Translucent Vertical Tubes

A while ago, I made a sort of rock-look cane based on the lace cane concept.  I used lightly tinted translucent clay rolled into a bull's eye cane and wrapped in white. Then I reduced the cane, cut it into pieces, and joined them together in a large matrix cane.  At that time, I used slices from the cane to cover cabochon shapes and make irregular beads that looked like unusual stones.  The photo on the left shows some of the polymer pebbles I made.  For more information, take a look at my post of Tuesday, December 24, 2013 - Honeycombed Pebbles.

The other day, I was looking at a piece of this type of cane I had left and wondering what to do with it.  Since I've been playing with tube beads, I decided to make some tube beads using the cane.  I left the outer edges uneven as they were on the cane itself, and overlapped the rolled edges rather than cutting them to meet evenly.  Leaving the translucent tubes hollow makes them look like they glow from inside.  I found some peach freshwater pearls and some iridescent glass O beads, and set to work stringing the tube beads vertically.  Here is the resulting necklace.  It has a really soft look to it, and the rounded ends of each of the tube beads helps keep them gentle on the skin.

It's fun to visit "old" canes and do do something new with them!

Experiments with Metal Leaf & Alcohol Inks

In my last post, I included a couple of photos showing new pieces with metal leaf and alcohol inks.  These are new surface techniques for me, and I thought you might be interested in seeing the progression of my experiments which have covered several days.

So, let's go back to where I began.  I wanted to try making a couple of polymer cabochons, and I wanted an antiqued and crackled look.  I started with a black clay base, layered on gold composite metal leaf (not foil) and then used alcohol inks to color the metal leaf.  I used Pinata brand colors, and loved the way they blended as they ran into each other.  Since the metal leaf was still exposed, and I wanted to be able to bend the sheets to create crackling, I covered the sheet with a very thin layer of translucent clay.  I ran the resulting sheet through the pasta machine a couple of times in different directions until I liked the look of the crackle.

 I formed a few cabochon bases, and covered the tops with pieces from the prepared sheet.  I baked these, then added a sheet of black clay to the back of the cabochon, and a narrow strip of black clay around the edges to create an outline or bezel look.  After these were baked, I sanded a great deal, but found that the color was still  clouded by the translucent clay.  I decided to try using an acrylic varnish designed for polymer.  A few layers made things shine and brought out the colors and the detail.  As a last step,  buna cording and clasps were added to create necklaces.