canes

so here it is, my first post about making things! i thought i'd try my hand at making canes. i've made some simple bead jewelry in the past so it seemed a good idea to have a go at making my own polymer clay beads. 

i used a leaf pattern by Leigh Ross from her brilliant website polymerclaycentral.com. i've only had a quick browse through so far but it looks like it has loads of useful projects and tips and ideas. 

i don't have a pasta machine - which is a really useful way of blending different colours together - but a quick google led me to Valerie Hollis' handy guide to making a manual blend in polymer clay (without a pasta machine). 

i'll admit to being rather impatient so i ended up with more of a swirly pattern of bits of white in green clay rather than a lovely smooth blend of one colour to the next. i also used less white than green clay, as i wanted more green in the leaves, but the white got swallowed up very easily, so i reckon maybe you need to use quite a bit of white to make an impression in a darker colour. anyway, here it is:

my first ever polymer clay cane! i'm really pleased with it as a first attempt. i've wrapped it up in greaseproof paper and i'll probably stick it in the freezer before having a go at slicing it. 

i didn't do a very good job of reducing it neatly (i think i'll need a lot of practice!) and i had a lot of distorted cane at the ends. i sliced the bad cane into leaves to practice slicing. those leaves would have made very bad beads, so instead i put the slices onto a backing of flat clay and rolled them together:

i quite like the random distorted pattern it's made and am going to think about what to do with it!

a cat is a lion in a jungle of small bushes

i thought i'd start a new blog to record my attempts at making things. i have spent quite a bit (far too much) time messing about with photos and pictures on my computer and reckon that it is about time i tried learning some actual skills and making some actual stuff. and then writing about it on my computer... with photos and pictures... ... oh well. 

so to start as i mean to go on, here is one of the things i've spent far too much time messing about with on the computer:

this is the clock on the arcade in bognor. i had been looking for things to photograph that were typically bognor and the arcade is definitely that. when messing about with the photos i decided i liked the clock best, and i liked it in lots of different colours, and being rather indecisive and finding it hard to know when to stop, i made it in more and more different colours and stuck them together so i didn't have to choose.

i like things in rainbow colours. i know they can seem quite childish but then that's not necessarily a bad thing. what they also are is bright, fun and cheerful, and light, colour, fun and cheer are good things to have.

and because i really don't know when to stop, i have many versions of the bognor clock:

i thought this range of colours seemed quite peaceful, with a splash of colour to keep it interesting.

and because pushing buttons and seeing what happens in photo editing software these days is so easy, that's another one.

so you can see that i really need to stop doing that, and start making actual stuff. which i'll take photos of and post on here. i may also post the odd photo of my cat, because that is really what the internet is for. i do like the clocks though!