Pirate Booty - coins and pendants

Today, I uploaded a little bit of pirate treasure to my Etsy shop and my photos at Flickr. Here's one photo of the silver-tone pendant I made last week:

I've also uploaded photos of a copper-tone one antiqued with verdigris, and there are photos of a gold-tone one I have yet to upload.

They're all made from the same mold-- a mold my husband carved himself for a tutorial at our clay website. The tutorial illustrates how to make a "pirate coin". I just took it a step further and turned the coin into a pendant/medallion.

I tried out a new finish on these coins-- matte instead of the high gloss I normally use. I think the matte is a vast improvement over the gloss-- at least, for things that don't look right with a high gloss. IMHO, the high gloss never has looked right on my "faux metal" pieces. They're simply too shiny with it. The matte doesn't 100% authentic, either, I think, but it's pretty good for things that must be sealed. (These medallion pendants have to be sealed because the rub-on wax would otherwise rub off on skin or clothes-- eek!)

Hm. The dryer's buzzing at me. Time to go...

Key chains with photo transfers

Oh, forgot to mention in my last post that I uploaded a few photos to my Flickr account this afternoon. Not many, but a few.

Among them were some key chains with photo transfers-- made as "a little something extra" to go in with the Christmas gifts for a few pet-loving family members. While I'm happy that the photo transfer process I'm using seems to work pretty well, I'm less than satisfied with the overall project. I'm just not that great at putting together different elements of clay.

Buy hey, they're just key chains, so they don't have to be perfect!

Here are a couple made with black clay for trim. I added a silver metallic wax rub-on to give a faux metal look, so I "had" to seal them with something (to keep the wax from rubbing off). I used two or three coats of MinWax Polycrylic, glossy.



For this one, I used very lightly tinted (too lightly tinted, as I realized when I saw the result) translucent clay with glitter inclusions. I also sealed this one, more to protect the photo transfer than anything else. Oh, and the accent bead is a twisted together bit of white and black clay, dusted over with Pearl-Ex powder-- duo yellow-green... or gold-green... or whatever it's called.

I need to think out a better way (or at least a way I'm more satisfied with) of using photo transfers with jewelry and such. (It's the covering up the back of the transfer clay and finishing off the edges nicely that gives me the trouble...) I'd like to try more transfers, but I'm not sure yet what all I want to do with them! (g)

Faux stone and metal

Yesterday, I finally got around to photographing some of my polymer clay beads and pendants. Among the things I photographed were the recent batches of faux stone and faux metal pendants I textured with my homemade texture sheets.

Here are some of the antiqued faux stone pieces...

And here are some of the faux metal pieces...

This last one wasn't from a texture sheet. Instead, I just stamped into the clay with a rubber stamp and used an embossing tool to make dots around the stamped image. I used the same type of rub-on wax that I used for the other pieces of faux metal.

I was a little bit disappointed with how the photos of the faux metal turned out. I mean, they're clear enough, but they don't really capture the shine and "metallic-ness" of the originals. I'll have to see if I can come up with a better way to photograh them...

One other thing I don't like about these pieces-- any time I use metallic wax on a piece of jewelry, I pretty much have to seal it with a clear finish. This adds to the shine of the piece, but it actually makes them look less realistic, I think. Maybe it's because most metal just isn't shiny in that particular way. Maybe it's because the recessed "tarnished" parts (the parts with no metallic wax on them) are shiny, too, whereas real tarnished metal isn't. Either way, I can't really see a way around it. I think that I need to coat the whole piece to really seal the wax, but even if I didn't have to, it would be a major pain, trying to varnish just the upper parts of each piece... Maybe a satin finish would be less offensive to my sensibilities, but I doubt it'll make that much difference. It's just a trade-off-- if you want the look you get from metallic wax, you have to accept the gloss of the sealant.

On a positive note-- It's interesting, seeing how the same design looks with the upper parts highlighted vs. the lower parts being emphasized with paint. The same design can take on a totally different look, depending on how it's used.

One of the next things I wasn to try is making another set of black pendants with the texture sheets and treating them with mica powders instead of rub-on metallic wax.

Testing out my texture sheets...

I've been testing out the mini texture sheets I made a few days ago-- using them to make small, textured pendants.

For the first batch of tests, I mixed up some faux stone (translucent clay with inclusions). I now have all of those sanded (inclusions sometimes make for rough edges when you're using shape cutters), antiqued with acrylics (mostly white), and re-cured to heat-set the paint. I'm going to try buffing a few of them to finish them off. Strictly speaking, they don't even have to be buffed, but I prefer that look, myself. Then, maybe, I'll get around to photographing them.

While antiquing them, it became apparent that some of the textures probably lend themselves better (or at least as well) to metallic wax, mica powder, or other "upper surface" highlighting than to antiquing. So I've just finished baking another batch with black clay, which I intend to treat with metallic waxes, once they've cooled (and I have time). To tell the truth, I had intended to touch some with waxes and others with mica powders, but I didn't realize until they'd been in the oven for 30 minutes that I should have done the powders prior to curing. Doh! Can you tell I haven't used that particular technique very often? Well, I'll just have to make another batch, sometime.

I've also started the first steps in one of the other projects I mentioned before-- the crackled paints on very thin sheets of translucent clay, applied paint-down to base beads. So far, I've just painted the clay and am waiting for it to dry so that I can crackle it. I used each of the three new Daler-Rowney acrylic inks I got for Christmas-- Silver Pearl, Birdwing Copper, and Mazuma Gold-- plus a new shade of Dazzling Metallics (Festive Green), FolkArt's Metallic Blue Topaz (a lovely teal color), and a color of my own mixing. The color is a pale sky blue mixed with a product that can be mixed with any acrylic paint to create a pearlized equivalent of the color. It was a bit thick and didn't go on very smoothly, so I may have to look into changing how best to use that product-- especially if it doesn't want to crackle very well. However, even with pre-mixed, store-bought paints, I've noticed that there is a wide variance in how well they crackle-- even between different colors in the same line of paints. I like to crackle, but it can be a bit unpredictable. That's part of its appeal, actually. If all else fails, I can always use scrap clay!