All Buttoned Up with Handmade Buttons, part 2

I am crazy about buttons, they are just so cute! Yesterday I blogged about my handmade polymer clay buttons and here's part two. I mentioned that I'm going to paint & glaze some of them to use as jewelry pieces (pendants, pins & rings). Today I found the correct glaze to use with polymer clay. I did some research online and found out that Varathane Diamond Polyurethane is one of the best glazes to use on polymer clay. Other glazes can eat away at the clay and cause the surface of the clay to become sticky.

Here are a few of the buttons I painted with some metallic silver, white & black paints.

Here are some unpainted gold buttons I made.

And here's a photo collage I made with some of my button photos! :-)

All Buttoned Up with Handmade Buttons, part 1

Hand-made Buttons!

click here to learn more about polymer clay glaze

All Buttoned Up with Handmade Buttons, part 1

I love buttons and right now I'm in the middle of a handmade button project. Here's a photo of my button work space. I'm making buttons with polymer clay and it's fun to create them.

Last Christmas I got a Dremel drill press and I'm so glad that I have one. It works wonderfully when I need to drill holes into my handmade buttons. All I need to do is line up my button at the base of the press, turn on the Dremel tool and pull down on the blue lever. It works like a charm!

How do you like my handmade buttons? What would you use them for? Maybe scrapbooking? I'm working on painting and glazing some of them. And I'd like to make them into pins, pendants and rings. Buttons are fun! :-)

Click here to see my first set of handmade buttons that I made last year.

Glass tile pendant starter kit - yay! :-)

For quite some time I've wanted to try to make my own glass tile pendants. The other week I found this great Etsy store, Candy Tiles 2, where there is a nice assortment of materials needed to make glass pendants. Candy Tiles 2 offers these wonderful starter kits, the one I ordered is pictured above. In the kit I received: five Square Glass Tiles, five small Sterling Silver Plated Aanraku Bails, two Diamond Glaze Samples, one tube of Super Glue, six assorted sheets of Chiyogami (Premium Japanese Paper) & Graphic Designed Paper cut to size. Included with the kit are step by step instructions on how to make glass tiles pendants and instructions on how to make Scrabble tile pendants. The instructions were sent to my e-mail addy in PDF format. This starter kit came nicely packaged within the decorated box shown in the photo.

As it says in the item description, ordering the starter kit is a nice way to try out making pendants instead investing a lot of money in materials. This starter kit is a wonderful way to give it a try and I think they'd make a nice gift for anyone who has a passion for crafting.

I didn't use the paper provided in the kit because I have loads of photos I wanted to use for the pendants. Last night I found a couple handfuls of pics in my photo archives and opened them in Photoshop and cropped each of them down to 7/8" sqaure. I printed them off on a sheet of 4 x 6 photo paper. Today I made my first glass tile pendant with a photo of some lilacs.

I love how the photo looks under the glass.

The photo above shows some of my favorite pics from flowers to my kitty Tiggy to my nieces' new bunnies. I also have a few of my watercolors I'd like to make into pendants. One product I need to order from Candy Tiles 2, is this material called "microglaze" to protect ink jet printed materials. After I made the lilac tile, I tried one of my cat and of the pink water lilly and the images looked a bit blurred. Using the "microglaze" is supposed to prevent smudging, so if you're going to use ink jet printed images for your pendants, this product sounds like a great thing to have while making your pendants. After I made my first pendant, I was hooked. Stop by the Candy Tiles 2 Etsy store if you want to discover a fun way to make jewelry.

Last week I blogged about my hand-made polymer clay buttons and I've gotten a positive response from my Blogger post and my By Hand blog post. In fact, someone left a comment at By Hand to let me know I was "gossiped" about and she left a link with her comment. Today I went to check it out. Julie wrote a nice post about my hand-made buttons at her Polymer Clay blog.

Please stop by Julie's Polymer Clay gossip blog.

Click here to see my blog post about my buttons.

Hand-made Buttons!

I'm a lover and collector of buttons. Recently I made my very own buttons with polymer clay. The first day I started to make them I was hooked on creating them. The pic above shows some of the buttons I have made. I'd like to hand-paint some of them to highlight some of the details. Also, I would like to put a shiny gloss-like glaze on them to highlight the details and to make them look finished. Today I've been trying to research a little on what type of glaze to use on Polymer clay. Yikes, there is way too much info to read and then there are always links to other links and then I get side-tracked from my original plan of finding out about glazes. Ever happen to you? I really need to force myself to stay focused on the task on hand. Speaking of "focus"! I'd like to make some of my hand-made buttons into pendants for necklaces and maybe make some of them into brooches and magnets.

Here are links to some of the poly clay sites I came across, if you're interested in visiting them.

Glass Attic - "The Polymer Clay Encyclopedia"

Sky Grazer Designs - Polymer Clay Link Index

Desiree's Desired Creations - How to Make a Better Buffing Wheel

Poly Clay - Varathane Diamond Polyurethane

Caution! Tons of info on polymer clay. Thanks to the forums at Etsy, I was able to find the sites listed above along with other polymer clay info. Another site I came across was, Sunni's Online Sales Links, and it gave a list of links for online sellers. I just skimmed it over. There is a link to a page all about improving your page rank for your site. I clicked on the link and there is a lot of info to take in. One of these days I hope to improve my page rank, which ultimately means working on my site to improve it. There never seems to be enough time to get all of this done. Ugh!

Okay, I better stop my rambling on. Talk to you later. :-)

Life of an Artful Pen from beginning to end, part 1

I wanted to try to give you a glimpse into how I make my Artful Pens.

So here goes.

The photo above shows 4 of my pens at different stages of it's "life." Pen "A" is the pen before it is embellished, when it is "born." Pen "B" is what the pen looks like after I add the first round of Apoxie Sculpt. During this phase, I want to make sure the pen clip is completely hidden from view. This also gives me a better foundation to build my designs off of. You may notice that I also attached something to the top of the pen cap. This is my little ladybug, which is my "mascot"/theme for my business and my line of work. Within the ladybug I inscribe my initials "CL." Pen "C" is at the stage when I attach my design to the pen itself. And Pen "D" is when my design is coated with a layer of gesso just before painting.

The first photo shows a pen with balls of Apoxie Sculpt. I measure out equal parts of part A and part B of Apoxie Sculpt and then mix both parts together for at least two minutes to ensure that it is mixed thouroughly. If it is not mixed thouroughly, it won't cure/harden properly, not fun. The second photo shows my pen along with a few original pieces made from polymer clay. These "originals" will be used to make silicone molds.

The two photos above show how I prepare my pieces to be made into molds. I use either clear pieces plastic or thin pieces of cardboard that I save from packaging. There's nothing more exciting than to have a package that can be used to help you out with your projects. I prefer using the plastic since you can see through it. Anyway, I get my plastic and cardboard stash and find sizes that will work well for each piece. Then I grab the good ol' glue gun and add a dollop of glue to my piece and carefully position it on the plastic backing.

Using the backing helps to achieve an "even" edge to the mold. And when I say "even" I use the term very loosely. The photo above shows a few pieces all ready to be molded with silicone.

Stay tuned to my next blog post when I show how I make the molds from silicone.

A Nice Feature at the Hazelnut Cove Blog & Some New Projects

Sunday at the Hazelnut Cove Blog was kind to feature me at her beautiful blog. Her blog has a nice and airy feel to it, please stop by her blog and see for yourself. She did a wonderful job at describing my artwork and my Etsy shop. Plus, I answered some questions provided by Sunday, so you can learn a little bit more about me and my work. Thank you, Sunday for featuring my work. Your compliments about my work are very much appreciated. Reading what you said makes me smile and blush. Oh, and please stop by Sunday's profile at the ByHand website. She is also a fellow "ByHander" like myself. It's a wonderful online community of crafters and I'm so happy and thankful to have found such nice people, such as Sunday, at the ByHand site.

Ahhh, today I was so relaxed and contented while working on some new pieces. I worked on some new ideas out of polymer clay. I took a photo of some of the newest in polymer clay form. Hmmm....maybe I will make them into Artful Pens or maybe a pin or a magnet or maybe one of each and make a matching set. It's so wonderful to thouroughly enjoy time spent creating and working with your hands. I'm also working on painting my new Bumble Bee pen designs too, so James can buy one for Birdy. Some new pics of my Bumble Bee pens all painted in full color should be buzzing into my blog soon. Don't miss it!

It brings me such joy to sculpt and paint. Today was a good day.

A shoe, some watermelon slices, citrus slices, eyewear and an "old school" rotary telephone sculpted in polymer clay. Now I need to get the good ol' sandpaper and Dremel to shape and define them a little more. I love to Dremel my pieces. Fun, fun, fun! :-)

Have a good day and weekend everyone!

Some Designs in the Works & a little "Idol" chatter

I'm working on some new pen designs right now. Currently I'm getting ready to paint 4 Bumble Bee pen designs. I also have an Apple Design and Unicorn Design in the beginning stages of design for my line of Artful Pens. The four bee designs are shown below. Not too attractive looking at this point, but that's where the magic of color and paint comes in. Once they are painted there's a whole new life brought forth, they will be trasformed from dull to "wonder"ful soon.

My Unicorn and Apple designs are first made with Polymer clay as shown in these photos. The next step will be creating a hand-made silicone mold from each piece and then casting them with my favorite medium, Apoxie Sculpt.

My Apple design shown above needs to be cleaned up a little with some sanding and/or Dremeling. Yay, power tools!!! Each piece is separate, so I will need to attach them all together. I may try drilling a small hole in each piece and connect them with a small wire in each drilled section. This will help keep them together when I make a mold from it.

And now for a little idle chatter, oh, I mean "Idol" chatter. Tonight is going to be a tense night in the world of American Idol. The competition is so tight this season. Any of the three have a good chance of making it to the finale next week. It is going to be a little sad next week after Idol is done for another season and I won't be able to see my fave, Danny singing on stage each week. I guess I will need to keep busy working on my crafts and wait until Idol returns next year. However, I don't know how much I will enjoy next season, after having someone so talented from my home state this year. It took 8 seasons of Idol for a Wisconsinite to make it on Idol. So exciting!

There's Renee with a "paper" Danny while we were waiting for the concert at the Summerfest grounds. We enjoyed our Ga-Ga for Gokey Day! :-)

Danny did a wonderful job last night. "You Are So Beautiful" sounded amazing and a "masterclass" as Simon noted. I sure hope he and Kris are the two finalists. Both of them have a more universal sound in their voices and music versus Adam, who tends to be on the screechy side. I know a lot of people love Adam and his music and his style, but not me. I don't care for his high-pitched voice. The sound makes me uneasy, like a blaring siren. No thanks! I voted for Danny tons of times last night. Can you guess how many times?

Last Friday some of us at the Danny Gokey Day concert were discussing Danny's universal appeal. A couple of people we talked to mentioned that they thought that Danny has a larger fan base than Adam. And they both did not care for his screechy sounding voice. Out of what I've read it sounds like there are a lot of people who do not care for his voice. The people also noted how Danny has never been in the bottom three all season. Way to go Danny! Go, Go Gokey! :-)