Mini Cookie Earrings

Over the weekend, I decided to play around with earrings.

To start things off, I made some mini cookie earrings to match the pendants I've been making. There are mini sugar cookies (pictured below), mini chocolate chip cookies (also pictured below), more mini sugar cookies (in a slightly different style, but there are no photos, yet), and mini peanut butter cookies.



For the mini chocolate chip cookies, I slightly altered my style from the mini chocolate chip cookie pendant I made earlier. Instead of using "pointed" chocolate chips, I flattened them out. I think I prefer the pointed chips, but the flattened ones are probably more realistic, since I think the chocolate chips would probably melt in the oven.



I also tried my hand at miniature cupcake earrings. I think I can improve them with a little tweaking here and there. Working in miniature made it harder for me to get them just the way I wanted them. Maybe making slightly larger miniatures-- say, for pendants or cell phone charms-- would be a bit easier.

This was also my first time to use a polymer clay icing/frosting. It worked very well (apart from being messy), and I'm looking forward to trying the frosting on some other miniatures. Cakes come to mind, of course, and possibly cookies, but I can't think of much else that needs that precise texture...




There are more photos of these particular miniatures at my Esty shop. :o)

Making earrings is fun. :o) Of course, you do have to make two items that are reasonably similar is size, shape, etc., but that's not so hard, and with mini foods, it's ok if they're slightly different, since real food varies in shape and size, too.

Silver-tone mokume gane, take 2...

I went ahead and used up the rest of the silver-tone mokume gane block. (I'm trying to finish projects before starting new ones. True, there are glittered, tinted translucent clay mixes sitting around, remnants from my opal obsession, and other items of evidence to the contrary, but from here on out, I'm trying to do better.)

Since I wasn't quite thrilled with the results from my first experiments, I decided to try something a little bit different.

For instance, here's a red base bead (metallic red, I think-- since I already had some custom-mixed) rolled in as thick a covering of chunky red glitter as I could get to adhere to the bead. Then, of course, covered in slices of the silver mg. I think it turned out better than the first batch. It's at least more interesting to look at, IMO.

The piece below is a pink/peach base bead with (if I remember correctly) iridescent "confetti" glitter (the type you use to make opals) between the base clay and the mg slices. It turned out ok, but I don't think the iridescent glitter showed up much.

One more example from the new batch of silver-tone mg: It's a green base bead covered with chunky green glitter (same brand as I used for the red glittered one above).

I think I prefer the ones with glittered base beads to the other type, with this particular mokume gane block.

Silver-tone mokume gane

I'd been wanting to make a silver-tone block of mokume gane for a while-- before I came down with the cold. I finally got around to starting it over the weekend, and yesterday I managed to buff up the first batch of beads I made from it. (There's still at least half of it left, unsliced.)


I'm sorry to say that I was a bit disappointed with the results. It's not that they were ugly, but they just didn't have much "pop" to them. Instead of being silver-tone, they're more grey-scale! (g)


Here are a couple of them:

There are a few more photos of this batch up at my Flickr page. (The link's in the column at the right of this page.)

I think part of the problem is that some of the silver (paints and things) turned out to be less silver than grey. Again, they aren't bad... I think part of the problem is that I'd been thinking so long about doing this particular color combination (if I may call such a monochromatic design a "color combo" (g)) that I expected it to "wow" me more than it did.

Well, I have a couple of ideas of different things to try with the rest of the MG block, now that I know I don't care to repeat those results. One thing I want to try is putting the MG over a very heavily glittered bead-- something with the big, chunky glitters I got at Dollar Tree a long time ago. (I tried one with the small holographic glitters in this batch, and while it was ok, I think the chunkier glitter will make a better effect.)