Scrappy chutzpah

To Carol Beal (BeadUnsupervised) there is no such thing as scrap. She follows some powerful inner radar to assemble this Big Bead Bracelet, mixing media and colors, precious and preposterous for a vibrant combination of shapes, and materials.

Her devil-may-care approach and high voltage colors require more chutzpah than most of us can muster which makes her unsupervised mashup exciting.

Look closely and you’ll see some polymer scrap beads — a little Stroppel cane, a bit of Barenholtz textile treatment. Wouldn’t it be fun to dive head first into a project like Carol does? On Flickr, her site, and Etsy.

No-fail scraps

Silvia Bordin makes a summery Stroppel with leftovers on PolymerClayDaily.com

Italy’s Silvia Bordin flips a Stroppel cane into summer mode by using white as her color for the solid layer. If you look through her Flickr photos you’ll see any number of variations on Alice Stroppel’s theme.

Has it really been seven years since we started tracking the Stroppel effect?

Maybe June will begin with scrap week since I’m currently fixated on playful pieces from discarded patterns. Because scraps are so disposable, working with them reduces the pressure to make a masterpiece.

And when you’re not so driven to make the perfect piece a spontaneous piece sometimes jumps out.

So we start the week with unpretentious scraps, formed with a cutter and strung on hemp. Thanks for teaching us not to take things so seriously, Silvia and Alice. Ease into the week with some no-fail scrap time.

Scrappy pots

Carol Lessans uses up scrap and gets a jump on spring on PolymerClayDaily.com

Maryland’s Carol Lessans got a jump on spring and used up leftover veneers and canes by applying them to flower pots. Yes, you can fire clay pots in the oven. A little glue or liquid polymer will make the bits and pieces hold firmly.

In her preparations for the season, Carol has also covered a birdhouse and other garden items. You may recall that she embellished her mailbox years ago and it survived a number of snowy winters. More on Facebook.

Need more wild ideas? Sometimes I hesitate to put edgy, out there polymer in the daily posts and I save them up for the weekend StudioMojo where the die-hards hang out. Walk with us on the wild side each Saturday!

Carried by color

These breezy, summery earrings from Spain’s Elena Fernandez Guijarro are made from scrap clay pieces laid next to each other in an easy, casual way.

Sometimes we forget about easy and casual. Color carries Elena’s design forward.

Try going simple and let color carry your work along.

Polymer grand finale

One last firework for the holiday weekend from Jael Thorp. Jael was practicing the spiral she learned from Lynda Gilcher’s class using scraps of clay for pattern.

You can see on Jael’s Flickr and Facebook pages that she loves bright patterns. Her eggs that I photographed at French Lick have been popular on my Instagram.

A polymer grand finale to blast you into July.

Traveling scrap

Scrap from Jon Anderson’s studio in Bali made its way to Ron Lehocky’s workroom in Louisville.

Through all sorts of serendipitous connections and with a great deal of fun and intrigue, Jon’s polymer scrap is raising hundreds of dollars for the Kids Project in Kentucky.

You can see pictures of more of Ron’s results by clicking on the image.

He nearly discarded Jon’s canes that had welded themselves together in transit. What are you doing with your scrap? Are you overlooking treasures?

There’s more to the story! Jon is sending another batch of what he calls polymer cheese (more securely packaged this time) when Barb Alexander’s tour arrives in Bali soon.

Tokens from scrap

Jewel-like scrap hearts from Quebec’s Claire Maunsell get us in the proper holiday mood. What mementos and love tokens will you make this week?

Claire says she’ll soon offer a tutorial about the way she uses her scrap to get the dramatic effects you see here.

In the meanwhile, you can learn about her methods of using Pan pastels, inks, paints and some unusual tools with translucent Pardo clay on her new Craftcast class.

Watch how she teases the clay into shape (she was a glass artist before polymer), and applies layers and layers of texture and color until she’s pleased with the effect.

I learned a new way to anchor the probe on the thermometer. It’s often the little tricks you learn in a class that come in most handy. See more of Claire on Flickr, her site, Facebook and in her online Zibbet and Etsy galleries.

Scrap habits

While we’re focused on ways of working, I noticed that Emily Squires Levine accumulates her cane slices and in a designated scrap bowl and at the end of each studio session, she makes coasters from the day’s surplus.

Clay that isn’t used in the coaster collage is blended into backing to add thickness. What a good way to get rid of scraps regularly so that they don’t nag at you from an ugly pile that clutters the studio.

See more of Emily’s studio here and on Flickr.

More scrap tweaks

Building on yesterday’s tutorial, we look at how France’s Anne-Sophie Bonnay tweaks her scrap stripes, gouging across them to create a woven pattern.

She enhances the effect by impressing the polymer with a fabric texture.

Anne-Sophie offers more items made from the scrap sheet on her web site.

She even uses the curly gouged out strings, pressing them onto a solid colored sheet to create an abstract pattern. Her imitation tiger’s eye pattern is another riff on this scrap stripe theme.

Rubiks scrap

I bet you have a pile of holiday scrap mounting up in your studio waiting to be turned into something wonderful. France’s Pinklily (Sandrine Arevalo Zamora) has just the new trick you need and her pictures are so complete that you won’t need any translation. She calls it the Rubik’s Cube Effect.

No fancy tools or solutions required. Assemble your most colorful scrap, some screening, netting, or needlework canvas (she uses “gardening mesh”), black clay and you’re set.

Maggie Maggio first pointed this out to me and I take that as a stamp of approval. Enjoy! Here’s Pinklily on Facebook.

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