LANAH'S WOLF

A few weeks ago I posted pictures of things that I sent to my great nieces and nephews (ages 7 to 13).  It was called Dragon Skin tutorial from Sculpey.  You have to understand that I've been doing clay for 12 years and it's something that I love. This past summer has been a bummer.  I got spasms in my back so bad I couldn't move my legs, had surgery on my shoulder on my right arm and then my left arm started doing the same thing with the pain and then had to have a cyst removed.  My interest in doing clay was slim and none.  I'm whining but I'm done now.

 I sent the key chains and pens to my nieces and nephews and got a request to make either a llama or wolf for one of their friends.  I was going to call them and say "sorry, I don't do llamas or wolves".  Then I saw a picture and the light bulb went on.  It's been a long time since I've done an image transfer on clay and not all of them turned out real well until I bought Lynda Moseley's tutorial on how to do image transfers.  I bought a digital download from Etsy that had beautiful pictures of wolves on it.  Lucky for me Lynda talked me into buying a laser printer when I bought her tutorial.  The other thing I found is that Cannon matte photo paper works really good with transfers.  So, here is my wolf.

I also found in my stash an alphabet mold that I never used so I thought I would make Lanah a letter charm for her key ring.  I believe this is a winter wolf and I really like him.

A couple years ago I printed out some pictures that I was going to transfer so I thought I would try them since I had all the clay out and was feeling better.  The first one I did was the kitten and I thought I picked up the bottle of water but NO, I picked up the bottle of rubbing alcohol so this came out a little light but I didn't want to throw it away.

All these pieces have Magic Glos on them.  I found the best thing to do with transfers is, put one coat of Magic Glos or resin on them before you sand and buff the sides and back and then put your second coat of resin on.  This will protect your image.  I'm going to try the cat one again because he reminds me of Buster.  With all this research on image transfers I also found something interesting about the use of E6000.  Don't care for the smell of that and sometimes I didn't think it bonded metal bail with polymer very well.  I was doing it wrong.  You have to put a little E6000 on the bail and a tiny bit on the pendant and let them sit and get tacky for a little while before you put the two together.  I love the winter scene and it has sparkles in it when you see it up close.  And that is as close to snow as I want to get.

I was told that it's best to use new printed sheets to do transfers but the piece on the left was printed out two years ago and it came out really bright.

I'm waiting to hear from Lynda as to where her link to the Image Transfer tutorial is and I'll put it in here.