Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Clay Day Workshop

I had a great day yesterday with Myrna who had requested some private lessons in polymer clay.  The day went by so quickly as I found her to be quite enjoyable to talk to and clay with.  She had her brand new pasta machine with her plus a few tools but for someone who had never even cracked opened a package of clay yet, was very knowledgeable.  She had done a lot of reading and studying up on the medium beforehand so already had some basic understanding of what we talked about.


It was a full day as I wanted her to leave with enough polymer clay basics to give her the confidence to experiment more freely afterwards at home.  We covered most of the basics including making a few skinner blends...




and even some jelly roll canes with those blends.





We also played with some of the CaBezel moulds ...




and I like how Myrna wanted to experiment a little further to texture and manipulate them so they would be more of a free form shape that was unique....  Here is another jelly roll she created almost entirely on her own and some focal bead pendants made from it...




Myrna is a textile artist and she was looking for a way to combine her love for fibre, threads and fabric with a new medium such as polymer clay.  We played around mainly with Premo as that is a much easier type of clay to start with but we also used some Kato so she could get a feel for it as well.


You can read more about our clay day together on her blog here as well as follow her new adventures in clay ...

1 comment:

Clay It Up said...

I spent the day after Christmas introducing my 17 yr old niece to my love of polymer clay! We had a good time and she went home with a clear glass cereal bowl done in a mokume gane camoflauge! She mixed all her colors from red, blue, yellow, white and black. We also went over the basics of canes. I gave her one of my pasta machines, all of the Sculpty I had (that's what I started with), a couple of blades & a tile to work on. The last I heard, she'd covered a couple of shot glasses for her dad's man cave! She did a great job!