Our Okanagan Guild Meeting

We had another great time at our new Okanagan Polymer Clay Guild meeting last weekend.  We have been meeting in the little town of Westwold which happens to be somewhat central between our members.  It is always nice to meet with other types of polymer clay artists.

Cassy-Rose is one of our newer members who drove all the way from Kelowna to join us.  Cassy loves to sculpt and she brought her latest project with her.  When she first showed us the photos, it was difficult to imagine how large this piece really is!

If you visit her facebook page you can see her step by step process as she creates her masterpiece as well as see some of her past work.

At our meeting I showed everyone how to make a Stroppel Cane.  We have several containers of scraps from our cane making so put them out for everyone to play with and this was the result:

And then we all made some beads from the canes.  The technique is named after Alice Stroppel who invented it and you can see the video here on her site.  

Afterwards, we took some time out to show how to sand their finished pieces and then Dave demonstrated how to use the Dremel to buff them to a high shine.  We feel this is an important part to working with polymer clay as anyone can create but the finishing can elevate you to a higher level. 

We are all looking forward to our next meeting in September.

Play Day with our Okanagan Polymer Clay Guild

We had an enjoyable day claying with our  Okanagan Polymer Clay Group last Saturday.  We are so busy working on orders and meeting deadlines it was nice to take a day out just for fun.  Our members wanted to work more on Julie Picarello's mokume technique and each one purchased their own copy of Julie's book, Patterns in Polymer Clay.

After making a few "lizard tails", we made Natasha beads from our left-over clay.  The building we met at in Westwold was nice and cool for working with the clay so we decided we would continue with meeting still in the summer.

Afterwards, we tried out a new restaurant nearby in Falkland called The Country Kitchen that had delicious Ukranian food.  These are the owners.  Next time you are through this way, give it a try!

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.