angela Bahrenholtz likes to work in small bright pieces. Sometimes she uses little sections to build polymer quilts, recently she moved to even smaller micromosaics as in this Autumn pendant.

Her 12″ square all-polymer quilt took second place in the Israeli Polymer Clay Guild’s contest this summer.

Even Angela’s faux tweed cane is made up of little pieces of other polymer scrap. I tried her tweed tutorial and loved the pixelated results.

Knit, crochet, quilt and more – if there’s a fabric technique that can be simulated in polymer, you’ll find it in Angela’s Flickr pages.

Polymer dancing shoes

Start your week with this polymer micromosaic dancing shoes necklace from Cynthia Toops. Her updated new works gallery shows these little slippers which you can also find on the Facere Gallery site.

Each shoe is listed as 1″ x 0.3″ x 0.2″ which seems impossibly small and totally Toopsian.

Cynthia continues her Metamorphis rolodex bracelet series. Her very small black and white illustrations on polymer are also recent additions.

Her Sleepless in Seattle necklace is part of the Dual Nature show at the Wing Luke Museum through January of next year. This Green Eyes necklace is made from polymer and glass.

If you haven’t explored Cynthia’s work for a while and could use some Monday inspiration, take a few minutes to click through her newest polymer treasures.

Layered-look quilt

This Mini Clay Quilt class with Laurie Mika already happened during the April Artfest. Even so, it’s inspiring and worth a Monday look.

Seems Laurie has taken her remarkable array of surface techniques and added a new emphasis on layering. You’ll remember Laurie’s earlier mosaics and her collaborative quilt entry in last year’s Synergy II Exhibit. Her polymer mosaic book is a “must have” and now there’s a Kindle edition.

Laurie’s off for the summer (in Egypt and Jordan) and will be gearing up for fall teaching in September.

I ran into the link on Julie Fei-Fan’s Pinterest board.

How does she do it?

Debra DeWolff has revived her blog and just set up an image page full of juicy polymer work that will capture your attention.

Debra works with felt saying that, “There’s a very pleasurable tactile quality to felt and I enjoy juxtaposing the soft fuzziness of felt with the smoothness of the clay. Her recent work also includes metalwork.

A closeup look at this mosaic bangle will have you scratching your head to figure out how she embeds seed beads in blended clay colors so precisely.

Red, white and blue polymer

In a nice turnabout, our tribute to Memorial Day comes from Pavla Cepelikova from Prague, Czech Republic. Applying foil with a USA flag image onto polymer, she cut strips and applied them to this heart pendant and added faux grout.

This new twist looks like a variation on the polymer mosaic technique first developed by Amy Helm. She cut strips, assembled and scored them to achieve the mosaic look without having to place each tile individually. (This technique was published recently. Does anybody know which book it appeared in? I need a refresher.)

Enjoy Pavla’s Flickr pages while we wave our red, white and blue.

Note: Amy Helms’ mosaic technique is explained in Polymer Clay Mixed Media Jewelry by Shirley Rufener.

Faux Shisha

These new mirrored beads delight me so I thought I’d share them with you. I’ve always been drawn to Shisha embroidery (you know, those wonderful textiles with mirrors). Seeing how Maria Airoldi applied small nail glitter pieces to her beads gave me big ideas.

All that I learned about working small and intensely in the Cynthia Toops’ class was brought to bear on this project. Thin cane slices were individually applied to a black bead. I felt like I’d hit a new vein of creativity.

The small hexagonal pieces of glitter bake tightly onto the raw clay with no adhesive necessary. Cynthia Toops’ faux heishi beads are cut from thin sheets of baked clay with a paper punch. These beads represent a collaboration of many ideas from artists around the world.

Dayle Doroshow will draw a random number for the book giveaway (see Tuesday’s post) on Friday afternoon. We love all the comments! Thanks.