A Few More Hearts
Someone wrote me after my posting a few days ago and comment that my hearts weren’t in very Valentiney colors. Fine. Here you go.
Long and Skinny
I’ve written in the past about what I affectionately call Scrapbooks. If you missed that posting in the past, Scrapbooks are books that I bind from the scrap material that is left over from other projects and generally, they tend to be on the small side. A few days ago, I found a long, skinny piece of red oak that was about 3″ X 24″. My first impulse was to cut it up into several pieces and make three of four scrapbooks, but then I stopped and thought about making a book that was long and skinny instead.
I finished the covers with several coats of milk paint in several different colors, and then create a distressed finish by sanding through the paint. After I finished the covers, I felt that they needed something more, so I made a band of polymer clay faces to attach to the cover to give it a more dimensional feel. Eight signatures of 200gm Artistico Fabriano watercolor paper were sewn to a leather spine with 4-ply Irish Linen thread which was then sewn to the covers. Here are some images of the finished journal, you can click on the images to view them in more detail.
Long and Skinny, Front View
Long and Skinny, Sewing Detail
Long and Skinny, Back View
What Happens to Scrap Clay?
If you’ve read this blog, you know I work in a variety of mediums; wood, metal, paper and polymer clay to name a few. Recently, I’ve been fooling around with the Mokume-gane technique again. It’s a great technique and you can achieve amazing results with it but one area in which it falls short, at least for me is in creating large flat sheets like book covers. At any rate, I was tinkering with it when a friend stopped by to drop off some holiday cookies and I had the block and some shavings out on my work surface. If you haven’t tried this before, basically you layer up a block of different colors, deform the layers to provide interesting patterns and then shave thin slices off the surface of the block. This particular friend is a little OCD and is particularly fond of orderly stacks of things and when they saw the thin shavings I’d taken off the block and other partial blocks of clay scattered around asked, “what happens to all the scraps?”
Most people who work with polymer clay have scrap bins and every bit eventually gets used. Sometimes similar colors just get mixed together for a project or it may all just get mixed into some muddy grey or brown chunk of clay that ends up as a base or unseen part of a project. This time, I just decided to use the scraps on the spot and see if I could preserve the variance in the colors I had used in the mokume-gane block. I think an email from one of the big box craft stores triggered this; frankly I didn’t read the thing but I swear it had something about Valentine’s Day in the subject. A few minutes later, I had shaped the scraps into a pile of hearts. In the photo below, you can see a few of them, the three on the left are raw clay and the three on the right are already baked. The only difference you may notice is that the colors are a little deeper in the ones that have been baked.
Once baked, I wet sanded then starting at 400 grit and ending at 1200 grit. Your average craft store or Home Depot type sandpaper isn’t meant to be used for wet sanding so pay a visit to your local auto paint store, they’ll have the stuff in stock ranging from 400 grit to 2000 grit. Once the wet sanding was complete, I took the outside to my buffing wheel and buffed them out to a high gloss. Here are a couple of shots of the finished ones. I should probably mention at this point that Sculpey may not work for this; you can do the mokume-gane technique using Sculpey, but it won’t buff to a high glass like Premo or Fimo will.
I’m pretty happy with the way the colors play together and the big surprise was they way the plain old Super Sculpey worked out. That’s pretty much it. The only thing left to do is drill into the top of each heart and add a sterling eye pin so it can be strung as a necklace or earring. Cheers.
Peerless Palette
A few months ago I scored several of the small Peerless Bonus Packs at a going out of business sale. The small bonus pack has forty colors on 2″ X 2″ sheets. Normally, they’re in the $22.00 to $26.00 range but the because I’d been a frequent customer the owner ended up charging me $10.00 each. They’ve been sitting on my desk for a while and I’d been considering making a small coptic bound book out of one of them but after tinkering around I decided against it. I would have had to interleave each color with an acetate sheet and the whole affair would have ended up being too bulky.
Instead of a book, I ended up opting for Jane Davenport’s solution. I’ve seen various riffs on this theme and while I wanted to make one, I’m fairly lazy and I felt like measuring everything out would be a drag. I went the digital route and used Adobe Illustrator’s distribute function to line everything up. Once the template was done, I cut a piece of 300 gsm Fabriano Artistico down to letter size and ran it through my laser printer. The pallet is made from both the Peerless Bonus pack and the Peerless Complete Edition and I just cut the sheets up with a pair of scissors and applied them to the palette with some Tombow permeant adhesive. The only thing not pictured, is a piece of acetate that prevents the colors from rubbing together.
Want to make one of your own? Download the template by clicking on the link below:
Three of Three
I’ve been traveling for my Clark Kent job so I hadn’t had time to complete the third in a series of three books I had been working on until today. I used wood to create the covers for the first two in this series but on this one, I chose polymer clay simply because cutting up tiny pieces of wood on a table saw presents some safety issues. The coverall size of this book is small, it’s 1 1/2″ X 2″. Not too much too say about it you can just look at the photos, the front has a contrasting stripe of black polymer clay and the back has some copper studs.
