Fairy tale polymer

Julie Eakes has returned to her fairy tale canes, taking slices from her Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood canes and making them into cylindrical pendants with polymer end caps.

Tiles with reminders about the stories hang from the bottom of each bead saying, “Beauty comes from within”,”Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth” and “Wolves lurk in every guise.”

“I managed to get a cane slice to wrap around completely, working the tree and the bushes together to hide the seam which really looks cool up close,” says Julie.

See these and more of her recent cane portraits and elaborate frames on her site.

Polymer housing

Housing starts are on the rise, at least in the polymer world. Two new ones – Inessa (smfactory) from Kiev with her Halloween houses and Slovenia’s Marjana Cajhen collections of buildings got me house hunting. You may remember a few others featured on PCD:

Pippa Chandler’s beach huts.
Nicholas and Sofie’s (bewilderandpine) miniature farm houses.
Jenn McGlon’s Luettes
Shay Aaron’s gingerbread houses

These nostalgic and stylized designs make popular wearable and decorative reminders of simpler times and places.

Jelly roll mokume gane

Polymer mokume gane has been around for so long that it can become, well, boring. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Rebecca Geoffrey’s latest take on the technique. Her polymer billet is made from layers of Skinner blend jelly rolls laid side by side and flattened.

Look at this picture to get the idea. These pictures may have you heading to your studio to figure out how it’s done. More pix here.

What looks like a cookie cutter in the second picture is actually Rebecca’s handmade silver bezel (and the round tube is the bail). It adds up to a stunning mix of media.

Polymer swallows

This beautiful swallow cane from the UK’s Claire Wallis illustrates a problem she’s working to solve.

“I really struggle with translucent clays,” Claire explains adding that, “I find it very hard to slice the cane thin enough so that the translucent is clear not opaque. Plus I find layering the cane slice distorts it somewhat.”

These pendants represent one solution. She trimmed and baked thin slices of the large swallow cane. Then she pushed the baked slices into unbaked backgrounds. Voila! No distortion….but more sanding. Claire brings her painterly approach to caning with impressive results.

A sunny start

Sometimes mokume gane in the right colors can just turn out perfectly. (Odile simply sands the baked clay to reveal patterns.)

Enjoy the sunny results from L’atelier de Dilcrea (Odile Marchais) to perk up the start to your week. Short and sweet.

Stamped polymer

Tamara Shea’s (BlockPartyPress) beautiful moth pendant was created with a hand carved stamp from her original drawing. In her signature style, Tamara stamped the 2 7/8″ x 2 1/2″ moth onto brown polymer clay, hand painted it with metallic gold, green and silver acrylic paint, then distressed and sealed it.

Simple stamping techniques combined with dynamite drawing skills can make for some stunning effects. Her Etsy shop’s having a back-to-school sale!

Have a great weekend.

Polymer in progress

Mixed media artist Angie Wiggins is almost panicked about her inventory for the September 15, 43rd St. Festival of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

The in-progress shot of her desk (above) has me checking the map to see how long a drive it would be. Wait ’til you see the mouthwatering photos on her Facebook page of her huge Skinner blends, her layered silkscreens on polymer, her handmade paper bowls.

Her eggshell mosaics fit right in with polymer and her felted bowls stand on polymer bases. In her hands the media mix like old friends.

Wouldn’t you love to stroll through her booth on a crisp fall day?

Polymer bail beauty

Zuzana, from the Czech Republic canes and collages pendants in an increasingly interesting way. The thin buna cord accents running through the polymer bail on the top of this pendant fit right in with the rest of the design.

She nicely attributes her designs to her teachers and then takes flight on her own as you can see from her Flickr photos.

I’ve taken flight too. Checking in from the road and back home soon.

Polymer meets zentangle meets typography

Not only is this design from Croatia’s Nikolina Ortrzan eye-catching, it contains some secrets.

Another artist (Christine Candora-Hickey from North Carolina) showed how she had combined contour lettering and zentangle in her journal in ink and then added color using watercolor. Nikolina used the idea to create a polymer pendant that lists the names of all her pets.

“I just couldn’t resist when I saw this artjournaling post. I wrote the names of all our pets, past and present ones,” she says. Here’s Nikolina’s Etsy page. You may remember her popular cat earring designs.

Champagne polymer

This Champagne Pendant by the UK’s Nadege Honey looks appropriately festive for a Friday. The mokume gane bubbles rise to the top to celebrate the weekend.

Nadege is a French silversmith living in the UK countryside and working in polymer. You can sense her delight as she jumps from one idea to the next in the polymer project pictures on Flickr and Etsy.

I’ll be floating off to Virginia this weekend for a gathering in the hills and a week of fun. You can ride along and share in the fun from the convenience of your own computer. Join me here next week.

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