Stretching and personal growth

It's been a while since I've written anything here on the blog. Part of that is because I haven't really devoted much time to working in the studio since last October. I chalk much of that up to a general malaise over what's happening to this country, which has deeply affected my motivation. Another part of the picture was simply the hustle and bustle of the holidays, paired with parental hospitalizations, plus household ailments from cold and flu season. And lastly, late in 2017, I decided to turn inward and focus on self-improvement. At the end of October, I began a routine (near daily) practice of yoga, which has both helped my physical and mental wellbeing. And early in 2018, I decided to tame the nutrition beast and begin the journey of losing the weight that has crept on over the years since I turned 35,  that magical number when easy weight loss suddenly became unobtainable despite a regular fitness routine. I'm happy to report, after 2 months of dedicated whole-food nutrition, I'm down 12 pounds so far, and feeling SO much healthier! This year is shaping up to be the year of "me", focusing on re-making myself into the healthiest version of me.

But, despite all of the aforementioned obstacles to feeding my muse, I haven't been totally out of my studio... Back in the fall I committed to participating in an online design course (that was scheduled to begin in December), which was offered by Christine Dumont and Donna Greenberg, through Voila! This course was specifically focused on jewelry design and the design principle of balance using symmetry and asymmetry. The course was held online, and was attended by a fantastic group of polymer artists. Though we each worked on interpreting the course material in our own ways, the sharing of assignments in our online group not only spurred conversation and camaraderie, but also generated a bounty of inspiration. If you've read my blog before, you already know about my artist crush on the work of Donna Greenberg from previous posts mentioning her. Christine Dumont's meticulous graphic style is mind-blowing to me, and she is another polymer artist who I have admired. I had the good fortune to meet both of these ladies in person last August at Synergy4. When the opportunity to take this online class presented itself, I knew immediately that this was an experience I shouldn't miss.

Now, the class was supposed to wrap up within a certain time period, but because of holiday, health and personal issues, some of us did not complete our final projects until sometime later. Our instructors have graciously kept the group open and kindly continue to provide a final assessment of our finished projects. This past week, I was happy to finally complete the piece that I designed as a result of this course experience.

My jumping-off point for this piece was a necklace that I designed last year, with some of the cut polymer quilling strips. But I wanted to push the curvy swirls from that necklace into something more defined and sculpted. I've always been drawn to art nouveau styling and I wanted this new piece to reflect that design influence. My brain started to focus on the remembrance of the art nouveau styled metro stations in Paris. Perhaps this was because one of my best friends from my high school/college era, with whom I spent some time in Paris, was concurrently taking classes to reinvigorate his French. He and I enjoy reminiscing those years of our youth, and these metro stations in Paris have captivated me from the first time I saw them:

Here's the necklace that was my jumping-off point:

As you can see, my design changed quite drastically from the jumping-off point. You can see the stronger influence (including the color scheme) from the art nouveau metro station images. 

For those interested, below I will detail my full process for creating this piece. There will be more photos of the finished piece and a video which demonstrates the physical flexibility and position-ability of this piece. To start, I sketched out a few ideas. After pairing down features that didn't work, I chose the sketch in the next image to be the starting point. Also in the next image is the wire armature that I created, this wire armature is what allows the necklace to be customized by positioning it to contour the wearer's body. The wire armature is a 16 gauge aluminum wire. At the points where 2 wires meet, they are wound with a thin 28 gauge wire for joining.

The next step in the design process was a base layer of polymer. Keeping in mind that I wanted this piece to flex without breaking, I decided to go with a 50/50 blend of Cernit translucent and Bake 'n Bend white. Below is an image of the base layer before curing:

During curing of this base layer, some areas cracked. I'm not sure why this happened, perhaps from the heat of the wire, perhaps from the temperature of the oven... I filled in the cracks and re-cured until the entire piece was solid and ready for the decorative layers. 

I started by covering the piece in another blend of Cernit (this time in the Shiny green color) mixed with Bake 'n Bend in the green color. This blend was approximately a 75 percent (Cernit) to 25 percent (BnB). I decided that the best way to cover this piece was to start with the back. I wanted a line inscribed texture for the back and scratched that into the surface before curing. Here's a shot of the backside of the necklace:

 After the backside was sculpted, it went in for another cure. Once cured, I began the decorative layer on the front. I worked one half of the necklace at a time, as seen in the next photo, and cured the necklace after the first half was sculpted before starting the decorative layer on the second half. 

Once both sides were covered and sculpted to my liking and put in for the final curing, I added some antiquing using a matte polymer varnish with Paynes grey acrylic paint to the green areas. The gold rounds were treated to a dusting with gold mica while raw, but after curing they were then painted with a coating of a gloss polymer varnish, some metallic bronze paint was added to some of this varnish for painting around the bottoms of the rounds to give depth and simulate pearls. 

I am quite pleased with the finished piece. I've already worn it when we went to a concert on Saturday, and happily report that it is very comfortable to wear, which is an important factor. While this piece will likely remain in my permanent collection, I think there is a strong possibility that I will create other iterations of it in the future. 

This was my first time using Cernit. I chose this brand based on what I saw at Synergy4 in the pieces of Marie Segal (another polymer artist and kind soul who I admire). I was impressed with the strength and flexibility of the Cernit pieces that Marie brought to Synergy, many thanks go to Marie for discussing the benefits of Cernit with me. And thanks go to the generous Maria Alexandrou for demo-ing her flexible cuff tutorial at Synergy4, it was from that demo that I learned the possibilities of mixing bake n' bend with regular polymers to add flexibility. Speaking of which, here's that video showing the flexibility and position-ability of this piece: 

My experience with the Voila course was superb, and I plan to participate in the next class offering by Christine and Donna, which is listed on the website as TBA in 2018. I am already looking forward to how that class will stretch my design skills and knowledge even further. Another huge Thank You goes out to Christine, Donna, and all the other polymer artists who participated in this course. If you are a polymer artist, and you are wanting to push your design skills to another level, I highly recommend taking one of the upcoming Voila courses. Please do take some time to view Donna's and Christine's amazing work at their respective websites. 

If you're still with me (I know this was a long blog post), and if you have any comments or questions for me, I'd love to hear what you think about my latest creation.... Please do leave me a comment below! I do plan to get back to creating on a more regular basis; at the least, I hope it won't be another 5 months before I have something new to share. Until then, Thanks for stopping by my blog!

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Labor of Love

My latest piece was truly a labor of love.  I wonder if I jinxed myself in the post about my last piece, when I said it just went together without a hitch.  Not so with this one.  The May challenge for my guild is the theme of bowls.  Immediately I knew 2 things, I wanted to make a yarn bowl and I wanted it to have a different design, perhaps 2 levels that were separated by space.  I made some sketches and came up with a design and shape that made me swoon.  I decided to use hammered metal spirals to support the upper level of the bowl.  While this idea was fun, it proved a challenge.  In hindsight I would have made the bowl and drilled holes into it for the metal supports.  I had actually considered doing this, but was wary of how thick I'd have to make it for drilling and was worried that I would drill through the bowl, so instead I tried to build the bowl around the metal supports.

I began by making a first layer of the basic shapes I needed to create the look I wanted.  I used a glass vase to form my shape.  After the first cure I wanted to sand down any bumpies, and in doing so cracked the top piece right in half.  I guess it wasn't cured well enough, as that should not have happened.  Super glue to the rescue and onto the second layer for strength.  This layer went off without a hitch.  Next up, was to build the hammered metal spirals -  I shaped these with my round nose pliers and hammered them on my anvil, and during that process I once missed and hit my thumb with the hammer.  Did I mention that this piece was a labor of love? ;)

After a few choice words and successfully forming and hammering all of the spirals I glued them to my pieces, which was a feat in and of itself!  Once I had them glued, I had to create another base layer to bring the clay to the same level as the metal.  In this next curing the cracks started.  I had 3 cracks from where the metal was straining while the piece rested on the vase for support.  I patched up the cracks, added another layer and back into the oven for another cure.  This time the cracks were healed, but I still wanted one more layer.  Imagine my disgust after the additional layer was cured and I pulled the piece out to find 3 cracks in the same general area as before!  One more patching and a layer of black lpc fixed that issue.

Next I gave it a good sanding all over to eliminate the bumps and fingerprint marks, then another layer of lpc for one more full polymer coating.  I wanted a surface treatment on the bowl that was just as unique as the shape, so I opted for a version of what I call impasto polymer technique, which I did in the Premo Bright Green pearl color, straight from the pack because I love that color so much. 

One final curing to harden the surface treatment, as I held my breath and watched over like a mother hen for fear of more cracking.  It survived with no issue! YAY!  I gave it a nice coating of a polymer gloss sealer for extra protection.  The interior bottom of the bowl, I forgot to mention, is a slab of mokume gane polymer done in black, silver, wasabi pearl and white.  You can get a glimpse of that here:

As I said, the idea for this was to be a yarn bowl, and the 2 layers askew were meant as a place for the knitting needles to rest as seen here:

And the yarn is meant to feed through the metal spiral like this:

Yes indeed, this one was a labor of love.  Lots of work went into it and while it is not perfect, I do love this piece.  The design of it is very "me" and I was so pleased with how the surface treatment turned out considering that part was totally unplanned.  I love it when pieces come together with something that just "happens"! :)  If I ever revisit this project again, I will definitely make the base parts full thickness first and then drill the holes for the wire support, that's the lesson for this one.  But overall I'm quite pleased!  What do you think of my funky bowl?  Have you ever had a project that kept giving you problems all through construction but you stuck with it and it turned out as good as you had originally hoped? Tell me about it in the comments!