How many of What? Crackly Stuff, No Room in the Inn. . and New Year Good Intentions

First off, may I wish a very happy new year to all my readers, present or past. thank you for your support. It is nice to think that I am not just talking to myself.  ;-) 

I'll try to make the read worth the wear on your link clicking finger. Failing that, I will at least try to make the the pics worth looking at. . .

simple crackled barrel beads

So, to business. . . 

As you may have realised from the title and any pics that may have passed in front of your eyeballs so far, I have been playing around with crackly stuff again. It's nice to come back to a technique after a month or two of not using it. I find the time gap has somehow consolidated a few things in my mind, and I am more sure of what I can achieve with it. 

I am really liking how it can be combined with my turned technique to make ancient looking beads which could be made of anything from ceramic to bone to horn etc.

Semi trans cernit tube beads with crackle and alcohol inks

Talking of making beads, the other thing that has been exercising me somewhat, is the issue of how many of what to make. 

I guess it all depends on the use the beads get put to eventually. I used to imagine my creations being used in necklaces and the like, so I made sets of six or eight. The number was pretty arbitrary but seemed to be ok with buyers. 

After a while I realised that they were using them mainly as earring components, which I obviously didn't have a problem with, but I did think that maybe making pairs would be more convenient for earring makers, so I started making pairs of beads. 

So, sixes or pairs? 

Crackled round semi trans beads

I hope you had a good Christmas or other festivity you may indulge in.

Mine was by and large good. We had an interesting moment when we turned up (after a four hour drive) at our pre booked hotel in a small Yorkshire town only to find that it was dark and uninhabited. It had gone out of business a couple of weeks before. The booking firm sent us an email just after we left on the 23rd but we weren't online after that so it didn't get to us in time.
Luckily the phone number had been rerouted to a pub just up the road, who were very nice and helpful and got us booked in to another local hotel. Phew.
Could have done without that to be honest ;-)

green patchy crackle beads

The new year gig I mentioned in a previous post went very well. Just me on bass and my mate Rich on guitar and vocals banging out old faves. The pub was packed and we all had a great time. Yay! And we got paid! (getting paid to play is a novelty, believe me)

grey round, turned technique semi trans crackle beads

I haven't made any new year resolutions as they never quite work, and make you feel bad when you don't keep to them. I have set some intentions however, but not with negative associations attached.

I am going to list more stuff on my Etsy shop and share on FB and Instagram etc. Thus keeping my profile reasonably high. But only if it feels good to do it. I'm trying to avoid the concept of 'should' where feasible and not harmful, as it usually turns out to be a confused version of somebody else's 'should' and not something drawn from my own experience. Which doesn't tend to turn out well imho.

Spikes!

I made some more cool spikes. These are fun to make and I will keep on making them and variations of same. . .

MDF backed poly clay 'biscuit' beads

I also found some smaller 'biscuits' (for use with a 'biscuit jointer') in a diy store (in the reduced price box.  .) They are MDF unlike the larger ones I had used previously which were plywood. This makes them a bit less forgiving to work with, and produced nasty dust when sanded, but nevertheless I made some MDF biscuit backed poly clay textured drops in a faux bone style. .

Well, that will do for now. Have a good 2018 'going forward' as they say, I intend to have a good one too, though going sideways is probably more my style ;-)

Jon x

Bead Frenzies and Textures and Tools

As I wander around on my day to day travels, taking the longer, more scenic way to the post office maybe, or on walks round the local bird reserve, or just wherever I happen to be, I am always half looking out for interesting things that might make a good texture on Polymer Clay. I'm sure there are many fellow texture obsessives out there who know just what I am talking about.
It's surprisingly hard to second guess which of the things I pick up will work and which won't, (too big, too small, not detailed enough at the right scale etc.) Some of the things I find look promising but don't deliver when it comes down to it, some are ok but nothing to write home about, but others are really cool and work beautifully. The ones above were pretty nifty. And they just look beautiful anyway. The closer to the minutiae of nature I get, the more wonderful I find it.

The other thing I look out for, though not in the same places, obviously, are tools. There is a secondhand tools stall on our local market that I like to keep an eye on. I have snagged a few useful things really cheap. A pair of parallel motion pliers for about 3 quid for instance. OK, theoretically useful things I mean. I haven't found a use for them yet, but if I wanted to bend several wires of the same width at the same time, for instance, they would be just the job. . .

But the extra small, bent nose pliers below, £2.50, and the fine point round nose pliers £1.00, are very useful. Not sprung handles, but sometimes that is a disadvantage as they can spring open when you accidentally relax your grip for a split second, causing you to drop things. And you know what happens when you drop things don't you? They bounce, and unless you manage to follow their progress with a hawk eye, they vanish, only to be found feet away from where you thought they could ever possibly end up, if they get found at all.

I have to say I do get a kick out of 'finding' things, whether in fields or in secondhand shops, it allows the Universe to smile on you from time to time I think, which is always nice.

 Here are some more texture finds. Bone is always good, with that kind of bubble structure. The middle one is Sugar Beet stalk I think, as that is the only thing grown in that field that could produce something of that size and gnarly-ness. The thing on the right is familiar but I can't remember what plant it was from. Winter is a good time of year to find plant related stuff.

Below are more twigs, rosehips, cedar cone remains, flint and a dried root of something or other from the garden. 

I really need to allocate a special box for my texture finds, as my windowsill is getting stupidly cluttered. . .

I used some of these texture items on some of the beads I made in my latest bead frenzy. A selection of said textured beads are pictured below.

The shape of many of them is due to the ad hoc bead rolling device I have been using, viz - a clear perspex block, which, all things being right with the world, is intended to have a silicon texture sheet stuck to it. Of course, being me I use it for no such thing. . . 

The edges of said block are bevelled or grooved to improve the hand's grip on it or somesuch. This groove is hemispherical in cross section. 

So what I do is kind of push or roll a ball of clay down this groove using a texture implement of some kind to propel it and impart texture at the same time. 

Sometimes I use found bits of nature, as seen above, and sometimes my photopolymer texture sheets. The result is a sort of centrally textured, flat ended, ball shaped bead, which is a shape I really like. Kind of pleasingly 'primitive'. . .

It remains to be seen if anyone else really likes it, as these beads are only lately listed in my etsy shop. I think they look cool all together anyway.

cheers,

Jon x

Well I had a go at some pendants. . .

I took some bits and pieces from my 'pending' beads, the ones that are hanging around waiting to be photographed and listed, and a couple from existing listings, which I shall take down if and when, and tried a few relatively spontaneous ideas for pendants. Using my animal zoo stamp tile type things I mentioned in my previous post. I quite like them, and might be moved to try them out in my shop very soon. I need to play with the zoo stamps some more, definitely, however I keep getting distracted ;-)

I made some quite cool heavily textured spikes, that look fun. . .

and I shall continue to mess around with stuff. I have more ideas than time, which is the right way around I think.

cheers,

Jon x

Common or Garden, but mostly Garden

Echinops. . .

Well, as you might have figured, if you were of a mind to ponder these things, I do quite like to try out things I haven't tried before in the area of polymer clay bead making. Not implying that these things are in any way innovative or exciting you understand, just things I personally haven't tried before. Being relatively new to the medium makes it quite easy to find these new things to try. I haven't got even close to exhausting the possibilities of the material yet so I can have a small time, not much effort creative thought, put it into practice and see what happens. All nice and unpressured.

So, I thought about selective texturing, using textures on only part of a bead. Alongside this thought was the knowledge that I had a new texture making tool, or something that can be used as a texture making tool.

You may or may not be a gardener of sorts. If you are, you may know of a plant known by the name of 'Globe Thistle' or by the latin name of 'Echinops'. It's a perennial herbaceous border favourite that stands about four foot high or thereabouts and has rather wonderful round, spiky, ball shaped flowers, or rather multi flower, ball shaped things which must have a technical name, but I don't know what it is. They can be blue or white.

When the autumn comes, and the flowers have gone, the ball shaped multi flower becomes a ball shaped multi seed head, and when the seeds have dispersed, a much smaller, (3/8"-ish)still spiky core remains. That is the thing I had in mind as a texture tool. I have several of them that I snapped off.

What I did was take a bead size ball of Polymer Clay and roll the echinops head around one end to make a textured area. Then I baked it. The bead, not the echinops. . .

The other thing I hadn't done before was selectively paint on Poly clay beads with alcohol inks, or anything else for that matter, so I painted a base layer of red, for the textured area, and yellowy green for the rest. When that had dried, I painted some stripes in yellow, I like the outline that appears when you paint alcohol ink on alcohol ink, and the fact that a new layer of ink tends to replace the previous colour rather than sit on top of it. I thought the result of the texturing and the painting was quite nicely organic looking, like a sort of unthreateningly alien acorn or somesuch.

As you can see below, I made some other ones, using a different texture tool. Those ones look as though they should be edible, like a bizarre sort of canapé or finger food. . .
I drilled a 1mm hole down the length of them, as I thought they looked like something someone might put on the end of a headpin. But whaddoiknow? ;-)

Well, the next step is to stick them up in my shop and see what the reaction is. Since the new year things have been eerily quiet on the selling stuff front. I suspect that it's the after effects of holidays spending and not that everyone hates my work. . . Whichever it is, I am undeterred, and listing stuff every day. Hah!
Jon x

Manic making. . .

Well, so much for stated good intentions. . . 

I have departed from my plan to lay off the component making and maybe do some larger more complex things. 

Aye well, given a choice between backwards or forwards, I will find a way of going sideways. . . That's just the way I am.

What I have actually been doing is somewhat manically making even more organic textured components these last couple of weeks. 

In my defence, the intention was to get a pool of draft listings together so I can add a couple every day or so while engaged in other stuff, like endeavouring to earn a living. You know, that stuff. . .

I'm sort of getting there, but the temptation is to add lots of items to the shop at once 'because it's there'.

I need to resist this.

I did, however manage to play around with multiple textures, as in the groovy limpet like thing above. The texture in the middle was from a kind of hard wormcast found on mussel shells and the like, and the other texture was from a digital image made into a texture sheet and a further texture stamp or roller made from that, then impressed round the outside. That was fun, and it came out looking well organic and crusty. But mainly I followed the simple rolled texture sort of fascination. . .

Some of the things below are in my etsy shop, and some aren't but will be in the next few days I should think.

I made some basic rolled texture beads influenced by a pic of some neolithic beads I saw on pinterest. 

Some strange organic fungoid alien bean shoot dangles.

Some satisfyingly crusty drop charms. Which have obviously been lying on the sea bed for about 100 years.

some entertainingly spotty blue beads, using the outrageously intense colour that is Indigo alcohol ink. That stuff should have a health warning ;-) I love it, but cleaning the brush very thoroughly afterwards is advised.

Some square texture beads.

And most recently, some more organic spike things that remind me both of seaweed and of microscopic creatures somehow. . .

At some point soon I will take my own advice and take a break from manic making. I would like to produce some more considered work as well as my more instinctive reactions to the material that my most recent work has been at root. 

Jon x

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

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

Making Decisions

My mode of working of late seems to be to mess around with an idea, make something, and then try to work out what it might be used for. It's not such a daft idea if you are mainly making beads, like I am, because beads are either things with holes that you thread a cord or wire through, (for necklaces, pendant and bracelets etc) or something without holes that you stick onto something else. (rings, cufflinks, stud earrings etc). So if you make something with a hole in it, it could be used in a necklace by somebody, and so on.

lazy beads with no holes. I messed them up when I drilled a hole down the middle, so that serves me right . .

But I am beginning to realise that having a plan of sorts is a better idea. I made some beads recently that I was thinking of selling without holes, to leave the decisions about where the hole should be, and hence the bead's ultimate use, to the buyer. You know, empowering the end user, not dictating what they should do, freedom. . . But actually that was dishonest. What I was being was lazy. I didn't want to have to make a decision about what the beads were intended for, and pretended I was enabling people somehow. Oh well, I fooled myself for a while. As kind people on Facebook pointed out, without holes they are just pretty rocks, or words to that effect. So in future I will make beads for a purpose. The end user is still free to adapt them for another purpose as far as that is feasible, but they will start off, at least in my head, with an intended use. . .

Tube beads. Proper beads with holes. For stringing no less!

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

Rummaging and Rediscovering. . . And the Cut Off Point

Well, I've been rummaging through some things I made a few months ago, that I wasn't quite sure what to do with at the time. It's a quite useful thing to do, to assess your not so recent work through the prism of your current set of criteria, if that makes sense. I mean, look at it in the light of your current creative confidence and with the benefit of your subsequently gained experience and see what you make of it.

My rummaging turned up a few worthwhile things, amongst the stuff that was justifiably not worth bothering with.

Such rummaging and re-assessing is a useful exercise because it can reveal how your attitude to the medium and to your process might have changed in the intervening period, in ways you hadn't actually noticed owing to the gradual nature of said changes. For instance, I found that my work of a few months ago tended to be looser and more free than my recent work, which is something that, it having come to light, I can consider and act on. Basically I need to loosen up ;-)

The things I found were a bunch of thin, textured spikes. Only just thick enough to be drilled through without breaking. I remember a few did break when I drilled them. These ones were the thicker, more robust survivors. The current incarnation of my creative sense decided they would look good as earring beads, so I paired them up and got my trusty camera and tripod out.

Which brings me to part two of this post. Something about a cut off point.
You see, for each item you need at least four photos, an intro shot, a close up, a scale shot and another variation on the intro shot, each of which you have to set up, take, load into your computer, run through Photoshop to resize, adjust colour/levels etc, sharpen and save as a .jpg. Times that by seven for the seven sets of spikes, then add the time it takes to upload to Etsy, write a title, paying attention to likely Keyword Phrases, a description, match your tags to your title, add some more useful tags to make up the 13, preview and finally list.

The trouble is, if the item is only selling for five quid, which is probably about right for these, is it really worth all that time and effort?
I am slowly streamlining the process, but long term I might have to reconsider whether to sell pairs of beads for instance at all. Maybe sets of six is a better way. . . That or charge more for pairs of beads and run the risk of never selling them. .
Bah, economics! Who needs it? 'I just wanna make stuff'.

Big steps. . .

I've been busy this last few days. Well, I've been busy this last few months on this particular project. We're sorting out the house, ready to put it on the market very soon. We made a list of things that needed doing, about four months ago, and have steadily worked our way through it. This last few days was just the cleaning and putting things out of sight to be ready for the photographer. He came yesterday, so I'm in that strange limbo you get when you have just stopped being busy and can't quite figure out what to do with yourself.
So I haven't done much claying, and haven't posted anything. I have been listing a backlog of stuff onto my shop though.
I did play around with some textures and some bits from the hardware store though.

Too big and heavy for earrings, probably, though I might be wrong. Cool for arty statement pendants though I think.

Still waiting for the house pics and description to come through, to be approved by us, but next time I post we may be in the throes of showing people round, fielding offers and all that stuff. Then all we have to do is find the right house even further out into the country. . .