Roses & Reviews

This year, my husband and I made a summertime return to our roots. The Columbus Ohio Polymer Clay Guild invited me to come home to Ohio and teach two days of classes on floral and geometric caning and making beautiful beads with polymer clay. Columbus is where I started as a professional artist, and it was an eye-opening treat to return after being away for decades.

Some things have stayed the same, but so much has changed! We had the enjoyable opportunity to visit with family and old friends, and to make new ones too. Some places and people are gone now, but its great to find a few favorites still standing--like Byzantium, the first store to ever buy my beads. Visit it on High Street if you are ever there! Its founder Libby Gregory gave me my first job as Artist In Residence, and taught me a great deal about business...and beads!

While my geographic roots began in the Midwest, my artistic training started there too--but not in polymer clay! I started out as a costumer and textile artist, and a beader. Everything I learned about fibers and prints, color and repetition (and stringing beads!) became very useful with my journey into the medium of polymer clay as well.

The Columbus PC Guild is a wonderful group of people, and we had a fine time in classes held at the old Armory building downtown, which has been converted into the Columbus Center for the Arts. In this great old building in the heart of town, we spent two days making millefiore canes, and making beads. Round beads, square beads, tubes, lentils and heishi; we played with shapes and with methods of decoration.

Shown here are some of the canes that I made during class. Millefiore lends itself very well to making repetitive patterns that can be made to look very much like textiles.

Geometric patterns and florals are both very prevalent in the "material world"!

Slices from the millefiore canes can be used to make beads by covering pieces of clay used as centers, or by using wooden beads as cores.

Thicker slices can be baked and then drilled to create beads as well.

The necklace shown at left is a "sampler" of some of the canes and bead shapes that were created in class. Another way to use the cane slices is to cut and bake them prior to use.

Then, earing or button findings can be glued onto the back, or slices can be drilled using a hand drill or a small power drill such as a Dremel MotoTool.

My favorite way is the easiest one--I use a small hole punch that is meant for hand sewing on leather.

This little tool goes right through baked polymer clay and makes clean holes without baking the clay.

I use it to create charms and buttons, and the holes are easy to place and punch. The best tool for this job is one made by Tool Smith (a Helby brand) and is sold in some bead stores.

The pieces can then be used with wire or jump rings and chained together, or to make earring dangles, or charms for bracelets. This works best with clays that give strong results after baking. Kato Polyclay, Premo, and Fimo Classic are the strongest clays in my test results.

The close-up below shows the nice neat holes made by the mini-leather punch. When first shown this tool by the owner of my Local Bead Store, I really didn't believe that it would do the job without cracking the clay--but it makes beautifully clean precise holes in a fraction of the time that drilling takes.

You can make use of the decorative potentials of polymer clay in so many ways, and beads are just a small fraction of the possibilities.

I like to make faces with it too, and I use them in doll making, but also as jewelry and decorative components too. Baked faces can be decorated with raw clay and then rebaked.

Below is a picture of a face that has been dressed up using some of the canes made in the Columbus class. Instead of making a necklace though, I've chosen to create a piece that can be used as a pin, or sewn to a bag as an embellishment. Shown here is the start of an eyeglass holder.

Holes were punched in the flat base on which the face is centered, and the embellishment was then sewn to the bag.

The cotton plush velour and cheesecloth were both dyed this summer during the Dyeing Days party we hold annually at my house.

That is something else that I've been doing since my Ohio Days, and its a wonderful to have foundations and continuing lines that run through my artwork from past to present. My skills have improved over time, and the things I do now are different from what I was doing (and where I was doing it!) 20 and 30 years ago.

And yet there are so many similarities; I've always had a "thing" for color, for beads, and for faces. Polymer clay has been my medium of choice along with fabric for a long, long time. Although there have been changes in the clays in that time, and in my own outlook on design, its been a part of my life for most of my adult years, and everything I learn gets used and reused in new ways.

I'm glad that we had the chance to return to our starting points, and even more happy that there's still so much to go on and do in the future!