I’ve been making floating fairy gardens, they’ve been so much fun! I’ve been making little fairy houses out of polymer clay, and I got these cool hanging terrarium’s that are being used for air plants. I got some moss and pebbles and ta-da! You’ve got a floating fairy garden, put a couple together and you’ve got a little neighborhood 😀
So If any of you have seen pictures of my jewelry you might notice that I use stamps to make my resin pendants and earrings. Now stamps can be rather expensive, so I have my go-to polymer clay texture flexible stamps, and tend to avoid the wooden backed stamps sold at craft stores. So about a week ago I saw this post on Facebook about a garage sale just north of where I live, this women apparently had over 1000 stamps and other scrap-booking supplies at said garage sale.
So I was all over that! I swung by after work and she was not kidding. She had two 8 foot tables, completely covered in stamps, it was awesome. So I dug through and picked out about 50 stamps! I spent a lot of time looking at each stamp because with polymer clay, I need a nice deep stamp with a good pattern. I probably could’ve found another 50 that would’ve worked, and for $1 a piece, it was hard to resist. But after 50 I figured that was probably a good enough start. I also got some alcohol inks and really nice stencils. Overall it was a great haul! I can’t wait to make some jewelry with these stamps!
PVC Pipe Jewelry Stands, Tutorial by Simply Renee Louise. Make all 3 for under $20. Great for displaying jewelry at art shows or at home!
I wanted to make new displays for my steampunk jewelry. I was looking at making pipe stands but man! that can get expensive. So I thought of PVC Pipe, lightweight and cheap, with a can or spray paint I could get the look I wanted without the price. In total this cost me just under $20 for all three stands.
This past Sunday was the The Detroit Artist Clearance & Artist-to-Artist Sales Event. I was able to stop by and boy was it awesome! It was a basically a garage sale style event for Artists, both to get rid of their old or damaged art and to sell their unused or partially used extra materials. I was interested in going because I thought it would be a good way to get some art materials at discounted prices. And I did! Here’s a picture of everything I left with, and I only spent $25! Read More
Quick update on my steampunk endeavors. I made this cute little octopus pendant below, mainly using Premo! turquoise, bronze, Gold and some metal embellishments. After it was baked I used a 2 part resin to fill the goggles, then coated with polyurethane.
I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I had purchased Cabezels, a bezel cabochon mold combo. I have gotten a chance to use them since they arrived and they are amazing! They create very smooth bezels and cabs, and with some sanding and buffing they really turn out beautiful.
I’ve been wanting to sand my pieces with my new Dremel 9100, but they only have up to 220 grit sandpaper, and I sand up to 1000 to get a smooth finish.
Oh gosh you guys! I am so freaking excited! I finally bought some CaBezels! I’ve wanting to buy them for ages and finally did! Yay! There’s so many sweet shapes and sizes, they arrived today and I’m already making new stuff. I’ll post photos when I’m finished.
Other then that I bought a new drill, a Dremel 9100 Fortiflex, I haven’t set it up yet but I’m excited to try it. I was using an old dental drill to do the drilling for my jewelry, and it finally broke on me. Plus with the Dremel I’ll be able to use the various sanding and buffing bits to speed up my process quite a bit, as I currently hand sand and buff all my pieces.
I also recently moved to a new apartment, and I now have an actual dedicated space for making jewelry! Before it was just all over my apartment, kitchen table, coffee table, couch even at times, so this is a really nice change. I also took a bit of a break after ARTitude wrapped up and didn’t work on anything. It wasn’t till last week that I got back into it with my new studio space and it is just so much fun, especially now that I have an actual table to sit and work at!
Hey All! It’s been awhile since I’ve made a blog post. I have been busy with ARTitude, a short term pop up shop with tons of amazing original pieces. Since preview night, I’ve decided to do the entire time, so I’ve been spending my free time there to sell my jewelry. It’s been going well overall, however, I do think the organizers could have done a better job promoting and marketing, as attendance was low, and it seemed like they didn’t get started until the event was halfway over. However it is still in it’s second year, so hopefully next year they’ll be more on top of promoting the event.
However, during this time hanging out at ARTitude, Steampunk Eddie, and I started playing around with clay and clock parts and soon enough Steampunk jewelry started happening. Since then I’ve been having a blast with clay, mica powders, clock parts and gears, making pendants and bracelets. I’m so pleased with how they’ve turned out, these are definitely going to feature heavily in my shows from now on!