Happy Monday- updates

I hope you all have had a wonderful week and an even better weekend.
I have been very busy.
We have our annual retreat for the San Diego Polymer Clay Guild coming up and we are all trying to get ready for it.
I have been packaging things for the store that we have there.
Making things, and getting ready for the demo I am going to do.
I am going to demo flower petal canes. The necklace above is something I made from those canes.
I love how this turned out and the canes are simple fast and fun.
I have also been playing with the new book I won from Nicole at Beadwright's blog. Of course I would get something new and exciting to play with when I am supposed to be concentrating on the guild retreat. ;-D
We packed all of our goodie bags last Friday and had a great time doing it.
This is our 13th retreat and we are having a Halloween theme, so I am very excited.
Our committee is a group of 13 wonderful women and we have a great time together too. How can it get any better than that? I enjoy myself so much I actually look forward to seeing everybody and doing the job!

I have also started making some Xmas presents, it is pretty hard for me to believe this year has flown by so fast.
I need to start now, otherwise I will not get everything done.
So this last week has been nose to the grindstone and things prioritized out of the week and others placed in front of those, late nights, and working, working, working.
I am still here and hoping you all are doing very well and life is treating you with kid gloves and ease.
Have a great week.
Smile at someone this week and share your light with them.
Change the world.

A new design- The cross

This is a new cross with lots of flowers. Each one of the flowers has been made by hand with each petal and leaf hand rolled, shaped, and applied.
The cross is bronze clay.
It s a handmade bail with 20 gauge wire.
It is hung from stain cord.

It is small and delicate in design.
Nature Cross 1

Another new plaque-Kelly's Birthday

Ok, I say I love all of these and I do, but this one is one of my very favorite's.
Happy Birthday Kelly!

I have wanted to construct a cross that I like without using a cutter.

This is what I got.

I like it!
Thank you for the pictures Kelly.

Glazed flowers

Links for the supplies will connect you to my Hubby's shop if you are looking for these products.

Thank you so much for supporting myself and my family.



Flowers and leaves cutter set (The cutters I used for this project are shown below)

Cernit Porcelain white 2 ounce package will make several flower and leaf sets
Air Brush Exciter Packs Metallic and Transparent

Small brushes

Ultimate Clay Machine or acrylic roller

Small knife (not a razor type knife)

Bic Round Stic pen

Condition and roll out the porcelain white on the thickest setting in the clay machine or 1/8" thick or a little thinner.

Cut out the 4 petals and score them with a small knife. Do not cut through them, just score them to make the lines in the petal.

Cut out the leaves and score the veins in each leaf, start with the center vein and then cut the side veins.

Cut the back flower out of the rolled out porcelain white Cernit. It is the large cutter with 5 petals shown above.

Lay down the 5 petal flower first and then place the leaves where you want them.
Press the very bottom of the stems on to the 5 petal flower.

Now add the 4 marked petals to the back flower.

Roll a 3/8" ball of the porcelain Cernit clay and flatten a little with your thumb and forefinger.

Add to the center of the petals. Poke several holes in the center.

Bake the flower in a 275 degree pre-heated oven for 30 minutes, shut off oven and let the flower cool in there.

I used these colors to paint the flower and leaves.

I let the paint dry completely and then coated with the air brush varnish.

You can also heat set this paint by placing in a pre-heated 200 degree oven for 15 minutes and let it cool completely before touching it at all.

Transparent yellow is used for the petals and the metallic yellow is used for the center.

These flower and leaves sets make nice embellishments for scrapbooking, journals, and jewelry, decorating mirrors and pots etc...etc...etc...

The Air Brush Exciter Packs are a newly listed product for my Hubby's store. 

There are 3

opaque

transparent

metallic

http://www.clayfactory.net/

Getting small

This is walking to the stand of flowers.

I like to get small and with a camera that is very easy to do.
I love to focus on the small aspects of life, the textures, and the subtle colors.
I love to use the pictures as components of my digital collages.
I was driving down the road the other day and there is a place where the volunteer honeysuckle is prolific and it is like walking or driving into a perfume shop. It is probably 30 feet long and 10 feet high.

The window was down and I got a whiff.

There is a smudge on my lens, I love this picture.

I have lived here for years and no one planted these, but my grandmother had some on the side of her house ages ago.

Smudge still there.

We get tons of things that grow from seed, from birds that sit on the wires and defecate. LOL!!!From piles of dung grow beautiful things.
I went back to the same spot with my camera and started taking photos of the area.
Smell-o-vision would be wonderful now.
But if you have ever been in a place where there is a ton of this flower it will bring back the fondness and the feel.
In smaller amounts of these flowers, I don't remember the fragrance being this strong.

I figured it out, I can see clearly now the smudge is gone!!!

This is a very close to the road. Eucalyptus seeds.

This is a flower (weed) in the hump in the middle of the road. It is about a 1/4" in diameter.

Red

These are the most beautiful flowers and add a light to my life. The red is brilliant.

Geranium

And... my gophers don't eat them (crossing fingers). They will even eat the garlic, just not as often. They LOVE roses and they have taken down a full grown apricot tree after (thank goodness) the first full crop. The apricots were some of the best I have ever eaten, which made it so hard to lose the tree.

One year they undermined the road (dug a hole under the road) and a big rain came and washed through the whole and washed out part of the road, when the rain was over there was a hole on the side of the road I could stand in. I am short, but it still came up to my thighs.

So I now spend time trying to find things that they won't eat. I also plant in chicken wire baskets that I make but that is no guarantee either. I drill holes in Cat litter buckets and plant in those, not so good for the bigger things though. But they don't go through those either. The buckets will also break down in a few years from the sun out here and have to be replaced. They have to be watered and fertilized more often also.

I get a perverse thrill after watering and seeing the mounds of dirt around the bucket and the plant still there. You know the movie with Bill Murray , Caddyshack ,that is real.

That's how I ended up with the huge crop of garlic I have. The gopher would dig a hole, and I would stuff a clove of garlic down there, LOL! We even have cloves of garlic in the little pathways. These don't get watered often.

It only worked for a bit and then he started on the tops of the garlic. He comes out of the ground for those. I believe the bulbs are still there, because the shoots will start again. You know the cartoons of the whole plant going into the ground a lit at a time, bit by bit, that is real people, I have seen it.

Green is green in my opinion and even if it is garlic, it is beautiful to me in the summer here. But those red flowers are divine.

Orange County Classes

I had the pleasure of teaching a couple of classes for the Orange County Guild last weekend. I left on Friday night and was battered by the rain all the way to orange county, almost turned around and then I thought, it will be like this all the way home, might as well keep moving forward.
My beloved Myra Katz put all of it together and in my opinion it was a smashing success.
I have had many beautiful experiences teaching but this one I will remember for many years with a smile on my face. The food was wonderful and plenty and Erika brought me gluten free ginger snaps from Trader Joes. Everything fell beautifully in to place. The room was warm, big, and the tables were great. I had someone come from the LA guild, Thank you Susan, long drives after an all day class and long drives in the morning to get there. I stayed with a charming woman, Alva LaFevre, I know Alva and I have always loved her, but it was such a pleasure to stay with her and get to know her better, many layers, talents, and interesting stories and the fact that I was treated like a queen made it all the more pleasurable. Had to take the crown off when I got home, it doesn’t fly well in my house at all.
Well enough blathering… the class was on how to make the flowers that I do. All went very well and EVERYONE made flowers, and EVERYONE’S flowers came out so well. I was so impressed, everyone had different skill levels and they were all wonderful. The hand outs were fine but I found that they inhibited the majority and I had not edited them enough, too many mistakes. I have a lot of excuses I could give, but they are just that excuses. Jill Kollmann kaliedascoped (new word) the petals and came out with some beautiful canes, YAY!!! Trina Williams made a beautiful flower with all the right colors and a magical appearance. She also suggested using wire coiled for the centers and embroidery or cotton thread and French knots for adding the flowers to clothing and hats, just brilliant!
I cried when I got this email and the picture in it. Here is my first picture from the class and it is from Dotty Mc Millan, you can see her other beautiful pieces at http://alookingglass.homestead.com/Dottykaleidoscopes.html
Dotty is a very talented woman in her own right, she has written several brilliant books, and I was completely flattered by her attendance! Thank you Dotty, for sharing this beautiful piece with me and oh… everyone else.
The next day went very well too, hmmmmmmmm two days in a row; I could become so comfortable with this. We did the shrine class this day and fun was had by all, I truly relished in the things that came out of this class and how the group took it to a whole notha level ;-D. I am really looking forward to seeing those pictures as they come. I think I want to give Sam Katz the award for the day just because she hates hearts (Sam and my husband are lucky enough to be sweetheart babies, Happy Birthday you two) and the shrine had hearts on it and she did not want to get even close to what I did and she did different colors and a different theme, a kind of steam punk rendition with light green, oh man, did I want that shrine. I thought I was being so clever by making the shrine with a heart-y theme for the upcoming holiday. And Becky Brooks did a bang up job too and she doesn’t even like to show her stuff from classes! After all I do talk about going in your own direction with your own add ins in the handout…but someone listening is always good.
“I think that making a shrine to commemorate a moment or period in your life that is monumental in so many ways, or a quality you want to emulate, helps to cement the lessons and also to let go of the energy, positive or negative to move on to the next page in this mystical experience we call life.
These are small testaments to the process I have enjoyed my self.
This one to the left is a personal shrine of mine. I have noticed that I collect things for my shrines now and my mind looks for things and meanings to incorporate in to the shrines. I love the ceremony of them and the ritual involved with the experience of collecting, developing, and manifesting this work.
I am going to share a small part of the ever changing quality and life of this craft that morphs as you go.
Also if you do these for someone as a request or order, do yourself and them a favor of not working or pondering on them with out clear, clean, and loving intent. There is power here and it is a responsibility. If this is the road that is taken, the rewards for all involved will be many.”
And boy were the rewards many. Powerful pieces all of them.

I had so much fun with this weekend. I feel like I shouldn’t tell anyone, that I have to suffer to teach and that there has to be pain to be rewarding. But I had fun and it was joyful and I am so grateful for the experience and the talented people I had the pleasure to share with over that glorious and miraculous two days. Thank you all for gracing me with your wonderful and insightful presence. I will be forever better because of knowing you all.

the picture is gone...

this is what it was...