Share your New Year's Resolutions & maybe win something!

Lisa Vollrath's doing her New Year's Resolution giveaway at Ten Two Studios. Share your creative resolutions there, and you'll be entered in a drawing for a 6-month subscription to her e-zine, The Monthly Muse. I get this for free as a member of the Ten Two Studios design team, but even if I didn't, I would subscribe since it's such a good value, and I learn something new in every issue. (And you can't always say that about the more expensive print magazines!)

Though I'm exempt from the drawing, I did have to leave a comment about my lack of New Year's Resolutions (as noted in my previous blog post). I spent New Year's Day in my PJs experimenting with the techniques I had learned in Laurie Mika's workshop, making New Year's ornaments to go out with my friends' winter holiday packages (They would die of shock if they got something from me before Christmas).

I experimented with image transfers using Translucent Liquid Sculpey and images from the Ten Two Studios Little collage sheets, which took me a few tries to determine the correct baking time for my toaster oven. Here are the experiments peeled at different times & thicknesses of clay, showing how NOT to do it.

Two more days to goof off, and then back to work on Monday!

Making 3-D ATCs

I'll be blogging my Raevn's Nest Art Retreat experience in installments. Last Friday, I took the "3-D ATC" workshop taught by Laurie Mika. I've never used polymer clay before (having vowed I was not going to take up any more crafts that involved buying even more supplies), and I was surprised how simple Laurie's technique is.

We rolled out Sculpey III or Premo by hand, stamped it with rubber stamps to create texture and then embellished with acrylic paints, mica powders and doodads, cutting and stacking shapes to make these three-dimensional ATC-sized works of art. My layers were only about 1/8" thick with my thickest ATC being about 3/4" but some of folks in my class made pieces over an inch thick! These were all baked at 275F for about 20-25 minutes or thereabouts. The temperature is low enough that we could include paper images in our pieces, so I used a Rossetti faux postage stamp and some tiny Victorian faces from Ten Two Studios. Laurie provided all these fabulous rubber stamps with words and textures for us to use. And no, these are not available for trade! :D

Here are some other folks who took the class and posted pix of what they made:
Carmi Cimicata
Gary Warren Niebuhr