Heidi Helyard brings us warm vibes from down under on PolymerClayDaily.com

Enough with the cold weather already! For those of you in my frigid hemisphere, here’s something different from Australia’s Heidi Helyard. It’s summer there.

Heidi unleashes hot colors, streaking them across this textured bowl. I feel better already.

If you need more warmth and frivolity, go find her on Instagram and shop in her store.

And then if you still need something to keep you snuggly, join us over on StudioMojo. On Saturday morning we dish about what’s happening and dream up new designs while we warm up our clay and wake up our mojos. It’s fun! Come out and play.

Going around in circles

Loose, colorful, happily twirled polymer beads popped into view this week.

Kathryn Corbin’s necklace starts with big textured peach-colored tubes on a thick cord.

In the center, bigger loops of random surface textures in springy colors overlap and crowd against each other. It’s a fresh and spontaneous look that kept catching my eye in Claire Maunsell’s weekend surface techniques class in Boston. What a great use for the samples we were accumulating in class!

Then Jean Rutka posted pictures from a weekend group event in Morrisburg, Ontario.

One photo featured thin extruded polymer strings that Lyn Tremblay twirled into flat round disks and strung into a fabric-like necklace. On her Facebook page Lyn shows a number of other fun designs that come to her when she lets the clay “speak to her”.

Is this fascination with easily twirled bits of clay a trend or just a reflection of the exuberance of spring?

Colors from another hemisphere

Going around in circles