Vintage Lace Designs

Our friend Linda was helping with the clay this past month, when she was able to.  She has been in a lot of pain waiting for her hip replacement surgery and she found that playing with the clay was very therapeutic and helped keep her mind off things.  Fortunately her surgery is tomorrow (Friday) and we wish her well with our thoughts and prayers.

These past couple of months with her helping has been a lot of fun and a real blessing!  I first taught her how to condition clay and then to mix up my color recipes.  I had several large bins of scrap clay and she had a ball going through each bin, sorting into piles and then mixing them up to create some new colors.

We were discussing what to do with some of it and I happened to mention to her about the air dry clay and ceramic dishes I had seen online made by texturing with lace doilies.  I have been wanting to try that with the polymer for some time now.  Linda was quite excited about the idea and the next day she came over with a bag full of old vintage doilies!  We started experimenting with them and these were a few of the first ones we made (not finished off yet). 

And this is one that I just finished off the other day.  You can see in the photos how large they really are.

We were wondering what else we could create with the lace and I thought switch plate covers could be cool.  We had fun figuring out various designs to see which ones we liked the best.

Some of these items will be going into the Shuswap Artisan Market in Sorrento this Saturday.  It is Canada Day and Dave and I will be there with all of our special Canada 150 themed pieces to celebrate this big event.  If you are in the area, come on in and see us!

Our First Day at the Shuswap Artisan Market

The grand opening of the Shuswap Artisan Market in Sorrento was last weekend.  Dave and I had our first shift at the store on Sunday and was a very enjoyable day.

Rebecca of Uberustic Natural Skin Care was there as well that day and set up her soap making demo and fun selfie photo booth outside.

And this is a display of her handmade natural skin care products that are for sale in the store.

We had a demo set-up that day as well to show how we make a cane and sculpt our signature lady bugs like the ones on these dishes which are now available in the new store.  

We also added a selection of our flip flop necklaces and earrings which are quite popular during the summer season.

With 21 local artists in the shop, there is a wide variety of handcrafted items and fresh new items arriving on a regular basis.  We will be sharing a little bit about the other artists over time but in the meantime, here is a sneak peek of a few of the various items that are for sale there.

Our New Shuswap Artisan Market Opening this Weekend

We have some exciting news to share.  We, along with 20 other local artists, will be in a new Artisan Collective Market in Sorrento.  It is located in the building right next to the Lighthouse Market and will be opening this Saturday, May 13 with the grand opening the following May long weekend.

This is Debbie and Rose, the two artists that are responsible for bringing all of us together and making it happen.  They have both been working hard and everything is looking really awesome so far!

We have been busy preparing some new scarf jewelry designs along with other special items to sell there.  All of the artists take turns managing and running the shop and our first shift will be on the Sunday, May 21, of the grand opening.

The Shuswap Lake Culture Crawl is on the same weekend so stop in and see our new shop if you are in the area.

Renewed Scarf Clips

The Shuswap Lake Festival of the Arts in Sorrento starts this Saturday and runs for eight days.  We are finally relieved to have all our items bagged, tagged and arranged in the gift shop.  I entered several pieces in the juried part of the show again this year which I can't show you just yet but will after the show starts.

We have a few new items in the gift shop this year.  Since creating our scarf necklaces we have received more requests for other types of accessories to wear with their scarves.  I was never totally happy with the scarf pendants we had made last year as the finishing of the clasp was very time consuming and finnicky to make.  I was so happy when we finally found some actual scarf clip findings.  These have a very strong spring type closure so it took quite a bit of experimenting to figure out how we could attach them to the backs of our clay designs without using any glue.

Here are a few of our new designs using the spring clip.

And here is a sneak peak of our scarf slip display set-up in the gift shop that will be open to the public this Saturday.  We had found these shutters which we painted and trimmed in fabric.

There are two of them so we can display our brooch pendants on the other one.