New ornaments in the making

Original froggy ornament

So a while back I made this frog ornament. Cute but a bit rough. However lots of people liked it and it has since sold AND I've had a request for another one.

So I've been looking around locally to try to find clear glass ornaments to use without much luck. However I got lucky over the weekend, I went down to Portland and stopped into the Joann's there to get more of the varnish I use on my jewelry and of course they had exactly the ornaments I needed in the holiday section.

Hooray for big craft stores. I wish there was one a little closer to me but that's what I get for living in a small town in the middle of rural Maine.

8 little glass balls for frog ornaments

Here are the new glass balls. I'm planning on making a few changes to the design. First of all wire instead of fishing line to hang the tadpoles inside the balls, ribbon instead of leather cord for hanging, and maybe glue some beads in the bottom of the ball to look like eggs (haven't decided on that yet). Also I'm thinking of not just plain old green frogs but maybe a few of the really colorful tropical rain forest frogs as well.

Another Post on Packaging

I know I've talked about packaging before but I'm going to do it again because I think it's an important way to make your customer see how much you care about the products you make. I have a whole Squidoo lens dedicated to the idea, you really should go check it out: Make your Handmade Products Stand Out.

The reason I thought about this subject again was that I attended an Etsy Virtual Lab Wednesday night on packaging and it was full of good ideas. One thing that was really stressed was that just sending out your products in it's pretty packaging isn't enough when you're sellign online. You should show your customers exactly the type of packaging that your product will be coming in. The best way is of course to include a photo of your packaging in the product listing.

Here are some examples of my packaging that I photographed last night:

And here is a new video I put together to replace the older one:

Branching off into hair jewelry

I don't know how obvious it is from my profile photo here on the blog but I have very long hair, down past my waist, and I love getting new barrettes and hair sticks to hold it up. So why not make some? Well that's what I've done.

First up here's some cuttlefish hair sticks, click the link under the pics to go to the shop page they're on.

Night Sky Cuttlefish Hairsticks with Moonstone

Green Cuttlefish Hairsticks with Aventurine and Snowflake Obsidian

Next up is an experiment, I'm not sure if I'm going to continue with this series yet. It's a nudibranch (sea slug) barrette.

Blue and Yellow Nudibranch Barrette

Packaging Video

Happy Halloween!

I put together a little video on how I package my jewelry when I ship them out. Hope it gives you some ideas and make sure to check out the Squidoo lens I have on the topic: Make your Handmade Products Stand Out! Using Creative Packaging

New Cuttlefish Complete

So here are the newest cuttlefish. As you can see the translucent ones turned out quite well. I also made a much darker cuttlefish as well. This was also an experiment with colored clay, this time pure black clay colored with just a little red paint and Pearl Ex powders in Super Russet and Blue Russet.

Translucency Test

Now that I have some test cuttlefish with this new clay blend I needed to test just how translucent it really is. I'm very pleased with the results. Here's a photo of the cuttlefish pendant held up to a candle.

I eyeball amounts when mixing clay so this isn't exact but the mix is basically 1/4 of a 2oz package of premo frost, a pea size ball of white premo, a smidgen of blue premo (maybe 1/6 of the size of the ball of white). You want to add just enough white and blue to make the premo frost look whiter, it's normal color is a little beige or cream colored but much less so than normal translucent premo.

Next up is painting these cuttlefish. I need to be very careful to only slightly tint them with paint and pearlex, I don't want to hide the translucency at all. I'll probably wait until after my new beads arrive to start painting because I want to be able to compliment the bead colors nicely.

Winter Cuttlefish Test

So I've sculpted the first winter cuttlefish pendants and earring bases. Took me a bit to get just the right blend of clay, I wanted translucent but needed it whiter so I added a tiny bit of white and even tinier bit of blue premo to premo frost so get my mix. Here's what they look like compared to my usual peach base.

Winter cuttlefish may not remain the name of this line depending on if I decide to keep making them throughout the year. Haven't decided on an alternative name though (anything but pastel cuttlefish).

New ideas and waiting for supplies

So I ordered some jewelry supplies Thursday night. Lots of nice goodies to play with when they arrive. I ordered from Firemountain Gems and they have lots of cool stuff and an even cooler assortment deal. I had picked out 12 items that I wanted and it came to about $46, little notice on my shopping cart said that if I ordered 15+ items I get the discounted prices for them, so I picked out 3 more things and guess what? The cost actually dropped to $37! Now that's pretty cool.

So I'm still waiting for my stuff to arrive, according to FedEx that will be Thursday. In the meantime since my wrist still hurts I'm planning new designs that will use my new goodies. Some of the things I ordered are little glass bottle pendants, I'm thinking tiny Perma-Pet necklaces.

I also got some nice pastel gemstone beads and I was thinking about making some winter cuttlefish using translucent clay mixed with a little blue and white and tinting with pearl ex in various wintry colors.

Not entirely sure how I'm going to decorate them yet but I ordered some blank barrettes and hairsticks.

I'm sure other ideas will come to me once I have my little paws on my new supplies and can start playing with them.

Announcing my Etsy Shop

Yep, I've finally worked out some issues with registering for Etsy and have now opened a shop there. I'm really excited about this, Etsy is the biggest site out there for selling handmade products.

You can check out my shop at noadi.etsy.com.

Can't Make Up My Mind

I bought some really pretty glass beads last weekend, lavender briolettes (teardrop shaped with a hole through the point) and oblong frosted clear beads. I put them together with some clear size 6 seed beads, those are the larger of the two common sizes, on my bead board into a very pretty necklace design. I also made wire-wrapped dangles with 3 of the briolettes, 2 are for earrings. The third is where my problem comes in, I want to sculpt a central pendant with that briolette hanging from the bottom.

I have no idea what to sculpt! I'm totally drawing a blank, about all I've decided is that it should be in the same general color palette as the beads. This is a very different design in color and mood than what I normally do so it's really frustrating me, flowers come to mind but so many designs use flowers.

Started on New Commissioned Sculpture

So I've begun my latest commissioned sculpture, Mike is a wonderful client to work for since he really didn't specify anythign more than final cost and that he'd like a full figure (he already has a bust I created for him). Things are still very rough right now, only an armature but I have an idea where this is going to go. I ran across these gorgeous stock photos on DeviantArt by Lockstock while browsing for reference photos last week.

I'm going to be doing a combination of these two poses and all that lovely drapery, it's size is 1/8 scale (a little over 8 inches). Here's the armature, it's mostly aluminum wire though the weight bearing leg also has a piece of much stiffer steel wire reinforcing it and helping anchor it into the base.

It doesn't show that well in the photos but the fingers have some extremely fine beading wire wrapped aroudn the fingers and then secured with a little super glue. I always have trouble getting clay to stick well on fingers and when I saw this wire I thought it would be perfect, it's really not much thicker than a hair or piece of thread that's how fine it is. Since I'm going to be doing so much detailed drapery in this sculpture I made the arms so they can be removed, the head can also be removed to make working on it easier.

I used a little aluminum foil for bulking and then covered it all with Sculpey Ultralight which after baking is much more secure than just foil and I can write on it. You can see the center lines I drew on the chest and head as reminders of the positioning I want.

To support the drapery I'll be using some wireform mesh, it hasn't been added yet because I had to order more (probably won't arrive for at least another week, a few things are backordered) and I also think it might be easier to get some of the torso roughed in before adding the mesh.

Tentacle Bug WIP

Finished sculpting this little tentacled bug Monday night. It's sculpted from super sculpey and is about 2.5 inches long. Turned out kind of cute actually. He still needs to be painted and I want to make little terrarium of his "natural environment" as a display.

Rainbow and Sculpey Ultralight

So yesterday was one of those days when the weather just can't make up it's mind. It switched off and on between light rainshowers and sunshine. Now that's a perfect recipe for a rainbow and about 8 o-clock PM (yes, I am far enough north that the sun is still up at 8pm this time of year) I caught this one. I've tried taking photos of rainbows before usually without success but these photos came out quite nicely.

Now to something about sculpting. A few weeks ago I picked up a package of sculpey ultralight to try out for making armatures. There are just times when aluminum foil isn't the best choice for an armature. For example sometimes the foil can show through when using translucent clay, like on my cuttlefish pendants and permapets. I decided that for large armatures that what would probably work best is still to use aluminum foil and maybe cover it with ultralight when using transluscent clays (I wouldn't bother with opaque clays like my gray super sculpey mix unless I really needed to cut down on weight). I just realize one very useful benefit of this clay as an armature tonight, I can draw guide lines on it.

The downside of ultralight is that it's a little chalky and not as strong as other armature materials like axpoxie sculpt so I wouldn't use it to support weight, only for bulking out so I may not use if much for really large pieces. For things like my cuttlefish earrings where weight is a big consideration for the wearer's comfort it's perfect.

Fire Dancer Concept

Here you go, as promised the concept art for my Fire Dancer sculpt. I decided to play with watercolors a little bit for this one. I never claimed to be any good at watercolors but it gets across the idea of the motion and the vibrancy of the colors I want.

And here's a photo of the fabric that was the inspiration for this sculpt. I'm still working on getting the right way of stiffening it for use in this sculpt.

In other news, I now have an announcement newsletter that you can sign up for. It'll go out once or twice a month and announce new artwork, sales, deals, etc.

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Pondering

I've spent a good chunk of the past few days editing cuttlefish jewelry pictures which is quite repetitive and I've gotten to the point where editing photos is pretty automatic for me. This gives me plenty of time to think and come up with new ideas. I don't know how many of these I'll actually make but they're all pretty fun (my mind starts getting silly after a few hours of any repetitive task).

1: Jellyfish necklace. I picture a transluscent bell with beaded tentacles coming out and wrapping around the neck.

2: Salamander sculpture. I'm craving sprign and one annual sign of spring here is when the spotted salamanders start emerging an migrating to water to lay their eggs.

3: Steampunk cephalopods. I'd need to get some gears and other mechanical bits and sculpt a squid or octopus with a panel that opens up to reveal clockwork inside.

4: Dance figure studies. I've found some great reference photos of dancers and contortionists that I'd like to incorporate into some sculptures. I've had the idea of a fire dancer for a while so maybe consinue the theme with different elements.

I think I'm done with creating cuttlefish jewelry for a while. I love making them but I've got a pretty good inventory of them right now so I need to move on to other projects. Here's the most recent additions.

All my Cuttlefish Jewelry.

Shop Blossom

Okay, I know I said I'd have non-web and marketing stuff soon and I will. I just finished sculpting a bunch of cuttlefish earrings and pendants (they are just awaiting paint right now). However I have to share my newest web project.

Shop Blossom is a social network I just launched last night, it's a place for any online small business including of course artists who sell their work online to join (even if you aren't an online business you can join if you are interested in the subject). You can create a profile page, network, add photos and videos, promote your business, and discuss how to make your business better in the forums and groups.

This is a new adventure for me, I've moderated forums before but never a social network. I will be moderating it too to make sure no one is spamming, flaming, or posting inappropriate or adult content. A lot of parents work from home, I want them to be comfortable viewing it while their kids are in the room.

Trying to Get Back into Things

I've been fighting off the flu for a few weeks now which has made working with clay hard for me (thus all the recent posts about web stuff). Something about being congested messes with my ability to focus my eyes, things just seem to swim around.

I'm feeling almost back to normal so I'm gearing up to get working with clay again and I have lots of ideas. Top of the list is of course to finish up Selkie Emerging, and I have a fun idea of a fire dancer. I'll try to get a mockup sketch done sometime this week.

How to Cure Polymer Clay

I just finished creating a Squidoo lens that gives an overview of different techniques for curing polymer clay. Give it a look, you might pick up a few tips.
Techniques for Curing Polymer Clay

I also wrote up a little lens on using the rss feeds eCrater generates for stores.
Using eCrater RSS Feeds

Odds and Ends

Few interesting tidbits for you today.

First of all the brand new Maine Arts Commission Blog. It's focussed on the arts in Maine but is a good read for any artist.

Second off a great armature tutorial courtesy of Jeff at iSculpt.

Last but not least I've added some handmade sculpting tools to my shop. I make most of my sculpting tools myself and through trial and error have come up with some that I really love. I'm now making these for anyone who would like to buy them.

Little Bit of Sewing

I was thinking yesterday that I wished I had some gift boxes to send out my jewelry in when people order but then I thought that would be a bit of a waste to use two boxes that are likely to be thrown away (the gift box and the shipping box) so I thought of fabric bags. Most people I think would keep it if not for the jewelry then to put change or little objects in.

So I broke out the sewing machine today to make up some little gift bags. I have a big box full of fabric odds and ends that I rarely use because most pieces are too small to do much with. Here are the first three test ones. It took me about 45 minutes to make them all but now that I have the process down I could churn them out pretty quickly.

So from now on anyone ordering one of my jewelry designs will be getting it in one of these cute little bags. Colors or course will depend on the fabric I have but I'll try to match it to the jewelry if I can.