Welcome to Sarajane’s Polyclay Gallery!
Here you will find all sorts of artistic eye candy, information, projects and tutorials about polymer clay, ceramics, metal, graphic arts, textiles and many other media. This is the blog page with all the news, and there are many pages listed in the drop down menu above. Please do explore!
Crowning Glories
Doesn’t everybody need at least one crown? I think I’d like a whole shelf of them, so as to choose what I’d like to be for the day. Princess, Faery, Empress, Beauty Queen? Ruler of the Quantiversal Realms, perhaps… There is an old quote about “Every man, a King in his own Castle”. So go for it!
I like making crowns and tiaras with a wire base, then adding beads, flowers, ribbons…more beads…Sometimes I use the laser cutter to easily and quickly cut watercolor paper into flowers and leaves. Sometimes I ct them from metal and file each one before adding it to a crown. Of course, these take a while longer to create!
Join me for a crown making class at Tinkermill in Longmont CO March 29, 11am-3pm
Color on Wood
The same cold water, fiber reactive dyes from Dharma Trading Co. that I have long used for dyeing textiles also dyes wood. Above you can see some 1/8 in. maple slices. I love the way the color accentuates the grain. At right are 1/8″ birch plywood samples. The tiles shown in the ring were cut and decorated before dyeing.
We’ve been too busy the last few years to do our Annual Dyeing Days, but this year we just might. We’ll see how the weather and circumstances develop! Till then, it was lovely to get a good strong dose of color. This test batch of wood was a much smaller event, held indoors at TinkerMill with just three of us, some wood samples, and half a dozen small buckets. Next up comes experiments with topical applications of color as well as immersion, and adding sealers like modge podge, polyurethane and epoxy resin. Inlays are like ahead as well!
The pendants shown here are a small part of my new line of wooden components, available just in time for Spring and Summer! I’m busy testing different wood and putting together 24 designs that work well with this technique, and I’m ready to do some production time next week. Look for these to be available in my etsy shop and through Facebook groups before the end of the month.
Photo Fixes
I have been taking lots of pictures lately to use in selling through my etsy store, my pages and through Facebook user groups like Handmade Component Bazaar. I use my Ott lights for controlled full spectrum lighting, and Adobe Photoshop allows me to easily tweak images to look better.
With good lighting, most of the time I just need to crop and do a Levels adjustment to get pics to look much better. Sometimes a little more is needed…A while back I put up a page on my old website on editing photos, and I have just resurrected it here. Thanks again to Ann Kruglak for allowing me to use the images of her wonderful polymer clay masks for this!
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