Playing with Textures

I love how polymer clay can take on so many forms and there are so many things you can do with it.  I enjoy playing with textures and using all sorts of stamps and texture mats but I also like to experiment and create some of my own.  I found these large brads in the scrapbooking section at Thread & Paper the other day.  I was attracted to the deep etched pattern on them and so created several textured type molds using them as the center design.

I also stumbled across some other item that had a cool textured pattern.  I made some templates and these are the pieces made from the templates and colored with mica powders.  I haven't quite figured out how to use these yet but I really like the geometric shapes.  Can you guess where these textured patterns came from? I will give the answer later on facebook.

 

This weekend Dave and I are teaching another workshop which is all about playing with textures and making molds.  It is with some of the group that took our beginner workshop and have enjoyed playing with the clay so much they have asked for a more advanced class.  We are looking forward to teaching but even more getting together and having fun!

Update:

So here is where the above textures came from:

From the soles of my new walking shoes.  I bought these the other day so I could get back into shape for spring with lots of walking and when I got home and was taking them out of the box, I was so excited to see the cool patterns on the bottom.  I heard of some people using soles of shoes for a texture but the design on these was so unique I had to use it in some way.