Bead Table Wednesday

I have been looking for a long time at the wonderful array of beads in the Bead Table Wednesday Flickr group and have decided to join in the fun.

Basically every Wednesday, we share a photo of what is on our bead table. Fun right? Lots of lovely beads to admire, covet and generally drool over!! So here is my first offering:

A mass of leaves all ready to be made into my signature bookmarks, some little raspberry coloured berry beads and some Drum Beads, inspired by the Wonderful Klew (aka Karen Lewis). I have been having some fun this week! Need to finish buffing some of them and then get them made up into items of gorgeousness!!

Hope you are having fun with your bead table today - do tell, leave me a comment and I would love to pop by and have a look at what you are up to today!

Pippa x

Everyone Is Doing It!!!

Doing The Stroppel Cane!!

Alice Stroppel's wonderful and innovative cane made from all your pieces of scrap cane, was featured on Polymer Clay Daily this week to huge acclaim!! Everyone is doing it and having the "Funnest" time doing it!! You have to give it a go - here is the link http://polymerclayetc.com/be warned though - it is highly addictive! Thank you so much Alice for sharing this wonderful technique with us all.



I have one small complaint about it though. Remember my new studio? (scroll down if you haven't been following).

My Beautiful, Clean, TIDY, Wonderful, Studio? Well, just look at it now!! Scrap Canes EVERYWHERE.



....................EVEN in my "clean zone" for jewellery assembly!!!!!! Alice....you have a lot to answer for LOL!!!








Hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Pippa

Excitement! (And a little bit of Polymer Pampering to look forward to!)

It has been a week of high excitement here in our house. Firstly it was Katie's Birthday.



I can hardly believe that she is now 15. I was busy planning a surprise birthday party and inviting her best friends around, all without her knowing. If any of you have children of this age then you will know just how difficult it is to do anything secretively! Luckily she didn't suspect a thing and the surprise was lovely - her face was a picture when her 3 friends arrived!

Lots of cupcakes, balloons, decorations and sparklers! They had a lovely time.

What remained of the week was devoted to making some more buttons. I am pleased with the buttons, I took the ones I made last week to the craft fair and got some great comments on them as well as selling some, so I am really pleased they were so well received. I will slowly build up the stock and see how we go. They are a great way of making use of the end of canes from different projects and I prefer to make buttons with these cane ends, rather than store them away, telling myself that I will use them in another project and then they sit there for months (or years in some cases) and become too hard to use or just never used at all. Doesn't half free up some much needed storage space on my tiny desk as well!


I did make one piece of jewellery this week! One of my signature Leaf Pod Lariats, this one in lovely shades of teal and spring green. Such a lovely colour and just right for making me feel that warmer days are just around the corner! Although it has been so cold here this week that I am beginning to feel like Winter is going to go on forever!


I seem to be making very little at the moment. Days are going by with me only making one or two things (sometimes nothing at all). I seem to be a little in limbo and not using my time effectively. My muse is lurking somewhere and I think I know why!

A week today I will be attending the Polymer Pamper Play Weekend http://www.polymerpamperplay.co.uk/, in Portland and I am getting just a little excited (OK - quite a lot excited actually!). This will be the first time I have attended a Polymer Clay Workshop and the thought of spending time with other polymer clay artists is just amazing. The Internet is a wonderful thing, and has taught me so much about working with this incredible medium, but it is not the same thing as actually learning from two world class tutors! I am hoping to learn so much on this weekend, but most of all I am looking forward to meeting and being with and sharing with other polymer clay enthusiasts. If you are going to be there, then I cannot wait to meet you!

Hopefully, after that, my muse will be bursting with ideas and won't leave my side for the next year or two!

I hope you all have a great weekend.

Ups and Downs - seriously picture heavy!!

Life has been full of ups and downs recently.



I have been very busy with caring for my wonderful Mum, and have had to squeeze about 30 hours of work into a 24 hour day. I am sure you all know that feeling!

But despite the stress and worry of looking after someone I love very much, I have had to work as well. Weekly Craft Fairs are a wonderful outlet and brilliant time to connect with other crafters when you work from home and feel a bit isolated, but I have to say I have been finding it really hard to cope with making enough stock these last 3 weeks. On the other hand - it keeps me grounded and stops me from moping and worrying too much. It makes me work - and I can eventually loose myself in the work and just be.

Happy times also inbetween everything else. My beautiful and wonderful daughter has just turned 14!

Frogs are her "thing" of the moment - so I made 24 Frog Cupcakes for her birthday tea!


We also had a wonderful day out with her best friend and my best friend and went for a girlie day out to London and visited Harrods where the girls got their ears pierced (after nagging us Mums for the past 7 years!).

Life is good - and worrying - and stressful, but I am so lucky to have my wonderful family and my wonderful life, for all its ups and downs.

So anyway - here is what I have been working on.

The picture at the top is a swirled lentil bead necklace with leaf caps. A "happy mistake" was made with the leaf caps - I didn't realise when I placed them that they would all line up perfectly like flowers,but will be making sure I do it again!





This is something I am really pleased with - hundreds of leaves all made into components that interlock. The inspiration came from a little cliosonne articulated fish that my daughter has. Loved making it so much I made a bracelet and earrings to match!



Here are the rest of the things - lots more phot0s but not too much of me whittering on!!

Enjoy!

Fish Focal Beads - Update!

Swimming Fish Focal Bead
Originally uploaded by Pips Jewellery Creation

Just to let all of you who have asked me, that the Fish Series Focal Beads are now up in my Etsy Shop.

I have added a link to my shop, over on the left hand side, here on the blog, so if you want, you can just click on any of the pictures and it will take you straight there to have a browse.

I will be putting up the listing for the Flower focals and the Tree Focals later today and tomorrow!

Thank you all for your interest and comments on these beads - it means so much to me to get your feedback - and I love comments!

Hope you all have a great week.

Flower Series Focal Beads

I am pleased to present my new Flower Series Focal Beads.

I have had such fun designing and making these. Using the wonderful Donna Kato's Composition Technique I have developed this entirely new series of beads.

Each bead is hand shaped with a variety of skinner-blend backgrounds and then covered on all sides with tendrils, leaves and blossoms. Each one is completely individual and no two are alike.

I have not made a series of beads before and am very excited by them. The ideas for more series are swimming around in my head, and the next series will be fish!

I have a few more colour-ways for the flower beads still to create and I hope that when they are all ready they will be well received at my weekly craft fair at Cirencester. I am still undecided as to whether to put them up for sale in my Etsy Shop or not. I am being asked more and more at Cirencester if I will make some beads for sale and decided that now was the time to do so. Beading and Jewellery making has become increasingly popular here in the UK over the past two years, and unusual handmade beads are always in demand. I would love my beads to become part of someone's design, or maybe to inspire a design because of the theme of my bead - that would be fantastic.

I hope you like them as much as I do.

How To Make a Complex Kaleidoscope Cane in Polymer Clay - It's Simple!

Kaleidoscope caning is one of my favourite techniques to use with polymer clay and lots of my beads are made using these canes. I thought it might be fun to show you how I make one.

First choose your colours, for this cane I have decided to go monochrome.

Condition your clay really well. You can use a Pasta Machine or a roller or your hands, whichever is easiest for you.

Here are my sheets after I have finished conditioning and I have put them through the Pasta Machine on a medium setting, about #4 on mine.

Next, make some interesting elements. Here I have made a Jelly Roll Cane, a Striped Cane and some plain "sausages". I have a couple of small sheets also.

Then combine them in whatever way you like, I try to keep them in a general right angle triangle shape, loosely speaking!

Then I reduce the cane, refining the shape as I go into a more recognisable right angle triangle - please note that this is not an exact science in my case!

When the cane is about 4 inches long I cut it in half and then combine the two halves, mirroring the image.

Now we have an almost square shape. Reduce the cane again, refining the square as you gently pull, squeeze, tug, smooth or whatever your preferred method of reduction is.

I then cut the cane into four equal lengths and again, mirroring the images, combine the four into one larger square.

One more final reduction and here is your finished Kaleidoscope Cane.

Of course, it does not need to finish there - you can reduce yet again and recombine, change the shape of the cane from a square to a circle for example. Add another cane , or several. Cut the cane in half and then cut lengthways and recombine. The possibilities are endless!

Here are my beads I made from this cane, cut, pierced and awaiting baking!

Now I just have to make something gorgeous with them!