My Clay-m to Fame

Most jewelry makers start out with one technique. For me it was single needle bead weaving. I learned as many stitches as I could; peyote, herringbone, the dreaded right angle weave (RAW to beaders) and brick stitch were all added to my repertoire via basic classes at my local bead store.

And most jewelry makers will learn new techniques, often because what they see in their imagination does not exist (yet) in the real world.

For example, I have heard the following from my fellow jewelry making students in one class or another:

“I'm taking a class in Art Clay silver because I couldn’t find clasps that I liked and I decided to learn how to make my own.”

“I studied polymer clay because I couldn’t find marbled beads in the color combination I wanted.”

“I’m going to take a class in knotting so I can update my Grandmother’s pearl necklace with crystals.”

The point of departure from my beloved seed beads arrived over the long New Year’s weekend. I searched the internet and local retail sources for a bead or a focal piece with a primitive-looking roadrunner image to add to my Tila tile necklace called, well, Roadrunner.

This necklace has lots of shine:

 

So I wanted a focal piece with a flat or matte finish. I could not find anything anywhere that matched the idea I had for this embellishment.

On New Year’s Day I searched through my supply closet and uncovered a package of epoxy clay that I had purchased a while ago and never opened. The product comes in two parts (A & B) which are mixed together in equal parts to make moldable clay that remains flexible for about 90 minutes. Finished items air-dry and cure in 12 -24 hours with no baking required, which is a plus because I do not own a kiln (yet – heh!). I chose the copper color clay to work with for my experiment in making my own focal for the Roadrunner piece.

Here are the packages prior to mixing:

 

Once the two parts were mixed I rolled out the clay and made a flat oval shape that would fit in the center of the Roadrunner necklace. The smooth sides were roughed up with the round side of an awl. I used this same tool to make two holes through the top of the focal so that I could string it after it was cured.

Then came the really challenging and time-consuming part. I have very little training in drawing, so I made several sketches of a stylized roadrunner that were spectacularly unsuccessful. At first I was making the sketches the same size as the oval bead. After lots of tiny squiggles that looked nothing like any bird known to man, I hit upon the idea of using technology. I made some full-page sketches and used a printer/copier to reduce the size of the best image so it would fit on my clay blank.

I placed the small printed image over the clay blank and used a sewing pin to pierce through the paper into the clay all around the outline of the roadrunner image. After I peeled off the paper I made sure that the holes were all of uniform depth. I added some cross-hatching in the background with the side of the same sewing pin and embedded a small crystal in the clay for the roadrunner’s eye.

This is the focal before it dried completely:

 

Once the clay was completely dry and cured, I mixed up a wash of light orange acrylic paint and brushed it over the focal. I wiped off most of the wash so that there was more paint in the depressions than on the surface. This is the final result:

 

For a first-time effort with clay, I am happy. I imagine this would have been much easier if I had actual clay tools but it was also fun to improvise with the items I had available. After I have stitched this oval focal piece to the Roadrunner necklace, I will show you how it looks when it is all put together.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

This may be hard for younger folk to believe, but there was a time before DVRs or TV-on-demand internet services. There was an even more distant time before VCRs. It was an era when, if you wanted to watch a particular television show, you had to be sitting in front of the set when it aired.

During this primitive time, the most important TV viewing time for kids was Saturday morning. This was the only time that all of the major networks showed cartoons for hours on end. There were prime-time cartoons during the week, like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, but for a dizzying glut of animated slapstick and mayhem, it was all about Saturday morning.

I have a visceral memory of flopping on a bean bag chair in the den of my childhood home just as Saturday morning cartoons were about to begin. That sense of anticipation is something that I did not experience again regarding a television show until many years later when my daughters Kage and Smallest of All got me hooked on (bwah!) Project Runway.

A consistent favorite during the Saturday morning cartoon era was any Looney Tunes cartoon: Bugs & Daffy (Wabbit Season! Duck Season!), Marvin the Martian (I am sooooo angry!), Michigan J. Frog (Hello my honey, hello my baby!). But for dialog-free, surreal cartoon bliss, there was nothing like The Roadrunner.

The great Chuck Jones directed many (if not most) of the Roadrunner cartoons. He crafted the complex and doomed methods that Wile E. Coyote devised (with help from The Acme Corporation, of course) to capture (or obliterate) the Roadrunner. He gave us a stylized, gorgeous view of the American southwest desert landscape that served as the backdrop for the Coyote’s never-ending pursuit of his prey. Chuck Jones taught us that, in the cartoon world, you could run across thin air for exactly as long as you didn’t look down.

An actual roadrunner looks very little like the purple, soft-edged Warner Brothers version. They look like this:

 

The Gruffalo and I enjoy spending leisure time in the desert, and roadrunners are a frequent sight. With their Mohawk-like crest, long legs, skinny frame and nervously peeved demeanor they resemble nothing so much as punk-rock chickens. They have a distinctive call which does not sound anything like ‘meep meep’.

This piece, a project-in-process, is called Roadrunner. I started it after a weekend walk with the dogs that included several roadrunner sightings. The shape is elongated and spiky, the colors are desert-like and the saturated orange tile beads are reminiscent of cartoon hues without being too extreme. I plan on adding long feather-shaped orange drops along the bottom of the necklace.

 

The colors and angles of this piece are a departure from my usual preferred hues and shapes. It is also woven in a set pattern of alternate opaque and translucent beads. This type of pattern is much easier to stitch than a random placement of colors. Whenever I am doing a random placement I have to think much harder than when I am following a pattern. Making a combination of colors look random is not as easy as it sounds; you have to pay attention to the way that the various rows & columns combine to avoid large blocks of a single color. Following a simple pattern like this allows my mind to wander while I bead. In fact, my mind wandered a bit too much and one side is longer than the other by two rows, so I have to unbead a little before I go on.

The translucent bead color in Roadrunner is called 'root beer' by Tila. Every time I read the side of the bead container I want a root beer float. Perhaps I will drive through A&W on the way home tonight--or maybe I'll use 'root beer float' as my next inspiration.