Testing, Testing.

 Using a piece of the mud painted paper that was a bit too messy for the final project, I started testing out stamps and colours. I thought that I'd use a pale colour as a sort of ghost print behind the darker one, but when I coated the paper in Gel Medium to seal the colour on, the pale image disappeared.

      This red isn't quite what I had in mind, I thought that it might be more of a terracotta colour.

The ghost print is a bit more visible here, but everything is a bit too bland. Still, I have a month or so before the final project has to be finished, so all this testing is a learning experience. Now to make some more mud pages!

 

 

 

 

Something Quite Different.

 I want to make a small book with each page featuring one of my carved Australian native plant seed pods, cones or nuts. I suddenly remembered that I had a large container of very red soil which I had dug up many years ago and never used. I decided to mix it with water and to paint both sides of some heavy paper to use as background pages for the carved stamps.

 Here's the bucket with the soil and water mix. Of course the heavy soil forms a sludge on the bottom of the bucket, but depending on how much I pick up with the brush, each page is a slightly different shade.

 Another hot sunny day makes getting the pages dry very easy. The earthen ware pots are to keep the paper from blowing away, but as it's a sheltered corner it wasn't a problem. Below is one of the papers showing the streaks of soil and water as well as some salt crystals that I sprinkled on to give some extra texture. Stamp first and then seal, or seal first and then stamp....decisions to be made.

Yet Another Stamp

       As part of the series that I'm working on this Bottlebrush 'cone' was the next to be carved.

 The test prints above are to locate problem areas and to clean up the edges and so on. The top left is the first one and the one at the bottom the last. That's about as good as it's going to get in terms of a clean-up. Below I've scanned in the print and had a bit of fun on a very hot and humid afternoon playing with the image in Photoshop.

Not Quite Right.

 I had in mind to carve some Gumnuts with leaves on either side to make another possible tile print, but this is obviously not quite right for the purpose.

It is another very useful stamp for the series that I would like to make, but just not the tile series.

 

At Last a Bit of Carving.

 This block has been waiting for me to get a chance to carve it for a week or more, and today was the day. It's the stylised gumnuts that I was working on earlier, but now that it's finished I wish that I had made the stem a bit shorter, even if it meant changing the angle of the leaves.

 I always keep the larger of the off cuts for making small flowers and the like, but even so there was a lot of  excess to crave away.

                                                      Testing a new stamp is always fun!

A Long wait.

 I have been waiting for 13 years for these wildflowers to appear again. Called the Blue Pincushion flower for obvious reasons, I first spotted them in the bush in 2003 but have never seen them since, until now. They are growing in a totally different spot to where I saw them previously, which is interesting. They may be dependent on good winter rains, which we have had this year, but whatever the reason for their reappearance, I'm very happy to see their lovely blue flowers again after such a long time.

All Finished.

 There weren't quite enough beads to make the above necklace without adding some extras, in this case some antique dark red glass beads in two different sizes.
     The lower one just has small seed beads in a bright scarlet separating the polymer clay beads.

A Bit Late!

 With a request for a necklace of red patterned polymer clay beads as a Christmas present, I have only just started to make the beads, 5 days before the deadline! I forgot to take a photo of the initial conditioning of the clay and the making of the patterned rods, but it's readily available in books if you'd like to try it.

 The first batch of beads from the multilayered first rod. I wanted about 20+ beads and only just had enough to make them, so I made another smaller batch with a different  rod, which could at a pinch be combined with this first lot.

 Making the holes is always tricky as you can end up with misshapen beads. As it is, some of these are a bit odd, but I always think that it adds to the handcrafted look if they aren't quite perfect. Here the beads are ready to bake in a small dedicated toaster/oven.

Here are the beads baked and with a first coat of varnish. Another tricky thing is not to have the varnish on the brush too thick, as you can end up with bubbles of varnish which can be visible on the beads. They need a second coat and be properly dry before I can have the fun of stringing them, probably with small commercial bead separators.