Week 52-7 - Air Dry Clay

This past weekend, I attended Art Walk near Kelowna, BC, about an hour from my home.It was their twenty-fifth celebration this year and both delightful and encouraging to see an improvement in the quality of the work shown since my last visit at least five years ago. One of my friends was a vendor and we are meeting to talk about her impressions over coffee this morning. She thinks my jewelry would do fabulously there and I am seriously thinking about the possibility as a two day show, once a year, would be a good option. Assuming that I was juried in that is!

Sue Hall was another vendor. She makes the most fascinating figures as part of The Gatherers Series. Many of them wore necklaces made from air dry clay beads which was inspiring to me since I had a container of the clay waiting to be tried.... which I did... on Tuesday.

I find having somewhere to start an important in to doing new work so I chose a heart theme that included three metal and one wicker hearts. These are broken parts from the thrift store, not at all precious.

I put the two larger hearts together back to back with clay in the middle and then embedded embellishments onto the surface. As the clay dried, some of the embellishments fell off and kept falling off the more I worked with it. Not good.

With the wicker heart, I applied clay to both surfaces, poked a hole in the top, used the end of a paint brush to make impressions, and hung it to dry. It cracked. Again, not good especially for pieces I might want to sell. I took a wabi sabi approach going forward because who knew, the cracks might have been exactly what I wanted except it seems I needed to wait longer for the clay to dry. The paint wouldn't adhere in spots and looks quite ugly right now. Hopefully, I can update that some time soon with an improvement. I'll try painting it again when the clay is more dry.

Above left, I made two beads and stuck some copper scraps into them. If the copper extended from both sides of the bead, it could be part of a chain and if it extends from one end, it could be a dangle. This has potential worth following up especially to make textured beads or ones in bright colours although...

... above right, you can see how the air dry clay did not stick to the metal bracelet form and how easily it is breaking up. When I pulled on the copper wire, it came right out although the coil did stay put. My initial reaction is that this is not the product for what my goals although I will give it a bit more time.

Another product I want to try is Apoxy Sculpt which is a two part resin clay. From my research, it not only dries faster but is far less fragile than the air dry clay appears to be and the resin clay sticks to virtually everything but plastic. I'll continue to practice with these pieces because even if I end up using a different clay, experience and learner are always positive.

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - back in the studio