Handmade and Homegrown

I went to the pottery to pick up my cachepot. I've got my rooster two weeks ago, but haven't taken photos yet, because my mother likes the proud bird so much, she instantly kept him. (I intend to take some pictures soon.)
But I did not only pick up my pot, I also took some clay with me and not only some clay, I also borrowed a mould! Woohoo! I can mess around at home now! (Although I don't know how to bring fragile dried items back to the pottery without breaking.) My feelings are divided though. My mind is excited but my wrists say: "You're stupid, stupid, stupid! Very stupid, that's what you are!" and then my mind, knowing that my tendons, muscles or both of them are burning like an igniter cord from my fingers to my elbow and up to my shoulder says: "The wrists are right! You ARE stupid!". So, let's see if I get anything done... Actually I planned to work with polymer clay, but it has to wait.

Today I harvested my first fresh and tasty green bell pepper! Look! They grow so well!


It feels good to take pictures of homegrown vegetables in bowls I made myself.


I wish I could also produce electricity by myself!

Blog Rockin' Beads

A few weeks ago I gave you a sneak peek to my beadmaking. I worked a lot on them every once in a while because I had a deadline for an order by my own personal patroness of the arts. (Woohoo! It feels very, very good if someone really likes what you do!) Many months ago I read a blog post by Humblebeads, who makes stunning polymer clay beads, titled "100 beads before breakfast". This line entered my mind again while I worked on my beads and I asked myself if this is really possible to do. 10 beads before supper is quite a lot for me and 100 beads within a month proved to be an impossible task, but nevertheless besides my usual tantalising difficulties I was really glad and enjoyed rolling a few beads every now and again. There are 91 beads of different sizes in this picture.

I made a nice bunch of bookmarks of them and they have arrived in the UK already and should find new and hopefully happy owners soon! You can take a closer look at all of them, and separately on the blue batch, the orange batch and the colourful rest in my Flickr photos! I want to make more!

Skipping Class

I did not go this time because I just need a little break. It's the loveliest warm (almost too warm) weather at the moment, which is really good for my hands and spirits, very unlike the damp, grey, un-snowy, bone-aching stupid mess of a non-winter we had for months. So I'm doing lots of things at the moment I couldn't do before but it's just too much.

I also started making polymer clay beads again and finally baked the bowl I made back in February. I received a very nice e-mail a few weeks ago about one of the bookmarks I made last year. I used some of my first and thus very flawed beads for that, so in my today's eyes it's not good at all, yet it brings joy to it's owner! It helps a lot to know that! My bead making skills are a lot better now, although I can only make a few at a time. I mainly used up bits and ends of old canes. They are all still soft and perfectly workable, even the ones I made a year ago.

My aesthetically challenged Bowl

So, here it is with it's nasty unglazed gaps, looking smudgy and as if made by the dilettante I obviously am. As you can see, yes, the glaze indeed melted and run, but it did so in places where it shouldn't. I just hope my next attempts will show better results.



Here's a part that came out as I intended it to be. Nice, even, sharp
and unsmeared and the clay completely covered with glaze. It's the
proof, it can be done properly (even by me)!

I filled the bowl with some of the polymer clay beads I made so far to make it look less sad. At the moment I can't work with pc, because my wrists can't stand more than the class once a week and need a lot of rest in between. I hope the Fimo I have in stock doesn't harden until I can work with it again.

Spring in Winter

I have to catch up on blogging some little crafting I did.
Last Friday finally was my first polymer clay day of the year. I find it always very hard to start again after a long break, because it always feels like starting from scratch again. Everything feels so difficult. My hands have to learn everything anew and there seems to be no developed routine I can build up on. I hate that! I used old canes to decorate a bowl, but I'm not too happy with it. Here's a picture of work in progress.

It looks like spring is coming already but I miss a proper wintertime, when everythings seems to be enchanted by glistening snow and the bright whiteness of it lifts the mood. Three snowy days in three months make no winter at all. There are so many grey days.

On January 22nd I was sowing tomatoes. (Is this too early?) The same sorts as last year. Eleven days later the first one started to sprout and the next day the second one. It's so nice to see them grow! Yesterday and a few days before also my cherry tomatoes sprouted. I hope they grow as fantastic as last year.

Soothing Sewing

Here's a picture that combines sewing with polymer clay. I took it because I think the colours of the threads go so well with those of my bowl. Especially the orange looks so lush with the pink and purple and blue hues.
(It's the bowl I named 'Tapio'. You may have noticed I started to give my creations cheesy names because I thought it's much nicer than calling them 'big bowl' or 'tiny bowl'. Whenever I look at this one, it reminds me of Tapio Wirkkala for some reason. I have no idea why, but it seems my brain sees a connection. So this one's called 'Tapio' now.)

I'm doing a little more sewing in small and slow steps at the moment to test how much I can do at a time without straining my wrists too much and I really enjoy it. When I'm claying I concentrate so hard on what I'm doing that I feel exhausted somehow. Sewing is so mind-relaxing! It works very well to distract me from brooding over troubles and political stuff, which can be quite depressing.

I read "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë in the past few days. I got the book more than a year ago but the motivation to read it just now is very sad and grim. The book's cover illustration shows a tombstone inscribed with the name Heathcliff, the character Heath Ledger was named after. I was really shocked when I learned he is dead. It feels so wrong and still it doesn't sink in really and I feel weird at the thought, that tens of thousands of people die much more gruesome deaths each day, yet I am so touched by the tragic of this one, although I only ever saw one of his films. But I saw "Brokeback Mountain" a lot of times and it means as much to me as a film can do.

Teddy Bears

My year so far has unfortunately been free of polymer clay but today I added pictures of the things I made last December to my Flickr-Gallery. When I stumbled across this picture this cute little face begged me to make a cane of it. So I tried and I think it turned out really nice. My teddy has a slightly more sad and melancholic expression though, hasn't he?

Winter Night

One month ago I made this bowl. Now I finally baked it together with some other items I completed meanwhile. It's the most sparkly thing I ever made because I used glitter colours. I can't decide if it is tacky or gorgeous. It looks so much like a twinkling frosty winter night to me, although the white parts looked brighter before curing. Fimo glitter white seems to contain a big part of translucent clay. I spent 2 1/2 hours alone just placing the slices on the bowl's surface because the design evolved while I did it. I am slow, but I get completely absorbed in it when I do things like that.

My Week

My little plan failed. I wasn't able to do anything decent with my hands this week. My wrists just hurt like hell and my fingers are a bit swollen. Maybe I should plan to make some little things every second week rather than every other day, although I'm bursting with energy when it comes to new ideas. Today was the first day I touched polymer clay again but I was only able to make six beads. So I read some books instead. I loaned several books about art glass from the library because my visit in Glashütte and many, many pictures I found online roused my enthusiasm for this material again. We had a beautiful wall made of quite ordinary but nevertheless very fascinating glass bricks in kindergarten. I think of it all the time when I look at and drool over the pictured objects in the books.

At the beginning of the week I picked the last of my tomatoes. I grew them on my balcony. I had to move last year and since then I have a balcony and even better I have one that views southward. It would have been a waste not to try my gardening skills having such perfect conditions. I love tomatoes and I love peas - some of the most delicious things there are in my humble opinion. So I tried to grow them and surprisingly enough it worked. I sowed them myself. Eight tiny tomato seeds turned into a little jungle. I liked to watch them grow. I didn't do much else but giving them water and worry on hot and stormy days. Two of them grew as high as 250cm, so everything became a lot bigger than I thought. I had two different sorts of cherry tomatoes and one usual sort. They gave me plenty to eat in the past months and they even resisted the frosty nights we have now. But I had to harvest the last ones now, even though they're still green. This sounds like there were only a few left, but indeed I picked a batch of 242. My complete harvest from June till November has a total amount of 1340 tomatoes. I never expected that much!

Moody

I'm a bit angry lately. I feel very inspired and have some nice ideas for new canes and patterns in mind, but my hands just won't work. It's grey and cold and wet outside, fine weather for crafting but it makes my wrists hurt even more. Nevertheless I want to try to do some little things at least every other day. So I made some beads a few days ago but again I noticed I somehow lack the sense of how much pressure I actually apply so it took a lot of patience until I managed to make them round. Sometimes it feels like I always have to start from scratch again and there's no progress at all and then I think it is just worthless. But I'm addicted after all.

New pictures of old things

A few days ago I put an end to six clayfree weeks. This also inspired me to bring my blog into shape and today I finally added pictures of the things I made in the past couple of months to my gallery. It's a bit frustrating though to see that I wasn't able to do more. Others could probably do that in less than a week. But at least I made them at all. As you can see I'm very fond of bowls.

Beads

Making beads is particularly exhausting for my wrists and fingers but I hope it strengthens them. I have some doubts though. Making beads is also a lot of fun! They need a lot of practice. I made bookmarks of my first sets and along with candlesticks I had made I gave them as gifts to some very nice people. The reactions I received were so positive, it still makes me glad.

My first face cane

I made my first bowls in May. Meanwhile I've done some more. It's still like magic. I can't get my eyes off them. I love the patterns so much.


I also made my first face cane. It's features and paleness are inspired by designs of Margaret MacDonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh and so are the stylised rose canes I built.


If you look closely it looks like this one has a tear falling from the eye on the right. But that's just an air bubble that got trapped between glass and clay. Usually they show up in less appropriate places.

Cockerel and Ball

I ordered a big range of colours online and couldn't wait until they arrived and I found great pleasure in building flower canes and tried Skinner Blends. I even made some good ones without a pasta machine. Although it was an odd thought to me to run sheets of clay through a machine that is meant for food I bought this useful tool. I convinced myself that I'm really serious about my new hobby and that it wouldn't be wasted money.

My next project should be a surprise for a dear friend of mine. He didn't like my first attempt at all. Sadly he was the first one I showed it to. Imagine how I felt when my excitement met his dislike. He said he doesn't like flowers. But as I like him more than he does my work and as I wanted to challenge myself although I'm just a beginner I made him a glass showing the badge of his favourite and most beloved football club Tottenham Hotspur. It took hours to build a complex cane as this and I'm always slow already because of my hands, but it was fun. The hole thing got a bit distorted when I tried to reduce its size but I realised I rather leave it as big as it is than mess it up in the end. I have no proper tools to cut a big cane like this into neat slices, so slicing it was also a sensible part. The finished glass looks like this.

It looks rather Greek then English to me but it is flowerfree and fortunately very well liked by my friend and I'm very proud of it.

The Beginning

Since years I've got a lot of problems with my hands and arms that include inflammations and quite a great deal of pain. I don't want to go further into this boring subject, just tell that I'm at a disadvantage when it comes to working with my hands especially as I always wanted to be an artisan.
I was in hospital at the beginning of the year and had some occupational theraphy that included working with natural clay. I made the vessel you can see in the picture. I think it shows that it was made with aching hands.

It looks quite clumsy, doesn't it, but my therapist recommended me to work more with that sort of clay to strengthen my muscles. But I feel it is much too hard to work with for me. I need too much help and I don't like that at all. I want to be independent of others to feel good and to be creative. Besides I can't bake it at home as it needs much to high temperatures.

So I looked for other materials to work with. I already had something like Fimo in mind because I had worked with it many years ago although I knew from this experience it's too hard for me as well. But then looking around in a shop I found out that there's something new called Fimo soft. Since when is it new anyway? If I had only known earlier of its existence! To try out if this stuff pleases my demands I randomly bought five colours that I liked. At home I saw three of them are labelled 'translucent' so I searched the internet to find out the purpose of that and also to find some inspiration as I had no idea what I actually could form and sculpture. Here in Germany polymer clay is a material children play with. I wasn't aware that there are so many adults in the world doing so many beautiful and artistic things with it until I saw them in the web. It was most inspiring! As I read about the ancient technique called Millefiori invented by glass artists centuries ago and as I saw what stunning things you can do with it my only thought was: "I want to be able to do that as well! I must!" I spent several weeks reading about it and pondering until I made my first cane. I did not want to mess it up. I wanted my first attempt to be successful. I made a very simple flower cane of the translucent colours I bought. I made it on March 25th. I covered a candle holder with the slices and was very, very satisfied with the result.

A huge inspiration for me is the idea of covering vessels using Millefiori canes and especially the work of Orly Rabinowitz I stumbled across when I searched Flickr. Her work is amazing! Take a look!

My first attempt made me so glad! The material is soft enough for me to
use, although not on a daily basis, but as you can see I was instantly hooked!

Starting my blog

Welcome to my blog!
My name is Jana and I live in Germany. I decided to write my own blog to keep something like a diary about my work with polymer clay which has turned into a little obsession. I also want to improve my English or rather use it in the first place so I'll write in this language.
I started working with polymer clay only three months ago, so my first postings will be about this time until I reach the present and then I hope there will be a lot of news to add in the future.