Egg Shell Shades

Today I'm playing around with polymer clay and using one of the colour resources I now am lucky enough to own- these great ready-made colour samples (I previously recommended them on one of my resources posts).

I was experimenting with an idea I had a few years ago and had yet to actually sit down and play with: using egg shells to add a mosaic look to the clay.

I knew I wanted a beige colour as the background but had no idea how to mix it- so my new toy turned out to be a great help.
I flicked through all the sections and chose a colour that I liked and learnt that I needed 2 parts white to 1 part each of yellow and brown.


I cut these amounts, chopped them up and began mixing...


and conditioning.


Soon I had the perfect colour to be the background for my shell pieces without having to sit there and spend ages adding colours and getting it wrong.


This will appear as a project in issue 24 of Bead magazine- out 21st July 2010.

Flocking

I spent the day with the lovely and talented Julie Smallwood of Natty Jewels and had lots of fun playing around with colour and flock.

The item we were flocking was an old table with a distinctive texture. At first the plan was to section it all off into small squares but we soon realised this was beyond our level of patience and skill so we moved onto using the tiles as natural barriers between each colour.


Next was making the colour choices- there were lots of lovely colours to choose from.
I'm glad it wasn't my decsion, I would have had trouble choosing!

We began by Julie narrowing down her choices to her favourite colours.


As there were 9 squares she narrowed them down further to 9 colours.


We soon realised though that choosing 9 which were different enough without there being too much of a bias towards one colour wasn't going to be easy. She wanted it to look balanced with no one colour or variant of that colour featuring too much.

So we changed plan and instead went for purples, lilacs and pinks which all seemed to work together nicely.


And we were off!

Flocking is time consuimg and messy and a few hours later we'd run out of background paint, were covered in fluff and tired and the table still wasn't finished.
Oh well- off we went to dinner and I left Julie to finish the table on her own....