Felted Purses with Polymer clay Buttons

Here is a smaller felted purse, it's half the size of the one I showed in the last post. I love the hexagon shape for the polymer clay button that I covered with Resin. A friend recommended I should teach felting at the local yarn shop and how to make buttons.
I threw in one of my scrap clay heart pendants on this post. I have a few to list on my ArtFire. So many things to do, so little time...

Polymer Clay Shawl Pins, Buttons and Felted Purses

Finally am getting back into some creating, although not so much jewelry. I've been making a variety of Polymer Clay Buttons, Shawl pins and am knitting and felting purses!
Here are some of my Polymer Clay Shawl pins.

 I also made two purses this week, but this large one took me about 4 long days to complete. It's a Hobo bag. My husband thought I was knitting a sweater because before felting and shrinking it, it was huge! I made coordinating button for it. I'll post photos of the smaller bag tomorrow and hopefully the baby booties I came up with for a friend who is expecting a baby soon.

This pattern is available from "Pipps Purses" on ArtFire. I had no idea what a Hobo Bag was, lol, but now I know!! It was trial and error following the pattern. One must definitely have an understanding of stitches as there are no photographs other than the finished purse. I knitted mine on circular needles in a knit one row, purl one row fashion instead of knitting all rows. I actually like the slightly rougher texture of the purse that resulted from that.

A Suntan bed for my Polymer Clay

Fall has arrived and with it, shorter days, less sun and cooler temperatures. If you've been following my blog on Polymer Clay Bytes!, then you know I've been posting quite a bit about resin. I've been bemoaning my two nail art lamps that have been doing double duty and there have been many times with me running outside to quickly lay out a tray of pieces only for the sun to go into hiding.
The nail art lamps are quite reliable for Magic glos, but since I have a quart of industrial resin that I also like  to use, unfortunately it also requires more lumen or output of light than the lamps could handle.

So check out this cool suntan bed my hubby built for me. I'm so stoked! It's fitted with 2 ballasts that hold 15 inch long BL 350 tubes . The plastic covers were removed and anchored inside an aluminum foil lined box. The aluminum helps reflect as much light as possible. The interior of the box can easily handle 40 pendants on its 9 x 18 inch area. I have two glass shelves that can be lowered and raised via 2 blocks for items with varying heights. Ideally, the resin cures best about 2 or 3 inches from the lights. There is a hinged door to close the unit as it's in close proximity to where I'm working. For these type of bulbs protective eyewear is recommended. I'll  be sun tanning my clay a lot more now!

About my other lamps, the single bulb 9 Watt lamp has only a 2 x 6 inch area and the larger with four 9Watt bulbs has a 6 x 6 inch working area. Those lamps cost on average $35 for the small and $60 for the large, but sometimes Ebay has great deals. I guess I'll put mine into storage or find a hobby crafter who can use one or the other.

There is a lot more to UV these days than suntans and light bulbs. UV can cause chemical reactions, cause many substances to glow or flouresce such as when checking for biological hazards in public places or to detect counterfeit currency would be a couple of examples. UV wands for your purse are now available to kill bacteria  if you are sensitive to chemical sanitizers and sprays. We all know the effects of UV by way of sunburns, but the UV spectrum has many other effects, both beneficial and damaging, to human health. You can read a lot more on Wikipedia about  UV and Black Light and differences.

Anyway, a big thanks to my friend Gera Scott Chandler who first blogged about her home built UV lamp that reminds her off a Lunar Excursion Module and well, I kind of thought so as well, lol. Well, it IS complete with Space blanket! You can see Gera's innovative LEM lamp and an update is found here. In general, her blog is well worth the visit.
 

Japanese Polymer Clay Tile Tutorial is finished

I had a few requests for this polymer clay tutorial and am pleased to say that it is finally published.
This lesson shows you how to create unique polymer clay tiles with an offset and layered Japanese text. The layer is achieved with both metallics and ink and finally resin for an added, but optional dimensionality. Use these tiles for jewelry such as bracelets, earrings or pendants, however, you could create larger tiles for journal covers, boxes, or sheeted around tea lights, bottles of hope or anything else you can think of.

 The step by step tutorial is 18 pages long,  consists of 48 steps and had 55 detailed photographs to guide  you from start to finish. You can find it in my ArtFire

Happy Friday!!