Moon swallow

I had a little fun with a pressed-glass bead. The picasso effect wasn't very strong on this bead so the bird silhouette wasn't very visible so I thought "why not fill it with Pebeo Fantasy paints?" So I did. Using blue Fantasy Moon paint to be precise. At first I wanted to mix colours, but it didn't take much paint to fill up the depressed motif so I stuck with just one colour.

Dark metallic bronze bead

Just wanted to add a pic of a wooden bead my sis painted in Magic Metallics dark bronze paint.

She bought the paint for the same reason I bought their steel paint: to paint objects we wanted to add a patina to. These paints contain real metal particles and when treated with the appropriate patina solution, they patinate. Bronze and copper paint turn a beautiful verdigris while the steel paint rust -- like in this example I''ve shown before.

But I must say this paint is very pretty as it is: a matte black with a discrete copper shimmer. In a way it reminds me of my etched goldstone.

Ick -- first try at polymer clay

First, I should add that these aren't new. The pictures are new, though, and I don't think I've shown my polyclay beads and pendants to anyone before. Why that is, is pretty obvious: I do have a hate-love relationship with all sorts of clay, which I've written about before, and this was my first time working with polymer clay. The only clays I've worked with before have been saltdough and modelling clay as a kid and then dabbling with ceramic clay in art class in school as pre-teen and teenager a couple of times.


 I'm no natural clayer. More a painter than a sculptor when it comes to creating. I like to work on a canvas, be it painting on an actual canvas, embroidering on cloth or weaving beads on a thread. While it most certainly can be dimensional, not least my beadweaving, it's not about moulding a material or chiselling away bits and pieces of it. I draw with threads and beads or piece beads together like it was Lego, I shape but I don't mould and manipulate like you do with clay. But sometimes I'm inspired to work with it nonetheless. It has its uses and there are many interesting techniques to try.

The beads above are made after instructions by Irene Semanchuk-Dean in the book Making Beautiful Beads. She calls the Inside-out beads if I'm not mistaken, which explains pretty well how they're made. It's a rather fun and very simple technique, perfect for clay newbies and kids. Like children's inkblot paintings, but in 3D.

As you can see, I haven't mastered the technique for smoothing out the edges and seams where the different clay pieces meet. One thing I did learn, on the other hand, is not to use white clay unless you're 100 % sure the work surface is clean. If there is just one pin-size speck of darker clay or one tiny glitter particle it will end up on the white clay... D'oh!

 I also used ultrafine glitters, metallic powder, liquid Fimo and copper foil on some of the pieces. You can only see the foil and silver powder here as I wasn't pleased with the other pieces. Too fugly to show...

The cat pendant and silver charm have stamped images. There was probably a good reason for adding the pawprint to the kitty image, but I wish I hadn't. Other than that, I'm pleased with the colour I mixed for it (using chocolate brown, white and a smidge of yellow, I think) and the chocolate brown frame. I also like the finish I got using Fimo silver powder.

The copper crackle cabochon is one of the pieces I was pleased with. Sure, it's a bit uneven, but I really like crackle effects -- and this one was so easy to do. Normally, instructions call for a pasta machine, but I just used an acrylic roller.

I will add another, bigger pic of the cab later. That photo shows off the copper foil better, but I couldn't add it now as the photo is on another computer. *photo added*

So there you have it, my first venture into the world of polyclay. I haven't touched it since -- and that was perhaps two year ago I made those. Clay probably isn't my thing. And now other clays have become more interesting in my eyes. Clays that don't require oven baking and clays that also work as adhesives. So why even bring all this up then? Well, I guess it's because of this. Pehaps I should give pc another chance? (Though I confess that a resin clay challenge or hop would've been much more exciting and inspiring for me personally.)

To oil or not to oil

I've vinegar etched a few more MOP beads this weekend and today I wanted to see what would happen if I oiled one of them. Sometimes the etched matte surface looks great, other times the contrast between motif and etched background feels too harsh. Remembering that I'd read about treating seashells with mineral oil to bring out colours and add a subtle shine, I dabbed a few drops on one of the less successful beads and rubbed it into the shell.

The image is slightly less visible than it was before being oiled, but I think it turned out nicely.
This image wasn't the best to begin with, I should add. (I forgot to take a "before" picture so all you can compare with is the unoiled bead at the top of the post, sorry.) This bead is freshly oiled. I'm not sure how much it will change once the oil has really soaked in and dried. If it does change significally, I'll update this post and let you know.
 
I'll probably be a good method for some of my etchings, especially when the matte background feels too "dry" or white. But other will probably not need any oil. Not for aesthetic purposes at least. Another option I haven't tried is to lacquer the shell. Many MOP pendants and beads I've seen lately have been lacquered, which gives them more of a shine, but I'm not sure how a lacquer or sealant will affect the etched and unetched areas.

"Lampwork" beads

I was looking though my bead and jewellery photo file on the computer as I need to erase old photos to have room for the new when I found this pic, which I've never shown ayone before.

Not very pretty perhaps, but can you see what it is? It's coloured glue gun glue that I played around with one day when I was bored. Sort of making my own hot glue lampwork beads. I did one or two using the actual glue gun, but then I switched to just melting the glue sticks over a candle. The blue beads in the back have patterns in red. Let me tell you -- it's not easy making little stars/flowers on a glue bead using stringy hot glue!

Is hot glue a good bead making material? Not really. The beads feel almost like rubber beads, but with a somewhat sticky surface even after it's been drying for days. It's also difficult to control the glue once it starts melting. It's stringy and messy. Though, I suspect it's not easy to work with glass rods either as a newbie... So far from ideal, but useful enough to kill a slow afternoon.

And why on earth did I get the idea to do this in the first place? I suspect it was a combination of having watch lampwork tutorials -- using glass -- on YouTube and looking at African plastic bead bracelets. The kind of beads that are made by hand using recycled plastic that's heated over a flame or other heat source and wound around a mandrel to form it. Hot glue is sort of a plastic. (But if I'm going to make any plastic lampwork beads in the future, I'll definitely use recycled plastic and not soft, sticky glue.)

In memoriam

This is a really crummy photo of two beads I altered in memory of two of our young cats that died in 2006. Vitis, the whiter cat, was killed in a hit-and-run and Svisston, the blacker one, died of disease a few days later. Their sister is still alive. Randa almost suffered the same faith as Vitis a couple of years later, but after being nowhere to be found, she came home on the fourth day after the accident and today she has fully recovered. (You can read the whole story about her accident here.)

I wanted to create something special to remember them by. In this case I ended up takin two 10 mm peruvian ceramic beads in the shape of cats, one white and one black, which I then painted with acrylics. Using a photo as reference, I managed to make the generic cat beads turn into indviduals very much alike their models.

Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do them justice: the close-up magnifies the details of the brushstrokes and the light and shadows are too harsh. Still, I wanted to show this photo as an example of how a beader can create keepsakes to remember beloved pets that has passed on. These beads still hang, together with the heart-shaped photo locket, above my bed.

Rose petal beads and tea dyed silk

Our water has frozon today so I feel it fitting to dedicate this day to daydream about last summer. One thing I managed to take the time to do for the first time last summer was rose petal beads.

There are many different recipes for rose petal beads online -- you can find several listed by me here -- and I read as many as I could find before giving it a try. I have mostly followed a version written by Cathy Covington, who puree the petals using a blender instead of using the old Victorian technique of boiling/simmering them for hours. Unfortunatly, her recipe is no longer to be found online.

I picked petals from several different rosebushes, some pink and others red. Luckily dad has mostly chosen to plant old-fashioned roses with wonderful scents, not the modern one that look good and blossom for a long time, but lack that real rose scent. To make them more special, I also added another sweet-smelling flower: Sweet mock orange or English dogwood ( Philadelphus coronarius L.). We have a couple of bushes in our gardens and they smell lovely. No summer is complete without the scent of doftschersmin in the evening.

It's impossible to tell the size of the dried beads from photos only. I haven't measured them, but would guess that they are 14 mm i diametre at the most. The colours of the dried beads are a melee of red and brown, reminding of silk ribbon I own. Many doesn't look divine, but that is how they smell.

They feel lightweight and fragile and I think one way I might use them is for decorative scented boquets/bags/pomanders for the closet. Or perhaps they will be part of a pendant or earrings.



But how, then, are rose petal beads related to tea dyed silk cords? Other than I dyed them the day after I made the rose beads. Actually it didn't start out as a project related to my venture into bead making. It just ended up that way. But I will tell you the story from the start.

I visited my local Panduro store, a craft shop chain, once when they had a sale and I bought two dozen white silk cords for a fraction of the normal cost. They spent a long time in storage until I finally decided I had to dye them, even if it meant I would have less cords left -- and that tea dyeing would be both fun and cheap. Barely anyone in our family drink tea so teas we are given or buy to serve tea-drinking relatives just sit in the cupboard most of the time.

So I did my usual round of research online. And I also began to wonder what the result would be if using green tea. Would the silk turn green? I'd love that! Found green fabric online which was supposedly dyed with green tea so it seemed plausible even if other websites warned of unpredicatable results.

What I did learn from my research was this:

• Salt or vinegar/ättika can be used to stabilize the colour. One website says to use 2 parts vinegar, 1 part water, and 1 spoon of salt. Soak for 15 min, dry and press. The tannins act as mordant.
• The dye can also be heat set.
  
• Colour can fade in the sun.
• Dye can be removed with bleach and too much washing using modern detergents.
• Work on all natural fibres.
• Use at least 2 bags of tea per cup. Rinse in cold water.
• Coffee dye will leave a smell longer than tea does. (So not for me.)
• Some say the tannins will deteriorate the fibres over time.
• Best for small projects.
• Green tea works, but many different variables will affect the outcome colourwise.

Knowing that I began, using different teas and letting the cords soak for different amount of times. My green tea did give the cords a bit of a greenish yellow tinge, but not as much as I hoped for. Below, in my crummy photo, you can see the different shades I ended up with -- upper-most cords are undyed. Green tea to the right and fruit-flavoured black tea to the left. In the middle a cord dipped in both.


Don't worry -- I haven't forgotten the rose connection. Well, after all my tea dyeing I couldn't give up thinking about dyeing with plants and natural dyes, something that had interested me as a kid. Actually, at one point as kids we did make "ink" out of flowers, mostly evening primrose or St John's wort, (i.e. boiling them with vinegar and reduce) and also "painted" with petals on paper. I can still feel the special vinegar smell from those inks. But we never really did try dyeing fabric. I guess mom thought that would mean too much work and special ingredients.

Well, as I mentioned above, part of making the rose beads included mixing the petals, which resulted not only in a puree but also a lot of rose juice. That juice, which I squeezed out of the puree to make firm beads, was saved. Don't ask me why. It had a pleasant smell so I guess I didn't just want to pour it out. So, one thing I had discovered about rose juice -- let us call it that -- was that it could stain clothes, paper and skin. Because that it did when I made the beads. I know somethings stain when you don't want it to, but refuse to be used as a dye on purpose. Still I wanted to give it a try. I added a splash of vinegar and salt (see above) and dipped the cords.

As you can see in the first photo of the silk cords, I did manage to give them a nice rosy colour. The flat cord was "heat set" using an iron. The cord in the upper part of the photo is both rose dyed and tea dyed. I liked that result. Unfortunatly I have no idea if my amateurish dyeing is good enough to make rose dye that won't fade in sunlight or over time... [UPDATE: the rose dye was unfortunately not permanent even without sunlight bleaching it. No difference between heat setting it or not.]

~*~

Footnote: The first thing I wanted to tea dye was actually not silk cords, but FW pearls. Inspired by websites on the subject, I actually once did try to dye pearls using plants, but it failed. Haven't given up though. If you are interested in dyeing your own pearls, please check out the links I've listed here.