Makin' Faces

Way too much fun. Mica powders, acrylic paints (left over from a paint-by-numbers set my daughters had), Alcohol Inks- sealed with Future.

The round blue plate are those going to the Beaded Art Dolls yahoogroup swap, and the others are for my personal stash, though some of those might switch around. Not too many folks like the larger faces, so the golden sort-of-Oriental one and the blue one might switch over to my group, and the turtle woman and owl woman to the swap group. I can always make more of those.

Hope you enjoy looking.

Viking Knit!

Gotta love it...the two-tone picks up the blue in the polyclay lentil bead- my first, made over two years back out of leftover cane ends. I don't know why I don't do more of this, as it is very relaxing. I do want to order a draw plate from glasshopper.com as the one they offer has many graduated holes, as well as being made of soft plastic (tho hard enough to do the job without falling apart), so it doesn't pull the finish off my Parawire. I do find some of the Parawire finishes to be not as dependable as others. The jewel-like tones seem to come off with very little use, while the more satin finishes seem tough as nails.
I hope you like it as much as I do!

Fun new mold stuff

It is fairly cheap at JoAnne's, especially with the half off coupon, which made it 4.50 plus tax! I saw it full priced at AC Moore for $11.95, so they are quite a bit more expensive.

I like that I didn't have to mix two parts to make it work, and that it does what it says it will do. I made all the molds shown with about 1/3 of what they gave me, and they really are flexible! If you are like me, and have a hard time figuring out if your thickness is 1/4" when making the molds, the clay turns slightly brown when done.

The directions specify to use a bit of talcum powder or cornstarch on the object to be molded- please don't skip this step! It makes getting the object out of the mold easy, instead of frustrating. This is very soft clay, and gets softer with handling.

I did leave one of my bone faces in while baking, as it is very thin and I wanted to see how the compound worked that way. I did not use cornstarch on that one, and clay stuck to the face. As it was shiney bone, it rubbed off easily. If it had been a polyclay face, it could have left residue that didn't come off.

The face is shown in the pic, next to the mold it made.

I made one mold from a wooden bear- it came off smoothly when I gently loosened all the sides by pulling at them all the way around, then grasped the back and tugged.

I even did one from 'The Love of Winter Moonshine' - a fully beaded doll, and got a nice arrangement of beads that will show up when I use this to make a new face.

It is a bit smellier than the usual clays, so use it outdoors, or in a room with good ventilation, like a fan pulling straight out the open window.

They say it can be used to soften clay that has hardened, and this is my next test. You only need 1% of the new to soften the old, so it should do the trick for all my slightly hardened clay!

All in all, I would highly recommend this product.