I use a toaster oven to bake small stuff like beads, and so far it has been a pretty good little machine.  It only runs 30 minutes at a time, the first 30 which is to warm it up.  So after it was heated up, I put my beads in the oven and set it for 30 minutes.

At the ding, I went and checked them, and they were fine, but 30 minutes isn’t quite enough time for polymer clay most of the time.  So I added another 20 minutes on the timer and went back to my office to do some web surfing while I waited.

Ding again 20 minutes later, and I go out to get an ice bath ready (helps hardening and with translucent blends, can help them appear more translucent) in a small bowl, and open the oven…

and discover I’ve burned my beads. 

They’re not trash worthy, however.  They do look rather nice with their toasty color, it gives them a rustic look, kind of vintage and aged.  But, the colors are way off from their intended purpose, which is birthstone colors in pastel.  Here is a picture (poor quality, sorry took it with my phone) to show them next to the clay colors as they started out:

So, I made another batch, and am trying again, correcting the mistake I made before, which was NOT covering them with something.  I usually use corn starch, so this time I covered the newly made beads liberally with it.  Hopefully this batch will turn out without being toasted so I can use them as I imagined. 

(Posting delayed so as not to give hints to those who may read here and are the intended recipients of said gifts!  By the time this posts, hopefully if all goes as planned and these beads turn out, the recipients will have their gifts in hand.)

(pssst! after the break, pics of the second batch – better for the gift idea I have in mind, the colors stayed true!)

Here is a picture:

I used a photograph from some book for the fuschia flowers in the background; the butterfly in the foreground was something I added to fill in the picture.  My intent was for the butterfly to be sort of transparent.  My teacher was not fond of this idea and thought something needed to be added to liven it up or something I guess.  She used bright orange, purple and green.    I don’t know what the heck she was thinking.  I tried lightening what she’d put down (it was pretty dark to start), but what you see in the photo was as good as I could get it.  If it was not obvious, watercolor was NOT her medium.

I was beyond ticked off.  I set the painting aside hoping to one day fix it.  Years passed, and after my parents dug my portfolio out of storage before they moved out of town, I found that the masking fluid that I’d used to save some white space for the water droplets (see the yellowed dots in the upper left corner on one of the leaves) had hardened.  Picking them off resulted in pitted paper.  I was rather sad, I figured it was a lost cause.  Still, I set it aside, hanging onto it.

Move forward to about a month ago.  An art supply company, that specializes in mostly their own watercolors, but also offers their versions of acrylics and oils as well, in addition to other manufacturers products, came up with a product that supposedly would make any surface one that could be painted upon with watercolors – metal, wood, paintings that needed repair, etc., etc.  When the company had a free shipping sale, I jumped bought this product:

Only this past weekend did I work up the courage to actually start applying it to my old ruined painting.  I think I may need to do some rough sanding on some parts of it (the large leaf in the upper left corner has obvious brush strokes from this ground stuff), but it covered pretty well.

Now, I am in search of the mystery photo that I used for the original painting, as it is obvious to me now that many of the leaves could use some reworking.

I found another watercolor artist in the world who had used the exact same photo in one of her paintings, and emailed her to ask if she could share the source of the photograph so I could complete my own painting.  I never received a response.

I have NO clue what book this picture came from.  It was one that belonged to either the school or the actual watercolor art teacher (who I dearly missed my Sr year but conflicts with other classes prevented me from being in her class), it was not one of mine.  The year I started this painting was late 1991, to give you a reference.

Does anyone out there happen to know what book this photo came from?  If you do, please drop me a line.  I would be ever so grateful!!!

Currently I have some ice cream cone charms in the oven, we’ll see how those turn out.  I have to admit, I wasn’t exactly fond of creating those for some reason.  They’re cute, but, I don’t know.  Whether I make more or not in the future will probably depend on how long the ones I made sit in my studio once they’re listed.

But now I’m kind of at a loss as to what to create next.  I’m contemplating some more snowmen charms maybe, like these guys that sold back in August:

It would give me a reason to pull out my Pardo clay again, and maybe work on improving the color (after baking) of the green holly leaves.  Other than that, I’m not really sure what to make.

Any suggestions or ideas of what you would like to see me make (or attempt to make)?  I’m not a huge fan of making canes, so that would be off the list (sorry – canes are fantastic, just not my cup of tea), but I’m fairly open to most everything else.

Post your suggestions in the comments.  Thanks!

I am toying with another blog platform. It is actually called a “CMS” – “content management system”, but in a nutshell, that is what all blog platforms are. Some are just more robust and can do more than others.

Anyway, I used this one, called Expression Engine, as my main blogging platform for several years at another domain, but stopped shortly after that domain got hacked (via another even older and neglected blog platform – Movable Type), because I didn’t feel like dealing with fixing all of the broken links and all that carnage clean up the hackers left me with.

The learning curve for this other system is pretty steep, and not is a “one click” setup type of blog. I’ve been working on it here and there, for weeks. It has some shortcomings (I cannot find an auto-Plurker plugin for it), and strong points (stronger spam control, supposedly, although I haven’t had much issue here on WP to be fair, the plugin I have for WP works pretty good). It is more for a developer type of person (web developer, etc), than not. But I do like to get my hands dirty with coding now and then, making something work that didn’t automatically do so, essentially build something from the ground up, so to speak, and this fits that need pretty nicely.  I did everything there – the graphics, the layout, the templates (internal to EE).  It’s not quite 100% finished, but it is getting there.

I have exported all entries from WP (except this one, as I’ve just typed it up), and am slowly working on adding them to the “blog” part of the CMS. When they were first imported, they got put under a default channel, and when I created a new channel for my blog, they did not automatically move over, and I am not sure if there is a mass editor that would allow me to do such a thing (or maybe there is and I just don’t know it). But at any rate, I have to move them manually one by one, along with associating them all with the proper categories, which also got messed up in the transfer – but that was not ExpressionEngine’s fault, that was the software I had to use to convert WordPress entries I exported, into Blogger format, and then into MovableType format (which EE can read). Yes, yet another pain in the butt, but I’m invested in this darn it, and I’m going to see it through! I’m still working on getting them moved to the correct channel, so not all of them will show up yet.

For some reason, even though all of my comments are visible in the entries themselves, nothing but new ones are showing up in the sidebar’s “recent comments” box. I’m not going to worry myself over it, that box will (hopefully) fill up soon enough, and it only will hold like five or six anyway. And speaking of comments, during the port, for everyone who commented here in the past, I had EE create an account for you on my new blog. I have NO idea if it has set any passwords for them, but if it has and it won’t let you comment without logging in, let me know over here and I can set up temporary passwords for you, if you like. If you do not want to have the browser log you in (if you have it save your passwords) every time, then I can delete you as a member and you can comment as normal without logging into anything. Whichever is your preference. I am not entirely sure yet if your Avatars that show up here on WP will also show up over there (if you use Gravatar for that, I CAN get that set up); alternately if you remain a member, you can also upload an Avatar to my server and it will display it from here when you comment.

So, rather than go on and on, I’ll just stop here and ask if you could go take a look-see.  Tell me what you think, how it loads for you, what browser you’re using and if it acts funny, etc.  If you want to leave comments there (see above if you run into issues with your login, it took your email addresses from here when it created the users), feel free.  If you can’t or don’t want to, comment here instead.  Oh, and yes I know some of the pages will have my grinning kid at 6 months old on them.  I used her picture as filler at first and haven’t gotten around to taking it out of all of the templates yet. So enjoy the pic.    Keep in mind it’s not 100% ready, some links may not work, some pages may look funny, but I wanted to get a general idea of what my visitors think about it.  Thanks!

And so I went out and bought some.

Artist papers and paints are not cheap, so I got two full sheets of Arches 140lb cold-press paper, a plastic board to staple it to after I wet it down, and a handful of Daniel Smith watercolors.  Since then I’ve picked up a few more paints, and now I have a total of 13 tubes of that brand.  But before I picked up the most recent tubes, I started a new painting of my daughter.

I already posted the WIP pictures on my Facebook page, but I figured I would post it here too, for those not on my personal FB page.

Here is the first picture:

I started with a purple underpainting for shadows.  The bright orange stuff is masking fluid to cover her teeth and the highlights on her eyes.

Next, I started adding some flesh colors:

It was at that point where I took a break, a) because the weekend was over, and b), because I needed to buy some additional colors in order to even attempt to finish it – blue, for her eyes and the background, and especially red, for obvious reasons.    I had pink but, it just wasn’t cutting it.  It was great for putting the pink in her skin, but wouldn’t fly for the shirt.

So here is the last WIP, taken today but I stopped working on it yesterday evening:

Still nowhere near done of course, and I’m guessing it will take at least another two weekends – since I don’t work on it non-stop – to finish it.  And that is being optimistic, it will probably be sometime before the end of the month, if I keep up painting on it.

I have to say though, so far I am happy with paying the extra money for better paper and paints.  The paper is much more forgiving at scrubbing, lifting and dabbing than the cheaper paper was (I used a small 4×6 block of cheap paper to practice on, and found it really was not inclined to much abuse).  And the paints, with the exception of one of the tubes, incidentally the most expensive of the bunch, I’m extremely happy with those as well.  They’re bright, their transparencies are lovely, they mix well, re-wet well in the palette, and will last a long time on the paper.  I’m glad I made the decision to set aside the student quality stuff.

I’m still waiting on a reply to my email to the manufacturer about the tube of paint I can only describe as bad.  The color doesn’t match the “swatch” on their color brochure – instead of a bright vivid blue, it reminds me more of old denim.  The color itself would not be bad if that is what I had been expecting, but that is not what I used my 50% off coupon to buy, and I’m rather disappointed in it.  The color wasn’t the only issue I had with it, it also seemed to have separated from its binder, so when the first squeeze came out, it was almost more binder than paint.  I am wondering if I’ll hear back from them about it or not.  I sure hope they respond, they have dozens of other colors in this “theme” of paints in the higher price range that I would like to try, but the first experience with that type is leaving me wondering about the others.  I’m sure I just have a tube from a bad batch, so it would be nice if they would remedy it with a tube fresh off the line.

So anyway, that’s been my project as of late.  I’m trying to take it a bit slow so I don’t mess it up too badly.

I forgot to put halos on the angels, and I’m debating whether to add them since their flesh color already seems to have darkened just from the 30 minutes they spent in the oven already, compared to the Santas where I used the same type and color of clay.

I’m a little disappointed with the green Pardo that I used to make the holly leaves on the Snowmen’s hats, it turned out very dark. I’m not sure if that is because they were such a very thin amount or if it’s just because they’re laid upon black hats and it’s picking up the color from the hats.

But I am happy with how the Santas turned out!

These are just preliminary “show and tell” pictures of course. I still have to loop the wires on the Santas and the Snowmen and maybe add some glaze to the Snowmen, angel wings and Santa hats to bring out the pretty colors in that mother-of-pearl Pardo, and then I’ll take the pictures that I’ll use when I post these up at my Artfire shop. Hopefully under better lighting the green holly leaves will show a little better but even with the naked eye they’re still pretty dark. Oh well, live and learn.

Hobby Lobby is opening stores in town, and I came across one very near my day job, so I went to check them out one day at lunch, 40% off coupon in hand.  I walked out with a few packages of this new polymer clay made with beeswax, Pardo – in red (ruby), green (amazonite), white (mother of pearl), and black (onyx).

I made some snowmen and Santa beads, mostly with Pardo, but also using Cernit, in the case of the flesh color fo Santa and the orange carrot nose on the snowmen.  Pardo is extremely soft so it was rather challenging to work with.  Now I’m trying my hand at a few angel beads, mostly made with Cernit except the wings in mother-of-pearl Pardo.  I hope to have those finished tonight so I can bake those sometime this weekend and see how this new clay turns out once baked.  If they turn out well, I’ll post them to my Artfire shop for sale.

Speaking of my Artfire shop, I unfortunately have not been able to spend much time, if any, promoting it, not without interfering with my day job, family time or clay/craft time.  I will obviously need to work on that issue if I want to start getting any sales.