Saturday, June 19, 2010

Happy Birthday Etsy!


Last night The Road Less Traveled  in Santa Ana hosted one of the many party celebrations for Etsy's 5th anniversary.  About 25 etsy sellers got together to craft, chat, meet and of course have food.  Everybody brought something to eat , we had delicious salsa and chips, someone brought a pretty cute three layer cake decorated to look like a patchwork quilt with stitches and cute buttons, vegan cupcakes (to die for),  preserved jellies to spread over bread or crackers with cheese.... yumm.  Delilah the owner of RLT made a delicious lavender lemonade  and had her new kumquat vodka (very strong) but I gotta say, very good!



We spent a few hours there enjoying  a warm california evening, enjoying friends, company and of course discussing our stores, strategies, sales and future shows.



Thank yous go to The Long Beach Craft Mafia for putting a fun night to celebrate handmade along with Delilah and Nicoe Stevenson for hosting the party.  Nicole and Delilah were busy making vendor bags for the next Patchwork show to be June 27 in Long Beach  http://www.patchworkshow.com/.  Many of the attendees last night will be at the show, so we hope to see you there!

Friday, June 18, 2010

Bead Frenzy

Beads beads and more beads..... I have a show next week and most likely I will not use these beads for that show, still, I need to make some more. I got an order that I have been putting off long enough that now it's do or die! So, I got into it yesterday and just started cranking them. I am posting some pics for the different shapes, textures and sizes.... nothing new or amazing that you haven't seen before, just good old clay made into something small.



The bottom pictures are beads in different shapes I made these beads in less than one hour....  you can see that the darker the clay the more water it still has,  at this point the beads have dried for a while and it would be hard to change the shape or add texture.  This stage is called leather hard.  The beads that are white are completely dry, and definitely you cannot change anything at this point, their stage is called greenware and they are ready for their first firing called bisque firing.  Greenware is very delicate, if you drop a piece most  likely  will break, with beads they either break or chip.

I am using stoneware for these beads, I hope to fill the kiln with just stoneware pieces and label really well.  I  have several withe clays but they're not all the same, some low fire and high fire,  labeling will help avoiding under or overfiring....   the picture above is of some stuff made earlier this week.  I  have some pendants, beads, and connectors for jewelry.

What is your favorite clay to work with?