JANIE'S JEWELS AND MY NEW FAVORITE MOKUME GANE

JANIE'S JEWELS ARE FINALLY DONE

Two weeks ago I made a black and white flower cane and radical zebra cane and combined the two to make Zebra flower cane beads.  Put some in the naughty tumbler and they came out yellow.  I worked on those little suckers for 3 days trying to get the yellow out.  Where's Mr. Clean when you need him?  I put them in bleach for 2 days, didn't work, I soaked them in Ivory soap didn't work, finally had to sand every little ugly bead.  Got tired of looking at them.  Today they are bracelets and earrings and will be going to Wisconsin to my friend Jane to give to her friends.  I can still see a little yellow but Jane is 95 and her friends are 85 so I'm letting them travel and I'll tell her it must have been the HEAT.

I had enough beads left to make myself a bracelet which is on the right.  The one on the left was made using the Cindy Lietz extruder tutorial at http://www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/.  If you don't belong to her weekly tutorials you are missing out big time.  The blog is wonderful.  People on the blog are so willing to share anything and everything which to me is what truly makes an "ARTIST".  One of the girls asked me to post pictures of my glass engraving that I do.  Polymer has taken over so much of my life I don't spend much time engraving anymore even though I have two closets full of glass.  In my previous life (before polymer clay) I taught glass engraving.  I guess I need to get back to that but I have about 200 pounds of clay and 400 boxes of beads that need to be made into something.  OH BOY.  Don't tell my husband.

ONE MORE BATCH OF SHIMMERING GOLD MOKUME GANE

I thought I would do one more batch of Barbara Mc Guire's Shimmering Gold Mokume Gane but I wanted to do a bigger batch.  WELL, little did I know that I would get 100 pieces out of what I made.  I got the main pieces, the little pieces for earrings, I used the end pieces for beads and even had enough left over to make spacer beads.  I tweaked the recipe a little, OK, a lot.  And now I have 80 pieces to sand and buff.  I used Magic-Glos on the bigger pieces and the ovals I sanded and buffed and the beads I put in the tumbler for two days.  I LOVE THEM.  But I don't want to BUFF NO MORE.

These are the ones with Magic-Glos.

These are the beads made with end and leftover pieces that were in the tumbler and then hand buffed.

These pieces were hand sanded and buffed.  The piece on the left with the Chinese lady frustrated me to no end.  I used a Lisa Pavelka water slide on that one before it was baked.  I coated the water slide with Fimo liquid clay.  I usually use Kato but in her DVD she uses Fimo.  I apparently missed a teeny tiny spot and when I sanded it, it turned white.  I'm going to try putting some permanent marker on it and then Magic-Glos and see what happens.

I'm still not happy with the camera.  It has a mind of it's own when it comes to changing background colors.  I'm sure it's operator error.  Might be time to get the book out again.