Buckles not many Beaux

I am into another busy week, so this is my only chance to blawg today. It's not that nice out so gardening activities are put on hold once again. Will those flowers EVER get planted?

So that gave me a chance to do some updating on my claying "jobs" that just seem to spring from wherever! Yesterday I made a bunch of molds so kids at an art experiential day can make charms. They were fun to make...easy too. The charms have all sorts of backgrounds and hopefully there will be enough variety. Some of them are from my own carvings, a few are from scrounged toys and others are from items I found in my "junk" box that I've had for years. One I really like is a little scottie "Westie" charm...it is so cute and petite. Of course there are some fish from my own rubber stamps I had made a few years ago, and then there are some "free motion" sculptures that I made out of leftover polymer clay. I hope the kids will have fun making the charms and fashion them into pendants or whatever. I'll encourage them to write little stories about them to give the charms a special meaning.

Today I got caught up on an order that I've had sitting for about a month. My batik friend Karen, (it seems that I know a lot of Karens)...had asked me to make more buckles for the guys and dolls she makes out of her gorgeous batik'd fabric. Finally I figured out a quickie way to make them. When I had made them previously, I spent a lot of time twisting wire for the buckle frame and then covered it in clay. It was not easy. I decided that since these are just decorative, and don't have to cinch in any waists, that they could just be made from clay without an armature. After doing the prototype, they were a snap to do.

The blue-green ones in the photo are from the sets I just finished...there are other colours too. Some of them have a few cane slices imbedded in the surface clay, some are textured, and others have foil below translucent, as these do. I hope she doesn't mind that they aren't precisely the same size. They are a little on the funky folky side. They're going to be on her musician dolls that she's making for the Winnipeg folk Festival in July. If the weather doesn't warm up, they'll be needing more than overalls with buckles...I wonder if she makes galoshes. Oooh, I don't want to think about making clasps for those things. That would really take some wheel re-inventing!