Here are some more photos from the recent (very popular) fairy garden exhibit at the Roger Williams Park Botanical Center in Providence, RI. A fun time was had by all the little (and big) fairies and gnomes during school vacation week.
So much wonderful inspiration can be found in the shapes, colors and textures of the botanical materials. It also helps you realize just how many innovative and attractive ways excess gardening materials and found objects can be put to use.
I was very happy with the look of the black papier maché clay when it dried. But of course, more possibilities for it came into the picture.
It’s nice to have the option of either the handmade paper look, with all its nooks and crannies or a super smooth finish. This coating acts as something of a spackle, filling in the low points.
It also minimizes sanding, which is not my favorite part of any project.
Well, I finally got around to trying out the last hopeful contestant that I had around the house, in the search for a clear spray finish for my papier maché bowls.
I tried out Krylon’s “Crystal Clear” finish, using the same kind of coverage as I had in the previous experiment.
The results were disappointing, to say the least. I had thought the polyurethane and Rustoleum sprays were yellow. This was slightly more yellow than the Rustoleum, and not much less so than the polyurethane.
There have been shelves full of decorative papier maché clay bowls just waiting for the weather to be warm enough to spray a finish on them. The time has finally come!
To make sure any finish worked well before I use it on the bowl that I’ve put time and effort into, some testing seemed like a reasonable idea.
The spray finishes were some I already had from other projects and wanted to make sure wouldn’t do something funky to the surface, like discolor it or react strangely (bubbles, stickiness, etc.)
I also have a few bowls with a white painted surface, so I wanted to make sure they’d stay white.
I’ve been waiting for the weather to be warm and dry to seal my papier maché clay bowls and put them in the ChirpHop Studio Etsy shop. It’s been either warm or dry, but not both.
In the meantime, the notion of changing the color of the clay got into my head. If it was built into the bowl material, rather than applied to the surface, I could save some steps. Applying paint also sometimes has a “fake” look, almost like the bowl is made of molded plastic.
Sad to say, the photo above is the best one to come out of the session where I tried to create translucent hollow beads with Translucent Liquid Sculpey (TLS).
I had read (where exactly escapes me now) about a polymer clay artist getting better translucent effects by painting liquid Sculpey. There wasn’t any further information than that, so out come all of the supplies.
After crossing paper off the list as a useful hollow bead core material, and realizing there was a crucial piece missing from an option I had come across earlier, it was time to take a second look at cornstarch as a contender.
I found a recipe for the traditional cornstarch and baking soda “play clay” of childhood. I remembered it as being heavy and cracking a lot when trying to make Christmas ornaments years ago. With any luck, neither of those factors should be an issue for this purpose.
What I’m looking for in my dream bead core is the ability to dissolve quickly and easily, so the bead won’t take forever to transform from filled to hollow.
Oh! There was once such hope.
Once the cast paper and papier maché clay cores I made for the hollow polymer clay beads were dry, they needed to be baked and hollowed out.
Little did I know what was waiting inside those pint-sized troublemakers.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m fascinated with some of the jewelry I’ve seen online that uses translucent polymer clay, especially when it looks like sea glass or glass glass.
After a lot of poking around for answers to how people like Kathrin Neumaier, Barbara Fernald and other clay artists, like those featured on The Blue Bottle Tree blog create their pieces, I had some idea of what to do, but was still a bit fuzzy about how to create the effects I was after. There were hints here and there, but nothing that really gave me the complete picture.
There were plenty of tutorials available for a price, but I had no way of knowing whether they would tell me what I wanted to know.
It was time to set up the la-bOr-a-tory (mwah, ha, ha!) and try some experiments.
