How About A Hand…
I spent an hour or two yesterday looking at links on the ‘net, and adding several favorites here, plus a little re-organization–some links fit in many catagories; they could be Dolls/Miniatures or Puppet/Props or Costume/Textiles…so be sure not to overlook some great links due to the organizing, do poke around! I’ve added more than a dozen new links. Quite a few are in the new Puppet/Props catagory. We really like puppets and all sorts of animation here at our house. “Gumby” was one of the first popular claymation characters that helped introduce American audiences to the potentials of polymer clays. Although made with the non-hardening varieties, the clays offer ease of movement that animators love. The “Wallace & Grommit” shorts and features made by Aardman Animations are another well known use of clays in animation. Cloth puppets often make use of some clay parts, notably eyes and teeth, and polymers also make for great costume details and props. My son Ian is in film school, and uses puppets in many of his movies. Here’s one created for his movie “Collywobbles”. Sister says “Do It Now” which is sort of a family saying here….
He used polymer clay to make faux rocks in which the Title was inscribed—much easier tha carving REAL rocks. The creative connections come home to roost along with the chickens here at our house, and Ian gets a hand here with the costumes (from Mom) and music for soundtracks (from Dad) and a round of applause for the finished productions from the rest of the clan. In his spare time he writes reviews with his cronies–take a look at confusereviews.com if you’d like to skew your slant on the day with some darkly humorous pokes at movies, games, books and more.
Font Fun
I’m a happy font-fiend right now, because I found a wonderful (and FREE!) program called The Font Thing at Downloads.com to manage my fonts for me. This is not an insignifigant task–I recently removed close to 800 fonts because they were making my computer a wee bit slow to load on some programs…and yet, I still have 785 fonts left. Almost half of them are dingbats. That’s a “pictorial glyph” for those who arent already familiar with them. Dingbats are used to pretty up the page by printers, and web designers. But what I like to do best with dingbats is to take them into Photoshop and use them to create graphics in black and white which I then send off to Ready Stamps in California to have made into custom unmounted rubber stamps and also molds (the matrix tray) for use with polymer clay. For more information about that, click here.
With The Font Thing, I can easily view each character in every font, scale it up or down in size to view, and group the fonts into catagories. It can call up all the available information about the font and its designer! I can put all my dingbat fonts into a folder and inactivate them until I need to use them. That means I can go back and get all the ones that I recently deleted, or shop around the various font sites for those that are freeware or shareware. The black and white graphics seen above are from a font called “Schluss-Vignetten” and it was designed by Dieter Steffmann. Those are the letters/dings for e, f and g. The Hawaiian Quilt graphic was created using a dingbat called “Hawaiian Quilts 1,2 and3” overlaid onto a graphic made with polymer clay tiles, using Photoshop again.
Another Day, Another Dye
We made it through the Big Dyeing Event and it all worked out very well. My hands and back are really tired, but the backyard has certainly been well watered with all the rinsing.
The ribbons, lace, scarves, cording, fabric, hats, bamboo beads, wooden pieces and tshirts have all been dyed, rinsed, and washed, and now I’m rolling and tagging and getting things ready for sales.
Next up on the “to do” list is making more polymer clay faces to go with all the great new colors, and putting them together into Spirit Doll kits–I’m going to the Houston International Quilt Show again this year in the Fall, and so this Summer is going to involve a Big Production Push. Lots of things to get done….Musician Bill Nelson says in song “People who do things, are people who get things done”.
I’ve been busy writing articles for Belle Armoire and other magazines, and working on books to the point that I’ve been spending less time than I need to on the actual polymer clay work, and I’m really looking forward to getting back to that!
Though I’ll be photographing as I go, because the dyeing process is part of one book, and the polymer clay masks are part of the next one up–“The Art Of Polymer Clay Masks”.
I have to work pretty steadily on that for the next two months in order to make it happen this year. It will be self-published through Lulu.com as is “Adapting Quilt Patterns To polymer Clay” with Judith Skinner.
I’m still working on migrating this site to the one that I maintain myself, but I havent figured out how to get tags to work there as they do here–in the meantime, I’ll make use of both lobes of my brain and both ftp sites and maintain both for a bit! Please do visit “the other side” to see the features available there that aren’t here.
Hats Off To Color!
The Annual Dyeing Days are over for another year. Almost–I still have to rinse out the bottles and put then pools away in the garage, but not today!!
My hands are sore, and so is my back…but I do love the colors that we got this year. Eggplant was the new color in the group, and is true to its name. I think I still like Black Cherry better…but Chartreuse was the winner of the Most Used award this year.
I mixed up more of it than the other colors and STILL had to make up another batch the second day!
For more information about this wonderful color, visit Maggie Maggio’s Smashing Color site–it is WONDERFUL and the section about chartreuse should have tipped me that its going to be A Popular Color.
We dyed shirts, hats, socks, fabric, lace, ribbons, doll bodies, and even wooden pieces. I think they are pine, and we got them in bags from a thrift store. It was a great find, though I’m not completely sure HOW they will be use, it will probably be in a puppet theater set or miniature diorama or some sort.
To read all about it, visit the new Dyes page at the Polyclay Gallery. It may take a few minutes to load as it is graphics-heavy.
“We who are about to dye..”
If I’m going to make colorful puns (and I am, just accept it) then the whole quote would have to be “We who are about to dye, solution you. ” Which is probably only funny to textile artists and those forced to take Latin in school…if that. But the colorful fun IS about to start here in my own backyard–after several days of unseasonable cold weather, we are ready to get saturated, with color and water both.
I spent yesterday mixing the dyes–42 bottles of saltwater and dye, ready to go. You see them here in a wading pool, and its just one of many. We have a soaking solution pool for the soda ash, a rinsing pool, and many many buckets. We have color swatches for reference, bagged items all tagged for 
the color pots, and my presence is shortly required out there, so I’ll finish up here with this picture of Premo clay beads in a colorstrand that helps me keep track of mixes and blends. The goal is to dye lots of things that will go with the polymer clay beads, faces, and more. I’ll be back with pictures later this weekend!