A Microwave Mishap, Hollow Lentil Beads and Charging for Actual Time Spent, I wish. . .

Hollow, Image Transfer beads, using my digital images. . . 1'' 25mm.

Having managed to lay myself low with relatively minor but still unpleasant food poisoning, due to not heating up leftover moussaka sufficiently in the microwave, duh. . . I have had a day or two of sitting around, feeling delicate, and recovering my equilibrium, which is a poncy way of saying 'getting my guts back to normal'. I'm not normally that dozy, not quite anyway. Dunno what I was thinking, but I wasn't concentrating on the matter in hand that's for sure. Still, lesson learned and no lasting harm done.

Hollow polka dot image trans beads, first experiment.

I'm feeling hugely better now and have been in the workshop/studio messing around with stuff. A valued regular customer asked me to make some more hollow, lentil shape, textured beads like some I had sold previously, so I made a set or two. While I was making hollow forms I decided to try the lentil shape with image transfers instead of textures. I liked how it looked so I tried some experiments to define the best way of getting the result I wanted.

Not too bad. Not so sure about the varnished look but I shall live with it for a while and see.

I got quite close to the look I was after but the process was pretty time consuming. I will do a step by step with pics if anyone is interested.

The reverse side of the ones in the top pic

Which leads me to wonder about the whole subject of charging enough for the time things take to make. Especially with supplies like beads, which people mainly buy in order to use in items which they then sell on. Whatever the theories about pricing, I don't think it is realistic for me to charge twice the unit cost (although not a lot when using polymer clay) plus a generally acceptable hourly rate etc etc if I actually want to sell what I'm making.
Finished items, like jewellery, maybe, as perceived value is connected to price and many sellers say that raising prices helped sales, but supplies are a bit different I think. Maybe?

I made some smaller ones 3/4" 18mm. maybe a more usable size.

I tend to look at what other people have sold similar things for, and price bearing that in mind. I suppose, pragmatically, if something is not economically viable to make, it's probably not a good idea to continue making it.
But then again, there is a lot more than economics involved in what I do, and a lot of my time is spent on all sorts of unproductive things anyway, so the question 'Is it worth it?' becomes a more complex and subjective one ;-)

Any thoughts?

best,
Jon x

ps - I'm still not sure how much to try to sell these for. . .

More groovy small ones

And another

Multi listings and all that

I keep thinking about writing a post, and then putting it off until I have something I think is 'worth writing about'. . .
Yeah, well dream on ;-) The usual drivel will have to do, it's been long enough since my last post.

I have been busy though. I've taken the concept of the Psuedoshard a step further, making thin image trans drop charm sort of things with the usual distressed image transfer stuff on the front. I used some of my black and white images on some of them, which worked quite nicely I thought. I always think they look African for some reason. To do with my mental image of what African looks like of course, and perhaps not all that close to what something African actually looks like, but there is such a thing as a national characteristic that comes through in work from a particular place. It's a vague concept, and involves that other vague concept, 'feel' as well as direct visual clues, but I maintain it does exist.
In my head anyway.

I have been trying out a time and effort saving concept too. I have made some multiple listings. The trouble with listing four (say) different examples of the same sort of thing, (Four sets of image trans earring charms for instance) is that each ideally requires 5 separate photos. General shot, close up, the back, one for scale and one wild card. . . Each shot has to be resized and tweaked in Photoshop before being saved in a different folder. Then a listing has to be written out, tags sorted out etc etc. Sometimes for a potential $5 sale. Not ideal. There has to be an easier way. . . So I have tried photographing and listing multiples when the items are variations on a theme. The buyer tells me which ones they want and I adapt the photo accordingly and relist. Early days but it's working OK I think. I will have left over items which I can then list on their own, but that is less trouble than making loads of small listings. . .
Of course I could stop making small beads, but that would be a shame.

I have made some more organic form spike things too. They are fun to make and the last lot sold very quickly. We shall have to see how these do.

Other than that I made some big hollow beads by pre-baking two halves and sticking them together.

And some bi-colour bicone beads, which I quite like. haven't listed them yet, but will do so over the next week.

I think I need to make some more eccentric style stuff, maybe some large focals or something, as I have been in component making mode for a while and need a change, just for a while.
Still enjoying the process, so all good there.
Jon x
https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/JBDRusticOrganic

Down in Black and White

I'm having a bit of a black and white frenzy at the minute. I have a load of these simple, faux African style images (of my own design) lurking on my hard drive, that I figured would look really nice as beads. So I have transferred a batch of them onto some Cernit squares and have been experimenting, trying different sizes and thicknesses of beads to see what I like best,. And ultimately, I guess, what other people like best. The ones in the pic are mainly 15mm square with a couple or three 20mm ones lurking in there too. A few are hollow ones, using my go to method, Claire Maunsell's strata bead technique which she helpfully shared online  and which I jumped on as it suited my impatience and my 'rustic' leanings. . .

The rest are just two pasta-machine-thick-settings thick. All are painted black on the back and sides with black alcohol ink, treated with renaissance wax and buffed up. Oh yeah, and I made a couple of artily mismatched cufflinks too. 

I didn't age any of them up for a change, though the temptation is hard to resist. I'm going to make a bunch more and mess them around like the ones below. They just look so cool all antiqued and ancient relic-ified. . 

And they sold. . . ;-)

The other thing I did with some more of the longer rectangular beads like the ones above, was to wrap them round some tube bead cores, and see how that came out. I decided to put them all together in one necklace, and after a bit of trial and error came up with the idea below. I need to take some better pics but I liked how the silver tone spacers worked with them. What you reckon??

Some, if not all of these will be making their way onto my Etsy shop in due course, so look out for them. I'm still considering in what form to sell them, bead sets, earring sets, made up earrings. . . hmm. . But that's food for another post I think.

See ya next time, which, despite my good intentions is likely to be another ten days away, judging by my past efforts, and hey, don't be shy about commenting, no pressure though.

Jon x

Image Transfer - part 324. . .

I'm still obsessed with image transfer stuff, and, though I say it myself as shouldn't, I have got it down pretty well by now.

Here's some I made earlier. .  Claire Maunsell gradauted cutters technique,  hollow beads. A repeat order no less ;-) Relatively gently 'antiqued' this time.

I have an idea of what works and what doesn't, which leaves me free to make various different sorts of beads, and to consider the different uses I could put the resulting beads to, instead of having to concentrate on the technique. . .

For instance, these are some 1.5 cm square, about 1cm thick, hollow, asymmetrical pattern, image beads I made because I liked the 3cm ones and thought smaller, chunky beads might look cool. Not sure what they would be best suited to, but necklace/pendant/assemblage beads looks the best option I think.

I can't stop making cufflinks. Even though I haven't sold many. They just look so cool! 

I am resisting the idea that a pair of cufflinks should match exactly. These, and all my other pairs, have similar, but not identical designs on them.

Some of the beads I made, that might have become cufflinks if I hadn't got a grip on my cufflink obsession, I made into earrings.

I have to stop making those soon too, or I will be overrun with them ;-)

Next, I going to try Tie tacks, I got some blanks the other day. Rings, if I can successfully mess up the horribly shiny ring blanks I got. I have sandpaper and alcohol inks etc, so I don't see it being a problem. . . And brooches, once I have researched what kind of pins and brooches other artists make, to get an idea of the scope of the 'medium'.
Should be fun ;-)
Jon x

Image Transfer - more musings and more results.

Well, after finally having the time to get stuck in to some Polymer Clay after the new year, I spent a fairly intense day refining my image transfer technique and my faux ancient, fake ageing surface treatment. It seems quite perverse to make a clean, clear image transfer and then trash it with alcohol ink and sandpaper, but the end result is worth it, in my view. The clean originals are just too. . . clean somehow. Also I like the contradiction inherent in making a computer generated image appear to be something dug up from an archaeological site.
From the reaction I have got from various sources, some from artist's who's work I admire very much, it seems I am doing the right thing ;-)

So, I confirmed to myself that a mix of 15-20% trans clay to 80-85% whatever basic clay you are using to transfer the image onto, is best. The image sticks to the clay appreciably better than it does to plain clay and looks a bit clearer.

I'm still not 100% convinced about dye sublimation inks and paper working as well as the lazer print and water technique. But it has it's own look, and it seems to absorb the image into the clay a little bit. Which makes distressing the surface a bit harder, you need to really go at it. . ;-)
I need to experiment with baking times and with transferring onto pre baked clay.

So here are a few of the beads I made.
What do you reckon?
Jon x

Aged dye sub hollow 2cm square beads

seriously distressed, hollow, 4cm round disk beads

dye sub - yellow acrylic ink version

An Experiment. . . .

Glass coasters from my Etsy shop

As you may or may not be aware, I have been making and selling framed tiles and glass coasters of my digital designs for a while now. To do this I use a process known as Dye Sublimation to transfer the

printed images onto the tiles or coasters. This involves using heat and pressure via a special heat press, specially coated tiles etc, and special printer paper and inks.

OK, Dye sublimation likes certain kinds of plastics and I was pretty sure that Polymer clay was likely to take a dye sub image pretty well. 

I decided to experiment as I had my specially set up printer and loads of paper, so I printed out a sheet of small images to mess around with. 

What I decided to do was use a disk of unbaked clay to apply the image to, but put a thin coating of liquid clay onto the image so that it stuck to the image and to the clay. The reason I wanted to stick the image to the clay was that I was intending to use a heat gun to 'bake' the liquid clay and transfer the image to it. If the image wasn't stuck down it would end up getting blown away. (I'm too impatient to bake them in the oven, and I wanted to do one at a time to see the results quicker)

So I tried that. I gave the image about one minute with the heat gun on medium. ( my heat gun has a heat intensity dial, which is very useful - Wickes sell that model ) I was careful not to burn it. The image became visible through the paper quite quickly but I kept heating it just to be sure it had transferred. 

I then wetted the back of the image and rubbed the paper off. You can soak it in a bowl of water if you wish, same difference. The clay disks weren't properly baked so I baked them in the oven for about 15 mins or so to cure the clay. The results were very clean and clear.

More or less un-messed with image transfer disks. Just a bot of Alcohol ink round the rim.

Too clean and clear for me ;-) having established that my method worked I decided to get stuck into some surface treatment on some of them. I tried my usual various combinations of alcohol inks, inca gold and gilder's wax in various colours, sanding it off a bit and then adding more, and so on and so on.

They looked nice, but there was no way of stringing them if I wanted to use them, so I made them into the front layer of some circular hollow beads, using the Claire Maunsell method with different sized cutters. This of course required the whole thing to be baked. . .

The trouble was that baking would melt the gilder's wax and disperse or otherwise mess up the alcohol inks intensity. Oh well, couldn't be helped. They came out solidly baked but a bit muzzy and fuzzy. So I used the same alcohol inks that I was painting the back and sides with to paint round the 'frame' of the front image. The resulting beads looked seriously beat up but cool all the same. Like something dug up from some archaeological site, on another planet. . . Which is fine by me.

But not as beat up as my attempts at transferring black and white images onto already baked clay disks. The image didn't stick to the clay as nicely as with raw clay and kept peeling off in an annoying way. I used some 'heat tape' that I use for dye sub stuff to hold it down but that wasn't always successful. I did the same as the beads above, giving them the surface treatment, then deciding to make them into usable beads by sticking another disk of clay behind them and then baking.

These ones look like they've been dug up from an ancient site, thrown off a cliff and then run over repeatedly by a chieftain tank. I like them though.

Next time I shall do things in the right order, but I shall still go for the messed up look ;-)
I might even do a proper tutorial in due course.
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