UTEE pool for Clio

This piece was very easy to make.  A polymer clay little goldfish named Clio.  A pool to hold her... that is a simple rectangle with edges, but I used a color progression (Skinner blend) to give the impression of deeper water on one side.  Then the fins... paper thin and about 1.5" for the tail and a little smaller for the other fins, veined and edged them (although the edge did not come out the way I wanted... scissors are not my friends).  Baked those separately and once the fish was assembled, I filled the pool with Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel and started to melt it with a heat gun.  Once it puddled, I set the fish in the middle and added more UTEE.  3 minutes in the oven finished the job and Clio got her water.  I opened the oven door and let the piece cool for 30 minutes before handling; the UTEE is like molten wax, burns, blisters, and you cannot lift it off of carpet (trust me on that one).

Its foggy in the Valley

Lucky enough to live in front of a park, the view from the window of my studio is wonderful!  And yet, in the Winter months, the fog can make the park look mysterious and a bit scary.  The oak trees are bare and  the street lights have an eerie glow... the old grandfather clock chimes another hour arrived.  The fog is low and something is about to happen.  Take a look

Late one night I got an idea to recreate this image on clay and rolling out copper and brown made a sheet where I impressed bare tree trunks with Stazon ink.  Using metallic Perfect Pearls I was able to layer and blend to give some depth to the scene.  The last detail was the clock embedded into the clay. 

30 plus years later

When I got laid off, my two best friends took me out to lunch.  We went to the Cheesecake Factory up top Macy's overlooking Union Square in San Francisco.  We asked a friendly tourist to take a picture of us.  And because my friends have been my friends since we met in 7th grade, I had to make something special with this picture.  To make this frame I used the mica shifting technique on polymer clay.  Impressing a deep grooved stamp on the raw metallic clay, then shaving the top layer and finally leveling the clay.  The chatoyant effect (cat's eye) gives the impression that there is something going on in there that tricks the eye, because the surface is perfectly smooth and flat.  Pretty neat, huh?

I liked the technique and had extra clay leftover, so I created a bracelet, a pendant and a pair of earrings; rubber cord holds the medallions together.  Because polymer clay is so light, the earrings do not pull my ears down.  Here is a picture of the set and a closeup of one of the medallions to show the chatoyancy detail. 

Polymer Clay Quilt

What a forgiving medium!  It can be very intense to work with and there is always 'just a little more' that can be added/removed/polished/tweaked with... but the results... oh my.  For a person with no limitations, using our hands to shape, roll, attach and manupulate the clay is not difficult.  For those of us who have a hard time using our hands... wellllll that is why I started by saying it is a forgiving medium.  I have created pieces usable in different applications, such as home decor such as picture frames or custom jewelry, and beyond those, cork coverings, imitation rocks... it just works out well.

Polymer clay quilt

This a a fun one! the simple and traditional Tumbling Blocks quilting pattern offers an excellent reward when polymer clay is used.  Each color was cut out from a sheet; a little perfect pearls on the white clay gives the shimmer of silk, an embedded pattern on the black one makes it stand out and glitter on the red one, was the perfect combination.  After baking the individually cut segments, I buffed each and then assembled the quilt on an 8x8 piece of glass.  I ran a bead of liquid polymer clay and created a seamless block.