Thursday, September 1, 2011

Ready, Set, Fold! & Guessing game winner!


66 comments! Wow!
I just love giveaways both as a giver and as a winner ;) LOL
Congratulation Ms. Small Idea! You've won my new tutorials!

Want to know what you won?

Well, the story begins 2 months ago, I was invited to my friend's daughter birthday party: "Come join us, Iris, Let's drink a cup of coffee", said the mother, "I have invited a wonderful entertainer - she makes paper folds! You'd love it!"

So I came. and... I was fascinated!
Remember when we were kids and made scoubidou strands and friendship bracelets? That was it, only with paper - the kids LOVED it!

It took me a while and I decided to take this idea, adapt it to the polymer clay world and create a more sophisticated technique using polymer.

Being a long time blogger, knowing many of the polymer clay artists around, I browsed and looked for more info about folding techniques in polymer clay and didn't find any, so I took the time to experiment and learn more about it.

When I started experimenting, I found that folding with polymer gives our designs a very special 3 dimensional effect achieved by the special characters of the material, the special colors - solid or marbled, metallic or glittery, skinner blended or extruded.

The adhesiveness of the clay makes it very easy to fold and to compress the folds - bead or jewel - these techniques are turning any piece to an intriguing, attractive, interesting and almost impossible to believe it is clay.

Although not as stretching as ribbon or flexible as paper - polymer clay with it's wonderful color palette, patterns and textures take these techniques into a whole different level.

Looking back at the history of weaving and folding, weaving was used by our prehistoric ancestors as an aid in their quest for basic needs of food, shelter & clothing, and folding, especially paper folding (japanese Origami), is an art of folding objects out of paper without cutting/pasting - that's perfect for clay! the clay will stick to itself!

These ancient techniques soon became very popular and moved to the modern era in the shape of recycled and found materials.
So, why not use use traditional folds to create entirely new and exciting designs?

After 1.5 months of work, trials and error, investigating these techniques from every possible angle - It's finally ready.

In this new set of PolyPediaOnline tutorials I chose to use our medium - polymer clay - to create folded, weaved and rolled fine jewelry and accessories.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you Iris!!! I am so thrilled :D, I have never won anything before!!!
    Cannot wait to try out this fantastic new technique!!!

    Regards,
    Shirali

    ReplyDelete