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The ornaments are made entirely by hand from polymer clay and occasionally have embellishments from bakeable material such as wire, glass or wood. Polymer clay is a purchased product that comes in several brands and many colors. Each brand has distinct characteristics and I mix brands to take advantage of those properties. Most of the colors I use are my own formulas made from different brands and tend to be a bit muddier (just the way I like them) than straight out of the package. I mix the colors, spend a lot of time making canes and then begin creating prototypes. While I’m figuring out how to make shoes, clothing, hair and whatever pose I want, it can take six or more hours on each one. Fortunately, when I do the production work on an ornament, they get a little faster but I still count on putting about 16 hours into the sculpting of a tray of ten. Each time I change colors I need to clean the last color from my hands before starting on the next one. So it goes something like this – make 20 (or a multiple of 20) legs from white clay, wash hands, make an equal number of shoes from another color of clay, wash hands, put shoes onto legs, add straps or ties or soles, wash hands, line legs and shoes up on trays, make underbodies and put in place over legs, wash hands, cut skirt material from cane, roll out skirt backing, apply slice of cane to backing, squish layers together to bond, pleat skirt and put on to underbody, etc……
So over the course of a day, I clean my hands and work area many, many times. After a tray is completed, they bake in a convection oven and are put aside until I’m ready to finish them. The last steps are signing, checking for hooks pushing out the back, painting faces, and putting on embellishments that go on after all baking is done. I use mostly Genesis paint because I love that it looks so much a part of the ornament and is less glossy than most other paints that will stick to the polymer clay. Each color of Genesis that is applied has to be temperature cured before the next color is applied. That means each ornament goes in and out of the oven at least four more times. A lot of the good comments I received last year about the website concerned this little demo, so I decided to add two more showing a couple of the more creative things I did this year - a little visual blog. Both were sparked by customers requests. I don't always have time to do special orders, so when I do, I try to turn it into an opportunity to make a new ornament prototype, as in the quilt demo, or a chance to learn something new, as in the bridal gown for the cake topper. The first example is a quilt I hadn't made before. I had a request for an ornament holding a cathedral windows quilt. The Christmas quilter turned out very nicely (you can see her on Christmas Kids - page 2), so I did her in blue also. (The blue quilter is on the Non-Holiday Kids page.) These pictures show how the blue quilt was created. The first step was gathering all of my old blue canes and reducing them so that the print was visible on a small scale. Some of the canes were very old, so reducing them required several days of work. Beating an old cane with a roller is sometimes the only way to get it to start to move. I shaved off very thin slices of the blue canes and cut squares from them. Then I trimmed each side of each square with a circle cutter to get the required shapes. These pieces plus the blue bindings were applied onto the white backing and then rolled hard to level the surface. This step had to be done by hand because the pasta machine would pull the quilt out of shape. I trimmed the edges, added stitching lines, carefully lifted the quilt off the glass surface and folded it before putting it onto the ornament.
Sometimes I get a request for a cake topper at just the right time - before I've started working and maybe need a project to spark my imagination. This was just such a project but I didn't know what I was in for. The pictures that I received were large and very high quality so I could tell exactly what I had to do, but I had never done a standing bride without pleating the skirt on. Since the skirt needed to go all the way from front to back and then to the front again, it required a fairly precise pattern. It took three days to get the pattern right because each time I cut a paper pattern, I had to also cut it from clay and drape it onto the base. Finding the crystals for the headband took a while too, but as it happens there is a wonderful bead shop in downtown Kirkland that had what I needed. One of the client's concerns was the groom's hair and that was one of the really fun parts.
I hope you have enjoyed dropping into my studio for a little glimpse of my creative process! |
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