What’s Happening in the Studio

Earrings

January 19, 2011 By Cat Leave a Comment

I’ve been making earrings lately.

The first kind I want to show are sterling silver Memorial Bead post earrings I made from sympathy flowers. The ball posts on the left are 7mm in diameter and are made from pink roses. The dangle earrings on the right have 7mm posts with a 30mm long teardrop, and made from white roses. I love wearing them both, but the dangle ones on the right are my favorite. They go with anything, whether I’m dressed up or in jeans. These prototypes worked really well, so I’m going to be adding an earring section to Memorial-Beads.com.

The second kind of earrings I made are something that started out as just looking for a project to make at my guild’s clay day. We were doing image transfers, and so I thought I’d make my daughter some earrings she can wear at work. I liked how they came out so well, that I made myself some earrings, too. The black and silver ones are for my daughter; the green ones and copper ones are for me. I’ve got the green ones on right now.

The triangles are 20mm long and 2mm thick, and curved. I used a variety of things for the curves… but my favorite was the back of Pam’s metal Oneida measuring spoons! Thanks, Pam, for your big bag of cutters where I found those spoons. They make awesomely curved earrings.

Filed Under: What's Happening in the Studio Tagged With: earrings, memorial beads, retro

Poor Man’s Bead Drying Rack

August 19, 2010 By Cat 4 Comments

I wanted to show a picture of a bunch of Memorial Beads on my improvised drying rack. Now I want to say at the outset that I usually use a wonderful bead drying rack from my friends at Poly-Tools.com; but my pins have gotten clumped up with dried sealant, gotten lost, gotten dropped in the carpet and bent by being stepped on (ouch!!). So until I get myself over to their website and order another set of pins, this is what I’m using.

I want to give credit to my friend, Rochelle Garver, for the idea of using an upright column to dry the large-hole, Pandora-style beads. (Rochelle, you’re more brilliant than you know). She brought me this lovely Styrofoam column, pressed into a 4-inch Terracotta pot for stability. And it stayed that way for almost a year, until I dropped the silly thing on the concrete floor of my studio and broke the pot. Darn. I’ll have to get another one.

However, even without the little pot to steady the rack, this works very well and is less than $5.00 to make, including the pot. The square on top of the column was put there so I could get it all into one photo, but it isn’t connected to the column. It’s a square of florists’ Styrofoam, which I cut from a longer rectangle. I’ve used both the rectangle and smaller squares, and I find it’s more convenient to use the squares because I can put masking tape across the side of the square, and put the customer’s name on the tape with a Sharpie. That way, I’m able to dry a dozen different customers’ beads at the same time, and not get mixed up as to whose beads are whose.

I can do the same thing with the column, just putting the tape at the base and placing it vertically next to the row of toothpicks. Now it just so happens that ALL of these beads are for the same large order, so I didn’t need to mark these racks with a name.

If your beads have smaller holes than will fit in a toothpick, you could always substitute sewing needles or headless sewing pins into the foam, instead of toothpicks. Or, you could order a set of pins from Poly-Tools, which is very inexpensive. But they will get gunked up with sealant, so you would want to have some 400-grit sandpaper around, to sand the sealant off of the needles. Once you do that, though, they will be more prone to rust. So you might want to coat the needles (or PT pins) with clear nail polish before using them again, so that the rust doesn’t get onto your beads. After you sand the pins the next time, just re-coat them with clear nail polish.

Filed Under: General Information, memorial beads, What's Happening in the Studio

New Fimo Nail Art Backgroundless Designs

August 17, 2010 By Cat Leave a Comment

Hello everyone, I’m back from Mexico! It was a great trip, and if you’d like to read about it, you can go to my blog at wordpress: fimofanatic.wordpress.com.

Can you believe it’s already back-to-school time? The summer has gone by so fast. My youngest son graduated from high school in the spring, so it feels wierd not to be getting school supplies like everyone else. Instead of spending my time doing school shopping, I’ve been making more backgroundless fimo nail art. I’d made these canes for a wholesale customer, back in July, but I hadn’t had time to show them online until now. The customer had requested all of my roses and rosebuds in the backgroundless technique, and since I made a lot more cane than she needed, I’ve listed those new designs in my online shop.

The technique of making the fimo nail art without the translucent background hasn’t been around very long. Traditionally, a translucent (or colored clay) was packed around the design when constructing the cane, so that the design didn’t “squish” out of proportion when it was squeezed to reduce it. But recently the polymer clay community has been thrilled to learn of a different technique for reducing a cane, which doesn’t require the use of that background clay. The advantage for nail art is that the designs can be placed closer together without overlapping — a definite bonus when applying nail art to a pinkie nail!

A secondary bonus is for people who aren’t able to slice their fimo canes very thin: when thicker slices of traditional fimo nail art are applied to a nail, the translucent clay creates a “halo effect”, where a wispy outline of the translucent can be seen surrounding the design. But with backgroundless canes, no matter how thick your cane slices are, no halo! I’ve personally been using my backgroundless fimo designs on my nails for the last couple of months, and I must say that I like it a lot better than the traditional ones. So in the future, all of my baked fimo nail art designs will be transitioning to the backgroundless technique.

I’d love to get some of these designs into your hands, even if you don’t use fimo nail art. These cane slices are great for using on scrapbooking pages, because polymer clay is acid-free. They can also be embedded in polyester resin for delightful resin jewelry, which is becoming all the rage once again. I’ve used slices of fimo nail art to create adorable stud earrings. They are encased in resin, which has a magnifying effect on the design.

As you can see with this earring stud set and the pendant in progress next to it, these fimo nail art slices are versatile enough to be used in conjunction with resin to create some really lovely jewelry. The bumblebee cane was created by my friend Beth Ackley, of Destined2Clay.com!