A Pleasant Time

I've been enjoying a bit of company lately while youngest son, Jordan (who looms over me alarmingly!) has been spending the week here with us. Saving some money and eating free food! I'm more than happy to have him. Hubbie's quite often pre-occupied with work or training and there's no-one else to talk to but the dogs and the cats. So I have been enjoying it greatly!

He even was good enough to join me working with polymer clay!

His water lily was so nice too but he discovered that if you roll the clay too thin it really does compromise the stability of the whole thing and sadly the middle petals fell apart. But I have pictures to prove it was beautiful!

I've also finally discovered a way to use the clay that I like. The pendants and the large disc have given me renewed hope that I might actually like using polymer clay. I've finally used up my pendant trays so now I'm wondering how to proceed...ordering more is NOT an option. 

I'm still making progress with the combo yarn beanies and the Monty Python cross stitch. 

I've finished up the last beanie using the blue combo yarn...

...And I finished the third line of characters on the cross stitch. Only one more line to go!

Still busy, still compulsively crafting!

I find it sometimes really discouraging to think of how many completed projects I have stored up, jewellery, tatting, knitting, various crafts that I have no use for. I will never wear all the things I make. If I were a bit more like everyone else I might. My mothers has hundreds of earrings and wears many of them because she likes social occasions and is both gregarious, cheerful and outgoing. 

I am not. I'm just an overly anxious introvert!

Social occasions fill me with an underlying wave of panic and anxiety that I can usually disguise adequately enough when I have to but invariably leave me washed out and exhausted afterwards. It's lovely when people compliment me about the things I make, but sometimes I question what point there is in me constantly churning out various crafts when all it does is cost me money. I feel a bit like a crazy crafting ant. Constantly creating things I have absolutely no aptitude to convert into anything useful. 

Obviously I'm still a bit blue at the moment. On Friday I'll be driving Jordan back to Perth. 

I think I'll even miss the continuous talk about movies and famous Directors...

Ah well.

See you all later

Dx

I found another craft to tinker with!

Polymer clay!

I bought some clay in Albany a while back. But it was all white and I wanted to try colours. I have art pastels and used those to add colour to the white polymer clay. I wanted to make something small but the clay got so hot in my hands it was difficult to work with. I found out later that Fimo is much better for detailed work but Sculpey is a bit softer and not so good for smaller details. Anyway, I made a cute little gnome house to try it out.

It's certainly cute but I still don't have a handle on dealing with the clay before it gets impossibly tacky. So, for my birthday I bought a lot more clay (still Sculpey. There didn't seem much point trying anything else when I already had Sculpey) and some more tools. But even with the colours I had I had trouble wrapping my head around what I wanted to make and what I could actually manage.

I tried cutting out medallions and impressing tatted motifs on to them. Of course, totally forgot to put a hole at the top to hang them from. I tried pushing coloured clay into the tatted impression but that didn't workout as well as I had hoped. I tried making a pendant with lots of flowers on it but I used a phillips head screwdriver to mark the tops and actually the pendant looks like a horde of molar teeth covered in murky paint. So as you see I haven't really been very satisfied with my experiments. I used ink and watercolour paint to colour in the impressions. Not bad but not brilliant either. 

The only pendant that I liked I ruined when I had to fix the back because it cracked. I tried to protect the clear coating I had put on the design when I recooked the new back but...it didn't work. It went kind of bubbly and cloudy. Not happy...

But, nothing daunted, I tried some more. I had a lovely mould with heaps of faces so I thought I could play with that...

I like this better than anything I've done so far although it still frustrates me that the flowers became difficult to handle as my hands heated up the teeny pieces of clay. And as for trying to get them to attach to the face...Arghhh! As you can see with the face, my big, hot, clunky hands have battered it around a bit, flattening the detail.

I still have hope! I decided to try something different. I tried using stamps dusted with chalk to make more medallions. I'd have used ink pads if I'd had any that were any good but they had all dried out from lack of use. They're nice enough but not really very good.

And with the new cutters I have I added leaves to the flowers on another face. I tried adding colour to the lips but I don't think it worked very well. Sigh.

 I'm enjoying playing but I get so frustrated when my expectations fall dismally short. But I will not be defeated! I've ordered some more colours and maybe I'll manage to get a pasta machine so I can condition the clay that way instead of in my hot little hands! But there's a huge potential here for a lot of cute little creations...if I can just come to grips with the medium!

Polymer Clay! Great stuff!

See you all later!

Dx