Cleaning up the bead stash

This weekend my husband asked me. if I could clean up my bead stash. He might have meant, whether I could move it somewhere else, or just get rid of it alltogehter, but I took it as "Honey, could you make some more jewelry?" ;) So I did. I mean, when would I not do what my darling hubby asks for?

I had a ton of polymer clay beads that I'd made a while ago, and a lot of already planned projects. I like to combine the beads with other materials, like glass, wood and semiprecious stone beads. This necklace only has a polymer clay focal bead, the rest of the beads are wood, ceramic and carnelian.

I also made earrings to match:


Here you can see the making of the Squiggly Necklace, with polymer clay squiggles altered with silver beads:

This bracelet is retro color polymer clay beads with some miscellaneous stone beads and some buno cord on a memory wire:



This isn't really craft related, but I just wanted to show you my tastiest accomplishment this weekend, a multigrain bread baked in a cloche baker that makes the absolute best crispy but not hard crust:



The only wool related activity this weekend was a felted space alien that we made with the kids:



I made absolutely no progress on the entrelac sweater -maybe I'm just a little too optimistic about the weather getting warmer. I better get on it and finish the thing, because if it really warms up, I'll never get it done...

Have a great week, and thanks for all the comments on the finished sweater a couple of weeks back! I know I'm really repeating myself, but I'll say it again: I'd love to reply to the comments, but Blogspot doesn't allow me to see the e-mail addresses. I don't know if it's a setting that I should change, or if that's just how it is with blogspot.

Weekend fun

Oh, the crazyness that is polymer clay...

This is a technique called "Cutting Edge" by Dan Cormier. He doesn't have a web site that I could find, but he gives a lot of classes, and has published some instructions in the Polymer Cafe magazine. The beads are made with a silver (or alternatively gold) clay mixed with a color clay. Those tiny little silver mica particles reflect light differently from different angles, which is what makes the beads interesting. (Carissa Nichols gives a pretty good explanation on mica shift here.) Also the lines are sort of under the surface, and all the beads are polished to a fine silky smooth finish.

This is a crazy curly-swirly bead that I made with the left over clay from the cutting-edge-beads: