the student teacher

'curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.'

~ william arthur ward

etching is one of my favorite techniques... you can take plain metal and give it a life of its own... at a bead shop i began noticing the possibilities for a lot of the components they had displayed - trays of vintaj, boxes of brass and copper shapes... so i asked if she would be open to an etching class...

the pieces above were made to place around the store so that people could see another side of what was available... i thought about just asking her if she would like me to etch some for sale... but i thought that teaching people how to do it would be so much more fun... 

and, girl, was it!

busy... i love that about classes... how focused everyone becomes...  how people talk and work together... these 7 wonderful women and i spent 3 hours together... (& i learned that 3 hours is not enough time...)

my favorite question - 'what if...'  it is what drives me daily... and i love to hear/see that in others... learning something new by whatever avenue then integrating it into your personal arsenal is magical... 'what if... ' is why i keep a journal for my work - because surely i would forget everything that flits through my head... 

it was a fantastic way to spend my friday... i feel badly there are no images of finished work... i had forgotten about taking pictures  as the class went on... 


and ai wei wei was released on the 22nd... 

new things...

'all life is an experiment.

the more experiments you make the better.

~ ralph waldo emerson

i can work with that! 

while i do not usually work with crystals, when i do shows i have noticed that they can draw people to a table... the sun sparkles off of them and people come... 

but i wanted to go at it a bit differently... the book 'a charming exchange' by kelly snelling and ruth rae was recommended to me and i cannot put it down... i want to try everything at once, but am trying to be practical... i adapted this link into an earring... and started with copper so as not to waste sterling... the swarovski colors are copper, brandy and chili pepper... i thought they stood out nicely against the antiqued metals - vintaj and copper...

hopefully will be trying silver this afternoon ... with some lapis or turquoise maybe!

learning

'i am always doing that which i cannot do,
in order that i may learn how to do it.'
- pablo picasso

my experiments with polymer clay are continuing... the first night i decided to try darker clays & was thinking i was going to have something called pearl-ex to use as a highlighter... however, at the two craft stores i went to, they didn't have it... from the depths of my mind was something whispering 'alcohol based ink'... i figure that had to have come from reading a post by heather at humblebeads or lynn at llyynn ... because they really are the pros... so i went back to the craft store and got some of them along with some lighter colored clays... i applied some different colored inks to some of the darker clay beads to see what would happen... the blue bead in the upper left corner has slate on it, the one under it has the meadow green on it...

when i applied the inks to a lighter clay bead, it put the light color into relief... the inks have a watercolor type finish the way i did it using a felt pad... some of the beads are just testers to see how the ink colors come out after baking... and what they look like on different base colors... they got much more subtle... so i am wondering if i should be applying them afterward sometimes... i am not sure if i like the green... & the different effects you can get... i like the way they bleed... my favorites are from the top two rows... zoa art today had a post showing a current mag containing an article on polymer clay, so i think i will try to grab that...
these beads happened when i applied ink to the rubber stamp itself... then i added some extra color to the one on the right... i do like the kind of distressed look they have... the middle one was a thought for the abs challenge this month - then i realized it's the 29th already!

re: a cube - that was trickier than i had realized as you have to push into the stamp to get the imprint... as you turn sides, it got sloppier - i was ok with how it was by 3 sides, sometimes... am going to keep at this... just to see what happens...

did you do anything different today?