READY FOR MARDI GRAS

At the July polymer clay guild meeting, Lupe Meter did a wonderful demo on how she makes masks out of polymer clay.  She is very meticulous and precise with the way she places pieces on her mask.  Me, not so much.

This is one of Lupe's masks and her demo on how she makes them round and beautiful.

Yesterday Evelyn and Rose came over and Evelyn wanted to make a mask so I decided I would too.  While Evelyn was cutting out fancy pieces and putting little things on her mask, I found a couple little triangle cutters and started cutting out pieces of a sheet of Mokume Gane that I had done.  I didn't figure to finish this thing, I'm not a mask person.  I think they are beautiful but I lost interest about 1/4 of the way through.  Anyway, I made the mask, put some little molds on it, didn't like the colors so I put Pearlex Powder on it.  Baked it, didn't like it so I sanded some of the powder off.  Didn't like it so I antiqued it.  It started looking better but I knew it needed some foofoo (spelling) stuff and I don't do a lot of phew phew (spelling).  

Here's my finished piece I wired feathers to it (there are little feathers flying all over my studio now).  Put a large gold jump ring on the side and put the lace ribbons in.  Added wire bail and a beaded hanger.  You can click on the picture to see it larger.  I showed it to my husband and he said "What's that for, is that suppose to be a work of art?"  I think I'll hang it in his office.  grrrrrrrrrrrrr

GREEN MAN

My friend Penni Jo Couch from http://www.bestflexiblemolds.com/ sent me a Green Man mold so I made a little guy and put silver and green powders on him and used watch stems for the eyes.  I put a plastic neck cord on him.

I'm going to send him to my 6 year old nephew who likes monsters and tell him that Green Man is a good monster.  Do you think he'll believe me?


TUMBLER TEST

I don't hand sand small beads and I do make a lot of them for my golf stroke counters.  I was having a problem with my tumbler.  If a bead had any white clay in it, it would come out of the tumber yellow.  I know quite a few people were having that problem.  I think the rubber from the tumbler bucket starts breaking down after a while.  Yesterday I cut a piece of 600 grit sand paper a little bigger around than the bottom of the tumbler and put it in and placed a long piece of the same sand paper around the inside.  I put my river rocks back in and ran the beads for 7 hours.

This worked really great.

 These beads have translucent and white clay in them.  The yellow you see was actually yellow clay but the translucent stayed clean and so did the white.  I think the extra sand paper also helped to make them buff faster.  I heard some people cut up cottage cheese cartons and put them in their tumblers.  We don't do cottage cheese so I'm glad the sand paper worked.