Textures and upcycling your accretions. . . ;-)

Just a quick post to keep the momentum going here. I've been fairly busy messing about making new things and trying out a few ideas. Nothing enough to post about in any depth quite yet really.
But one of the things I was playing about with was textures. I found a somewhat gross but useful texture source that you would quite likely have in your home. You know those wire wool type things you put in the bottom of the kettle to crystalise out the limescale stuff that makes hard water 'hard'? Well, apart from scaring you by making you aware of what the hell your kidneys have to cope with on a daily basis, the crusty accretions kind of bursting out of the wire mesh that you get when the wire wool thing badly needs changing, (I know, I know. . .) makes a really cool texture.
Once you get the loose stuff off, you can use it as is, or make a mould with it using whatever substance you normally use. I have some 'Mold Maker' I think it's called, left over from a while ago, so I used that. It worked OK. You could use scrap clay, it wouldn't be flexible though.

I used it, via a sort of texture 'mask' to make this textured connector bead thing. The texture mask was a plastic sheet with regular holes in it, left over from something I can't quite remember. I laid it over the polymer clay and pressed the texture sheet onto that. The texture only appeared where the holes were, if that makes sense.

I also made a bunch more photopolymer texture sheets using my digital images. They came out Ok too. I need to do a post about that process I think. I made a some flat textured beads to test them out. Here's a couple of them.

Anyway, have fun with your hitherto unwanted limescale catcher. . . ;-) or not of course, your call.
Jon x

Waste not. . .

Even though polymer clay isn't ever so expensive I still don't like consigning potentially useful bits to the scrap . . . er. . . lump in my case. (What there is of it gets rolled into a multicoloured clump, like the way plasticene always ended up when I was a kid.)
So when I made these hollow beads I posted about before,

I used the squares cut out of the middle of their inner layers, to make these hollow beads,

Then the squares cut out of the middle of those beads' inner layers got made into these non hollow beads.

Only the little scrappy edge bits left over were fed to the 'lump'. . .

What I liked about this whole progression was that only the first part was planned, the rest was a spontaneous reaction to seeing the cut out bits in front of me.
I'm not trying to maintain that this was a major piece of lateral thinking or a unique insight, just the kind of enjoyable creative diversion we all make from time to time. Let's call it 'Play'. . .

I'm sure I read something recently about how useful play is in the creative process, (the Fall edition of Polymer Arts magazine I think) and I can only concur. The imagination and inventiveness involved in play make it a valuable and precious thing. For reasons I can't fathom those attributes are often underestimated and even dismissed, seemingly just because using them can involve fun, and of course anything fun is somehow not 'serious' and therefore not really the domain of adults/professionals/serious practitioners.
Yeah well, I'm happy to leave the serious work to the Grown Ups. I'll keep playing with stuff and see what I can come up with.
You can join in if you like ;-)
Jon x