Week 15, Year of Jewelry

I love the retro pixelated cane (thanks Bettina Welker) and I love die forming (thanks Dan Cormier).  Here is my latest pendant using these techniques. 

A showcase of shawl pins

I've been making shawl pins using every technique I can think of.  Here are some examples:

This is a "Bend it Yourself" safety pin with silver zinc beads, silver-plated wire swirls and red glass beads.

This pin was made from black, white and gray layers of clay, imprinted with different texture sheets, and then the high spots shaved off.  Sanded and buffed so it is completely smooth.

Imprint mokume gane using Dan Cormier's wide peeler,

Mica shift with gold clay.  Imprinted with Helen Breil's texture sheet and then high spots shaved off.  Sanded and buffed so it is completely smooth.  It really looks 3-dimensional in real life.

From the cane I made in Carol Simmon's Kaleidoscope Cane class.

Design made in raw clay using various implements.  Antiqued after baking.

Imprinted with Helen Breil's texture sheet and then highlighted with Perfect Pearls while raw.  Wondering if I need to seal it.

Made using Wendy Orlowski's Feather Boa texture sheet.

Workshop with Dan Cormier

This weekend the Southern Ontario Polymer Clay Guild hosted Dan Cormier teaching his Relief Beyond Belief workshop.  Die forming is a technique Dan adapted from metal work and he says "It's the easiest and most addictive system I know to make contoured and voluminous forms from flat sheets of polymer clay, and it remains my favourite way to create beads, buttons, brooches, and other three-dimensional objects in a range of shapes and sizes."

As part of the workshop, we received a special collection of dies to use in class and to take home for future projects.  Dan has a number of different die sets available with each one featuring a particular shape in nine graduated sizes.  The die sets don't seem to be on his website yet, but I imagine they will be soon.

This was a "process" class so we focused on techniques rather than creating a finished project.   You'll have to stay tuned to see what I make using die forming.  In the meantime, you can go to Dan's site to see his extraordinary work using this process.

Some examples from Dan's website:

Beyond the Blend

My marathon week of claying finally came to an end and I am recovering at my mom's house in Pennsylvania. I darted out of the Synergy gala dinner just before the live auction, which I heard was a lot of fun, and drove back to Damascus, Maryland to get ready for Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes' two-day workshop called Beyond the Blend. Dan is a very analytical and precise kind of guy and he has spent much of the last two years working with clay blends in the pasta machine. He has come up with an interesting method for achieving complex, predictable and repeatable results. He also likes developing tools and introduced the SHARK, a device for limiting the spread of clay in pasta machines. It helps when you want to make a narrow blend or just a narrow strip of clay. Griffin Cormier was there as well, running around in his jammies, and he kept us all entertained.

I can't say enough about Rob and Wilma and Devon at Artway Studio/Polymer Clay Express. They gave the students the run of the store and instantly provided anything we needed for the class.

I'll be offline for awhile. I'm driving my mom down to North Carolina for a big family reunion and probably won't be blogging til I get back to Canada around March 8. Unless, of course, you want me to show photos from my cousin's 50th wedding anniversary.