Upcoming Craft Show

I am very excited right now because my first craft show is coming up soon. I will have a booth at the 28th Annual Fall Festival Arts and Crafts Show in Stillwater, Oklahoma. I’m going to be selling etched copper jewelry – pendants, earrings, and barrettes, as well as other items. I’m a lot more serious about this hobby than I was when I started, and this seemed like the natural next step. Right now I’m still in the planning stages – mostly, I’ve been brainstorming new ideas and designs, but soon it will be time to really ramp up production of new merchandise. I invite anyone who will be in the area to come meet me and look at my stuff. The show will be close to the holidays, and casual hand-made jewelry makes a great and affordable gift. It’s the Fall Festival Arts and Crafts Show at the Payne County Expo Center in Stillwater, Oklahoma on November 6th, 7th, and 8th. If you’re interested in attending and you need directions or any other information, please email me. I’d love to see you there.

Improved Copper

I’ve been continuing with my metalwork the last few weeks, making many new designs for copper pendants. I am ramping up production on these for my first big craft show in November. Here are some of my latest pendants: another smaller version of the Horned Lizard, two different variations on an Armadillo, an Insect design, and a Mandala (which is a Buddhist/Hindu meditative symbol representing the cosmos). The Insect and Mandala Designs are the first round pendants that I’ve made. I’ve been cutting the blanks myself from a sheet of copper, so round pendants are a little more work than square ones but I am very happy with the way these turned out.

Copper Pendants

Being the kind of person who is not content to keep doing the same old thing, I like to challenge myself when it comes to making crafts. I love to experiment with new materials and techniques whenever possible, and I had always wanted to try metalwork…there is something irresistible about the shiny allure of metal. These etched and oxidized copper pendants are my first efforts in metalcraft. Each is a hand-cut copper plate (1 ½” x 2”) etched in acid. The portions of the plate that are not etched are coated in resist and the etched portions have the resist removed before the acid bath. The pendants are hung on 18 inch spiral-braided hemp cords with pounded copper s-clasps. So far, I’ve made four pendants: 1) A Horned Lizard (AKA Horny Toad) 2) Running Ponies 3) A Frog and 4) The Venture Brothers, Hank and Dean. The Venture Brothers pendant has two sides, with Hank and Deans faces on the front and their partially formed “Clone Slugs” on the back.

Jellyfish Panel Bracelet

Here’s another jellyfish-themed craft to go along with the same motif of last week’s entry. This is actually one of the favorite things I’ve made and I put a lot of detail work into the design. This is a panel bracelet with metallic blue acrylic paint antiquing and image transfers of jellyfish in circular windows. I had the idea to do coral pieces to join the panels together and I think that’s the detail that really brings it all together. I did get a little carried away with them, though, and the bracelet ended up too big for my tiny wrist! But I loved working on this project a lot

Handrolled Jellyfish Bead Necklace

This is a necklace of handmade black polymer clay beads with jellyfish designs. Jellyfish are beautiful and naturally lend themselves to designs in this medium. The black matte-look beads with the pink jellyfish made for a very striking design. In my day-job, I’m actually a scientist, so I can appreciate using something a little more unusual than the typical floral patterns and swirls in my designs. And invertebrates are a perfect source of infinitely strange and beautiful designs.

Earrings!

One weekend I decided to go on an earring making kick and experiment with a whole bunch of different earring styles and findings. All were made with polymer clay. The first pics are round bead earrings with abstract shapes in green, purple, and white clay. Then a pair of flower earrings in purple, black, and white clay. Then a couple of gray and white swirl square pendants. The next few pics show several different experimental designs I made, all using the motif of comets in blue and orange clay…I made round, tubular, flat square, and flat flower-shaped comet earrings. Finally, I made these snail-shaped earrings in several different colors, blue-and-black, red-and-black, gray-and-black, and purple-black-and-blue. These snail earrings are my favorites (invertebrates are awesome!).

Tye Dye Star Necklace

Tye Dye Star NecklaceI wanted to make a nice hand-made gift for my future mother-in-law, so I had the idea to make a hemp necklace with flat polymer clay beads along the lines as my Rose Necklace that I love so much. For her necklace, I decided to use yellow, green, black, and white polymer clay beads, a star-shaped centerpiece, and an easy-to-use magnetic clasp. Initially, I’d had the idea to make bead designs in the shape of trees…but the cane I made came out more abstract and tie-dye looking (this was one of my early forays into making my own canes of polymer clay). The unexpectedly pleasant color combination, together with the unusual-looking abstraction of the shapes actually made for a cool, unique necklace that seemed to go really well with the star-shape motif of the centerpiece. So you could call this whole design a happy accident, but my fiancé’s mother really liked it.

Rose Necklace and Earrings

Rose Necklace and EarringsNow this is one my absolute favorite things that I’ve made so far…a hemp necklace with handmade polymer clay rose beads. Each flat bead is in the shape of a red rose, with the centerpiece a cluster of a dozen red roses. I also made a matching pair of rose earrings to go with it. I wear this all the time, and like I said, I am very proud of it.

Dethklok Glasses

I made this set of Dethklok glasses for my friend’s birthday. I had not done any glass etching in years, so for being out of practice for so long, I was really happy with the way these turned out . If you’re not familiar with Dethklok, they are the animated death metal band from the Adult Swim show Metalocalypse on Cartoon Network. We are big fans of this show. I etched five glasses with the five band members: Skwisgaar Skwigelf (Taller than a Tree), Toki Wartooth (Not a Bumblebee), William Murderface (Murderface, Murderface), Pickles the Drummer (Doodily-Doo, Ding-Dong-Doodily, Doodily-Doo), Nathan Explosion! And for the sixth glass, I decided to make the band’s manager, Charles Foster Ofdensen…it was a detail I knew my friend would really appreciate. He said this was one of his favorite birthday presents ever, and that made me happy.




























Toki

























Skwisgaar

























Pickles

























Ofdensen
























Nathan























Murderface

First Adventure in Polymer Clay

My First Adventure in Polymer Clay
Here are images from the first things I ever made with polymer clay. I discovered this stuff almost by accident…this winter, I wanted to make things with resin but found that it was too cold for it to set up properly and still have ventilation in my house…so instead I started looking into polymer clay. I have been in love ever since! Right away, I was really impressed by the medium and have now made many things using it. If you aren’t familiar, polymer clay is a blendable polymer compound of PVC chemicals suspended in plasticizer, not an actual clay. What I love about working with polymer clay is the versatility of the art…the clay comes in many colors which can be blended, like paint, into an even wider selection of colors. The clay can be used to create beautiful effects such as marbling and caneworking simply by putting different colors together in patterns…in this single medium, you can borrow techniques from everything from textile arts, sculpture, and glasswork and make beautiful things right in your home with a minimum of equipment. These two bracelets were the first things I ever made with this technique, and I was really happy with the results! Both are woven hemp bracelets with flat cylindrical polymer clay beads. The first one is done with red and tan clay. The second one I made for my sister using black and white clay.