More Clay Things!

Good afternoon all!
I've been having a lovely time crafting things, and have been really bad documenting what I've been up to. So here goes:

1. Playing with Polymer Clay: Getting the hang of al-foil as a sculpture medium.
These both have aluminium foil cores, covered with Sculpey III.


Still learning how to think like a clay artist who can fire and re-fire pieces as many times as needed. I finally fired all the spots, then put them into the mushroom, cos I kept squashing them!


It's really hard to make a ball symmetrical... Needs some smoothing down in this photo still.



2. Getting the hang of blending up colours, and using my new pasta machine clay conditioner machine.






3. Putting all the tricks together and making a birthday present!



He's about 12cm tall, and is an al-foil skeleton covered in Sculpey III clay- mostly bought colours, but a few I blended myself, varnished with clear nail polish.


PS: Have started to upload larger images of my work too - 640 is a little small for this day and age... but due to my blog being somehow to awesome*, the Lightbox feature of Blogger is totally not working or even an option, so if you'd like, even though its not quite the same or as easy, you (firefox users at least) can right click and 'View Image' and it will show you the larger image on my photobucket account which loads in a grey window anyway and then use the back buttons to come back to the page... If I've made the image lots smaller for blog use, instead of just compressing the image in the browser and making you all download huge images, I'll link to another page where it's made big properly. :)

*Somehow my blog was converted to dynamic view, even though I use a standard Awesome Inc. template, and even if I go through and reset all of my settings (and I customised this template quite extensively) with a standard template, my beautiful blog I love the look of, looks funny AND Lightbox still doesn't work. So I've spent the better part of two hours playing with this, and now I'm giving up. I tried, I promise, but it's not going to work right now. Maybe when I try again in six months it will work no worries :)

More Juggling Balls!

Went to a music festival over the long weekend, made these while I was sitting at the campsite :)

They are fluffy, really soft wool (Blissful by Moda Vera, from Spotlight), with a 5.00 mm hook. You might remember these (The Evolution of a Fluff Ball/Tribble I made a while back) - yes, using the same style of wool in a different shade - but I've since learned how to better crochet the fluffy wool directly, so these don't have an under-net like my older tribbles.

The insides are a really cheap tennis ball, so they even have a slight bounce! It was actually way easier than I thought it would be to crochet a firm net around a tennis ball, and close the circle around it. Just basic sc, and increase and decreases. :)



How fluffy are they?!!

I'm contemplating making a few variations and seeing if I can sell them, I think. :)

Piggy and Me

Remember this model?




Here he is!! All finished, and hanging out on my trampoline.


And hanging out with me in my room, and for some reason my camera has chosen to photograph like we're out clubbing or something.



And here is me being 'artistic' with photoshop... haha.




And I'm trying out better ways to photograph my clay thingys, but apparently only the rabbit is photogenic. I'll coach the others through their issues, and see if I can't get some better pictures for later projects. :)