Faux Lapis Lazuli demonstration

On Sunday I went to the wonderful London Polymer Clay Group and demonstrated a way to make faux Lapis Lazuli from polymer clay. The focus of the meeting was faux techniques in the colours of the Olympic rings. As well as my demonstration there were brilliant demonstrations on faux malachite from Sue Margetts and faux bone/ivory from Debbie Carlton. There were handouts available for some other techniques.

Here's what I had a go at from the demos/handouts

Faux cinnabar , faux malachite and faux Lava rock

I spent a lot of time playing about with several different Lapis Lazuli techniques and colour recipes before I share my demo with the group. I will try and write some of it up properly to share you with soon, including some colour recipes for Kato clay. My favourite technique was the one in Carol Blackburn's excellent book  In the meantime here's some pictures

The beads are real Lapis, the cabochons in the middle were made with different recipes

Precious little creatures.

Some of the owls have had some Pearlex powder applied to the markings - you should be able to spot the 2 who have. There is also a cute little faux Lapis cat!

Bettina Welker's Pixelated Retro Blend Cane

I was so excited when I saw Bettina Welkers Pixelated Retro Blend Cane Tutorial - it looked so cool! Loads of people have been trying it and it's great to see all the variations popping up on flickr and facebook.

Finally I found some time to try it. Here's my first cane

I then decided to use it to catch up with the earrings a week challenge on Flickr and made these earrings

 Which ones do you like best?

They are all available to purchase direct from me. Please email me if you would like more details.
It is the school summer holidays so I have my children home. We are having great fun and enjoying some lovely weather! Hope you are all having fun!

New Online Mailing List

I have been running a mailing list for sometime to keep in touch with local people about when I am teaching workshops and selling my jewellery. It has been getting a little cumbersome so I decided to investigate Mail Chimp as a tool for keeping it a bit more organised and most importantly keeping everyone's data safe!

Mail Chimp has lots of tools and enables me to make subgroups within the list of people interested in different things. So I am now opening my mailing list up to people who live further away but may want information on when I finally get that online shop up and running, or want to know when I release another tutorial.

So you will find it over there on the top left ' Subscribe to our newsletter' and there are some boxes you can tick to say what you would like information on. I will try and keep it relevant to you! I'd be interested to see where people are from so do fill in the Location box - just a city or a country. That'll help me keep it more relevant to you too. If you live in Canada I won't email you to invite you to a sale in my house in the UK - although it'd be great if you could all come!!

I would love to show you the new jewellery I've been working on but it's for a surprise so I had better keep it quiet for now. I'll show you as soon as I can!