Bicoastal creation.

So we are just a few hours from the Gulf of California and the main inspiration for this comes from the Florida side of the continent. 

I have made loads of Beachy things, mostly stones, snaills, seahorses and fish, but the inspiration for this neck piece was directly from the west coast of Florida. We often spent Christmas vacations there while I was teaching full time and I absolutely loved beach combing.

The snail, starfish and white thing are simple hand formed polymer creations, but the scallop shell and faux coral have closer ties to the beach.  I made the scallop using a modified Skinner blend sheet which I coaxed along an actual scallop shell I collected many years ago. After I made the impression of the ridges, I used the inner part of the real scallop shell to make a backing.  For the faux coral, I made a molded impression of an actual conglomerate of whah might be coral ... Not sure... but it was plenty interesting with lots of texture.  I whipped up a small batch of "impromptu" coral colors and put it in the mold. Fortunately the impression took pretty well, and where it wasn't good, (there may have been some undercuts), I used a needle tool and pulled out some pipe work. 

I tempoarily have it strung on heavier waxed cotton cord.  Not certain how I am going to finish it.   Maybe I'll sleep on it tonight and have a few pipe dreams of how it is all going to come together. 

For the birds, continued

So yesterday was my first post in ages, and here I am today, with a bit of a follow up.  

This is what I am doing with the birdhouse cane.  The completed bookmark just to the left of center is for the neighbour who is the birdhouse collector. The others with flowers will be also become bookmarks, while the little one at the top left is a charm that I will use to embellish something. 

In my last post, I mentioned that that I had seen birdhouses on Cindy Leitz' polymer clay tutorials.  If memory serves me correctly, I believe that was also where she demonstrated the bookmark hook similar to what I have here. To see the way Cindy explains her method, here is the link: 

www.beadsandbeading.com/blog/?p=13064

Speaking of birds, when I went out with Daisy  this morning, We were greeted with the sweetest of bird songs. I guess that means  spring can't be far away in some places!

It's for the birds

Posting to this blog has been very lax lately...not that I haven't meant to write.  It's just that old nemesis  of time.

Yesterday was a fun filled day where we hosted a pot luck on the patio and then followed that with a little game night. It was enjoyable with Daisy providing half time entertainment with her spin the bottle antics.   Even though she has a dozen "toys", playing with an empty water bottle was just as engaging for her. 

Earlier in the day, I spent a couple hours doing some clay work.  Inspired by our neighbour's bird house collection, I thought I'd give making little bird houses a shot. I have made some three dimensional sculpted birdhouse before, thanks to "PCT" Cindy Leitz 's instructions on her weekly site.  For this effort, I thought I'd try a cane.

My cane is pretty simple and its shape evokes a bit of a hobbit house. I pre-baked some tiny perches and inserted them with a bit of t.l.s. close to the base of the abode.  In the cane slice, I inserted an eye pin, and will probably make this baked sample into a bookmark charm. 

The stripes were originally intended to represent planks of weathered wood, but was afraid the weathering details might get lost in the eventual reduced cane slices. So, they ended up like jailbird stripes. Maybe I'll assign each one a number!