Two months!

Well, I've been getting used to a new job, remember?  Yeah, I know, not much of an excuse for two full month's absence, but it's all I've got.  :)  I wish I could say I have tons of great projects to post pictures of, but I've only got two.  Hopefully, there will be more in the near future.


My sister, Emily, is leaving on a mission in a couple weeks and as a good-bye present for her two roommates, she "commissioned" some work for them.  I made Em some dragon bookends for Christmas this last year (that I still haven't gotten pics of to post...) and her roommates really thought they were something cool, so she asked me to make some for them.  Actually, only the one roommate got dragons, the other -- well, pics are below.

 This roommate loves pink and bold, bright colors.  I took Emily at her word and went super bright!  When I delivered them, Em's roommate really seemed to like them, so I guess it worked.  I had fun with the rainbow backdrops -- they remind me of thermo images.  You know, the one's that you need special equipment for that show differences in temperature through color.  Pretty cool, huh?  I made them using the same technique as for the faux abalone I used on the bottle I gave my mom (see earlier post).  It's all clay -- no paint -- and they have hematite beads for eyes.

Emily's other roommate apparently prefers more mod-ish looking things, and her favorite flower is a tulip.  Emily asked me to do a scented oil bottle basketweave like the one I had done for Rachel (see earlier post).  I thought black would be nice, but a single bottle didn't seem like enough when the other roommate was getting two pieces.  So I did this matching relief sculpture -- it's got a picture frame stand back on it to hold it upright.  You can't really see it in the picture but both the flowers and the leaves have gold clay in them which gives it a really cool sheen and depth.  I was really happy with the way these turned out, and I'll have to do some more.  The bottle is a flattened sphere rather than an actual sphere like the ones I did before, and the craft store had all sorts of shapes of bottles for only a couple bucks each, so my mind is buzzing with ideas.  Whether or not I'll ever actually get to them....  well, we'll see, I guess!  :)

Oh, and that's a nice glimpse of my really cluttered creation station, don't you think?

Yay! Presents!

I didn't go to Manti until this last weekend for Mother's Day, so I didn't get to give my mom and sisters their presents until now.  So here are the pictures of them.  They are bottles for scented oil and diffuser reeds.  I encountered this new company, Cierra Ashley, at a craft fair a few weeks ago and I splurged on one for myself because it smelled so nice (and was less expensive than a candle).  Then I decided to play with decorating the bottle with some clay before adding the oil and this is what I ended up with.

It's a really basic polymer clay technique but one I hadn't tried before, so I thought it would be fun.  I just sandwiched a sheet of gold foil between a sheet of dark blue clay and a really, really thin sheet of transparent clay and sent the whole thing through the pasta roller a few times to crackle the foil.  I painted the glass with PVA glue and let that dry so the clay would have something to grab onto, smoothed the sheet in place, and then added the gold accents.  I was so pleased with it that I decided it would make an excellent gift for Mother's Day and for my sisters' birthdays, so I called up Heidi from Cierra Ashley and ordered 3 more.  I wanted 3 more round bulb-like ones like this one, but she only had two, so I had to get a square one.  That one went to Mom.

This is supposed to be faux abalone, so I was really thrilled when -- with no prompting from me -- Mom said that was what it looked like.  I thought the pearlized clays and pretty pastels really suited her.  For my sister Rachel, I made a clay basket, which was a great idea but took forever.

I textured the horizontal strips to make it look more like a straw basket, so before adding the final sealing coat they all got, I added a patina with some burnt umber acrylic paint to emphasize the texture.  There are three flowers around the rim of the "basket" and when I set out to make them, they were going to be sunflowers, but I just couldn't get them to look right, so I just made up these.  I call them "Rachel Flowers."

The idea for Emily's came from a turtle shell (she collects turtles) and is made from an extruded hexagonal cane.  The hexagonal shape didn't survice the process of making the pattern sheet very well, but I'm still pretty happy with the results.  I had a bit of that pattern sheet left over so I made a couple of cabochons that now only need a head, 4 legs, and a tail to look just like cool little turtles.  Not sure what I'll do with those yet...  I have a lot of the abalone cane left too, so I'll probably try to do something cool with that as well.