Flower Frenzy

The flowers in our studio are blooming like crazy -- our sculpted clay flowers of course.  All of these flowers have genuine Swarovski crystal centers and a special snap embedded in back so they can be easily added to our different necklace components.  They can be arranged in different color combinations or pop one onto a hair barrette, bracelet or ring.

We wanted to have a good supply of items for the Craft Culture show this weekend so have been putting in long days.

Cool to Live in Chase, BC

We moved to our little town of Chase in the province of British Columbia (Canada) more than 6 years ago and really love it here.  We have lived in small towns before but this place is special.  We are surrounded with so much beauty and nature right on the shores of beautiful Shuswap lake.  We love the people here and have made quite a few friends and gotten to know most of our neighbors.

We just learned this week about another cool thing about our town.  The Haldane Elementary school (our only elementary school in town) received an award and was designated by national non-profit SEEDS Foundation as the greenest school in Canada.  The students in the school had completed 10,000 environmental projects and is the first and only school in the country to achieve what is called an Earth X status.  To read more about this and listen to an interview with the students click here.

Shuswap Lake

Chase Creek Falls

Mountain sheep in our yard

Mountain sheep coming down the hill behind our home.

Snap Decisions at Craft Culture

We are gearing up to be in a new show this spring in Kelowna called Craft Culture which runs May 2nd and 3rd at the Kelowna Curling Club.  There will be more than a 100 vendors with a wide range of handmade items and artwork as well as plenty of live entertainment and various cooking and gardening demos.  We think it will be a fun and exciting show to be a part of and really looking forward to it.

At the show we will have our popular scarf necklaces and interchangeable earrings.  We will also be featuring our latest "Snap Decisions" interchangeable jewelry collection.  Our polymer clay creations are mounted on special snaps that can be worn as a pendant, necklace, bracelet, brooch pin, ring or even a hair barrette.

Okanagan PC Guild - First Official Meeting

Yesterday during our clay get together, it was decided to officially form the Okanagan Polymer Clay Guild.  We will be meeting as often as we can and our members come from all over the Okanagan.

Our clay meeting yesterday went for a full 5 hours duration.  We played with our extruders and between us all we had several types to compare as well as several methods for using a power drill.

Several people had the Walnut Hollow Extruders which seemed really awkward to work but the set-up that Joanne (below) was using really worked like a charm.

Dave and I had just received our Lucy Clay Tools latest extruder Disc from Vanisland Jewels so had fun experimenting with some of the patterns shown on their site.  These are the patterns I made and was using Premo clay.  I found the Premo very soft so was a little trickier to work with.  But as we have a number of novices in the group who use Premo clay we went with that.

After a bag lunch, we pulled out our books, Patterns in Polymer by Julie Picarello to try out somoe of her techniques.

We didn't have time to finish so planned to take them home and bring them finished off at the next meeting for Show & Tell.

After the Quilt Show

We had a fun time at our first show of the year yesterday.  It was another successful quilt show put on by Heather's Fabric Shelf and there were lots and lots of fabulous, beautiful quilts to see.

This quilt, titled "Gone with the Flow" was created by Sheila Crowe, and was our absolute favorite.   It was in direct view of where we were located so had a chance to admire it all day.  It is a hand quilted piece from a postcard design.  You can see the postcard picture above to compare how similar it looks but when you get up close it has so many more features which makes it so unique.  It is more of a multi-media quilt as it has other textures added such as real feathers used for the hair.

This is the main part of our display.  It was our first showing of our new interchangeable jewelry and we are still working out the best way to show it off and were interested to see how it was going to be received.  The response from our customers was very good and we received a lot of positive feedback.

Dave taking a moment out during set-up.

Donna and her mom Elsie of Donna's Yarn & Craft were also there and set up right next to us.  They had lots of knitting and crochet type samples there to provide plenty of inspiration for some fun projects.

The photo below is one idea that Donna has been working on together with Mary Anne, who is  another local polymer artist.  Mary Anne hand sculpts all these adorable little kids buttons.  She is a a retired veterinarian so you can see why she does the animals so well.  These are decorations combining crochet or knit flowers and using Mary Anne's buttons for the centres.  I forget what they all represent but perhaps you can figure out some of them -- There is a Black-eyed Susan, a Ger"bear"a Daisy, Dogwood, and I think those little babies are cabbage patch kids.  These are a fun idea to add to a child's sweater or add to their slippers.

Polymer buttons created by Mary Anne, Kamloops, BC

The spring season was off to a good start for us and we have several more shows coming up over the next few weeks so will keep us busy for a while.

Quilt Show at Heather's Fabric Shelf in Kamloops

We have been busy working on our new interchangeable jewelry line for this year.  We should have a nice selection ready for our first show in Kamloops coming up this Sunday on April 12.  The quilt show is put on by Heather's Fabric Shelf and is at the Holiday Inn just across the parking lot from their store.  We will be set up in the main lobby again together with Donna and Elsie from Donna's Yarn & Crafts.

Here is another sneak peek at more of our interchangeable jewelry pieces.

The art beads interchange on the pendant shown below and the pendant clips onto different types of cords for a different look.

The art bead cabachons can be switched out in the necklace base shown below.  Same necklace base but different cabachons give it a completely different look.

Are you curious about how these are created?  Well we are really excited about it and love this new concept.  So much so that we are already writing our tutorial and will be available soon.

Easter Colors

We had to make more rainbow extruder canes so spent all morning mixing up and stacking clay.  Fortunately we still had some colors premixed from the last time we made it, otherwise it would have taken all day.  After arranging all the colors in the order I wanted, I noticed they reminded me of  Easter which is this weekend.

The extruder cane is a cross between Bettina Welker's Pixelated Retro Blend Cane and the Rainbow Daisy Pen tutorial by Amber Elledge of Starless Clay.  We used Kato clay and shared the color recipes on a previous blog post here.

We made extra canes this time to experiment with and these flowers were formed by using the teardrop shape extruder die.  I am not sure what to use these for yet but am thinking they would make cute buttons for a little girl's sweater.

Scarf Jewelry at Intwined Fibre Arts

We stopped in at Intwined Fibre Arts in Salmon Arm, today and had to take a picture of their latest window display.  They are always so unique and I loved the cheery and colorful spring theme.   That is one of our scarf necklaces on a pretty scarf that Althea knit up for it showing in the window.

She used the Sublime yarn which is super soft and the shade of green really compliments the jewelry piece.  The pattern for the scarf is called X's and O's and is super quick and easy to knit.  If you are an average knitter, it should only take about 3 hours to finish.

 

Intwined Fibre Arts has a good selection of our scarf jewelry for sale and if you buy any piece you will receive the scarf pattern for free.