Polymeri Online 5.9.11 | Santa is near, Neon jewelry, Candy pails and Happy weddings

How do we feel that Christmas is close? Santa canes! this time it's Deb Tuchsen's cane sending some cool air to my direction :) It's still too hot in Israel!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rengalsa/6101392054/in/contacts/

Italian Ilaria Anselmi has a wonderful collection of polymer clay designs in her blog and flickr gallery (mostly delicious looking), she also works with resin and created 'neon' colored designs.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/filoecoloridiila/sets/72157605162714737/

http://filoecoloridiila.blogspot.com/

Jessica Hamilton's Halloween doll candy pails are SO cute! Made of polymer clay and 1.5" wide - perfect for small treats!

When Jessica was a girl, she wished her dolls would come to life so she could feed them tiny bread, sew them teeny socks and make their tiny beds. With the exception of the bread, she quickly realized she could do those things without the whole semi-creepy ‘coming to life’ part. Her dolls are amazing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dollproject/6084044171/in/contacts/

http://www.etsy.com/shop/dollproject

What better way to end this post with love? These bride and groom by Dorothée Vantorre looks as if they were taken from fairy tales. Dorothée is a French polymer clay artist, a former student of art history and graduated in architecture and the creator of Mad Marquesas, creates jewelry and other designs. She is currently working on her first polymer book! I'm curious to know which tales she will tell us!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69939106@N00/6080363372/in/photostream

http://lesfollesmarquises.blogspot.com/

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?

What those mysterious tiny pictures are?

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.

Polymer clay folding, weaving and rolling are new techniques you'll want to add to your skills repertoire!

Want to read more about it?

Click here for more details!

New Tutorial Guessing Game!

While I'm working on my new PolyPediaOnline tutorial (quite a thick volume with 11 products and 10 videos) I want to play a little guessing game with you guys.

I am posting 2 partial photos of the designs.

The photos are tiny, I know, but that's the whole point! guessing!

Guess what you think it is, what technique it is - anything you think of!
Of course, I think it's easy :)

Everyone is invited to participate in the guessing game, I won't be commenting until the tutorial itself will be ready and posted here in the blog with the right answer (and full photos).

One of you guessers (no matter right or wrong) will WIN this tutorial as a GIFT! I will choose one of the numbered comments using a random drawing.

So, what are you waiting for?

place your guess!

:)

Polymeri Online 22.8.11 | Colorful creations; Wedding on glasses; Eyelets Jewelry and a Daisy tutorial

Klio from Athens, Greece works with polymer clay as a hobby, as a busy mom and working lady, she only works with polymer clay late at night.
Her recent art in flickr are so happy and colorful! cut outs, skinner blends, dots and circles - every piece is a joy to the eye!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/klio1961

Miriam from Italy makes such cute cake toppers. In this post I found
the nice couple hanging on the glasses! how sweet! I think they are adhered to it, don't seem to hold the glass in another way, Cheers!
http://lalbicocca.blogspot.com/2010/08/flute-da-cin-cin-e-sopratorta-cheers.html

Nikolina Otrzan from Croatia have a wonderful line of polymer clay jewelry using rivets and eyelets. Her flower pendants and animal bracelets are wonderful!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/orsons/6025506134/in/photostream
Don't miss her geometric collection of beads and jewelry using head pins and metal parts - very unique!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/orsons/5879103588/in/photostream

Marina originally from Magadan, now live in Moscow, She combined her studies and work and fond of paper art which is mostly featured in her blod. Here is a simple and cute tutorial for daisies flowers -
http://bond-mary.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post_09.html

And, last announcement, a new PolyPediaOnline tutorial will be announced very soon!

It's a technique never seen before using polymer clay (I'm 99.9% certain!)

Trying to keep kids quiet in their last days of vacation while I record my videos...

Will be posting about it very soon!

Polymeri Online 15.8.11 | Scorpions ahead! Fairy doors, Psyzoo animals and play with some paint!

Stephen Lavedas is an amateur sculptor. According to him, he has no formal art training (unless you count one class in 8th grade). He sculpts in polymer clay as a hobby and is a software engineer by trade. I hope I'm not disappointing Stephen but every time I see a scorpion near my front door (and we have quite a few!), I'm **** the hell out of it. wouldn't want to meet it inside my slippers! Take a look at his various galleries, some dedicated to his sculpturing.

https://picasaweb.google.com/stephen.lavedas/Scorpion#

https://picasaweb.google.com/101263776772198593001

Here is another polymer clay project of a fairy door from "cut out and keep" website, this project is by Lisa H.

http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/polymer-clay-fairy-door

Ekaterina is a young artist and fashion designer, creator of handmade clothes, accessories and the russian project Psyzoo. Psyzoo is based on cool, funky jewelry featuring animals of all kinds - cats together with elephants and some creative imaginary animals seen only in Ekaterina mind :) cool!

http://psyzoo.ru

http://facebook.com/psyzoo.fanpage

http://www.flickr.com/photos/psyzoo/

and a cool painting tool when you're in the mood, I found this flash app in this website

wonderful to play with the children or just for ourselves! Click the link to get the code to your website.

Tomorrow I'm going to have fun with my 12yrs old boy celebrating his birthday, hope you're having fun as well! :)

Polymeri Online 6.8.11 | Special cake toppers, Crayon's necklace, Spoon bead core and Polymer clay horns

With a degree in Sociology and Psychology, Christina Robinson worked in the mental health field, and pursued various avenues of careers. Before finally settling on the fact that she wanted to work

full time on her art, she took classes toward finishing a degree in Biology in hopes to do research in genetics and nutrition. Her current interests include creating beautiful accessories, oil painting, and sculpting art dolls in her own unique style, with a special face expression I can't really describe in words....

http://www.etsy.com/shop/OhMaudlinMe

http://www.christinazimmer.com/dolls/

Don't miss her "in process" photos of one of her pieces -

http://christinarobinsonblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/mr-modesty-in-progress.html

Dany Teysseire-Mlanao is a graduated from the Regional Academy of Fine-Art in Valence (France) specializing in painting. his (I hope I'm correct) artistic expression goes in three diverse directions: paint on textile and creation of clothing, plastic animation and dressmaking. He has been creating jewelry since 1994 and produced costumes for shows and the

theatre. In his free time he enjoys 7 hours per week of kick-boxing and 800 sit-ups later (Did I mention I walk the dog??) :) In this piece he is using resin, paper, drawing crayon and of course polymer clay.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/64316503/girls-and-eyes-polymer-clay-necklance

Galina (Grgalina) has posted a cool tutorial for creating a a bead core made of aluminum foil and... spoon! It's a bit of an oldie but who's counting?

Galina was a guest in my blog but was not introduced in full in my previous post (here) - she was born in Russia, but since 1998, lived in different places around the world, from Singapore to Ireland. At present time she lives in Dublin, Ireland. For many years she worked as a computer designer, but discovered polymer clay few years ago, and since then her soul & mind are into it.

http://grgalina.livejournal.com/38490.html

I found these polymer clay costume horns using aluminum foil in cut out and keep website which is full of simple projects using polymer clay.

http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/clay-costume-horns

Have a great weekend! I'm off to my studio planning my next project :)

Playing with Cubes!

Several weeks ago I was walking at a fair and saw this guy creating wood mind games, one of them was a 3*3 cube challenge. I was immediately hooked and couldn't rest until I solved the whole cube. THEN I figured I must create one with polymer clay!

My cube is just one option among many!

Now you can play with your jewelry while you're waiting at the dentist's reception :)

Here is a free video tutorial - How to Create Polymer Clay Cube Puzzle Necklace including a diagram for stringing and it's solution!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIZrSHxFv9k

Have fun! :)