Another try at making a bead series. I bought 1 big block each of Premo black and white so I have quite a lot of clay to play with (I don’t have the heart to open most of my Kato. They are so tiny!).
Again, I was doing the flower design here. The lentils came from the failed experiment of making a checkered beads. The black clay is softer then the white so it’s difficult to create the exact same size of black-white-black and white-black-white. You can see the distorted pattern on the second photo below, the square bead on the left side.
The rest of the beads are using anything-goes design. 
These took half of last Saturday. You may recognize that the flower and the dotted beads designs come straight from common lampwork beads designs. You’re right. I’ve been fascinated by the chubby flowers ever since I saw one on lampwork beads. So I tried to simulate it here with clay.
Working with white clay is tricky. Even after wearing gloves and cleaning the pasta machine, it’s difficult to keep the beads clean. Somehow there was always something that managed to stain them. And then there was problem making them round. I don’t know how other people do it but for the life of me, I couldn’t make them perfectly round. Argh!
But all in all I’m quite pleased with the result. There were not enough beads to make a full string necklace so I have to think of something else. Probably strung with Softflex silver wire and suspended by sterling silver crimps.
And here’s to show off our mini studio. I bought the light box for $80 and Panda bought the lights (and the camera, of course). The lightbox can be folded into the flat carrying case. Neat!
Much to Panda’s horror, I went mad in Blick and Michaels and bought a truckload of polymer clay stuff Of course I had very good reasons for it. There’s not much choice of clay supplies and tools here in Singapore. Art supplies shops that sell Premo didn’t even have the basic colors like black, white, or pearl! *tsk tsk*
So ladies and gentlemen, may I present the new additions to my clay treasures
Not exactly clay stuff but I was finally able to lay my hands on Softflex Extreme 925. They went out of production for quite some time due to Katrina hurricane, then the stock availability was delayed from June to July.
I love the baking rack! Previously I made one from the disposable aluminum foil baking dish and straighten paper clip. Yeah, cheapo me.
These little jars are quite expensive! I’ve only tried few colors so far but they are very interesting to use. The bead below was made from moss green scrap clay and dusted with Interference Gold powder. The powder itself is white but turns into lovely gold shimmer. It is recommended to wear a mask when working with mica powder so that’s one more thing on my future shopping list.
Other stuff not pictured here: oven thermometer (long overdue) and a brick each of black and white Premo.
Stuff that I forgot to buy: Donna Kato’s latest book :( *duh*
Excerpt from its official website:
From the biggest festival to the smallest church social, Kenny Smyth delivers porta-loos to them all. Ignored and unappreciated, he is one of the cogs in society’s machinery; a knight in shining overalls taking care of business with his faithful ‘Splashdown’ crew.
Got a chance to watch it en route to San Francisco. Not expecting anything, I was quite surprised to find that this is a truly heartwarming movie. Don’t worry, despite the theme of loos and comedy genre, it doesn’t use gross slapstick to make you laugh. In fact I almost didn’t laugh at all. Not because it’s not funny, but you can’t help to feel for Kenny that laughing at him just doesn’t feel right. So if you can get hold of the DVD, go and watch it.
Back to life, back to reality.
The past 2 weeks was fun, fun, fun! San Francisco was nice, Disney was great, and Seoul was, well, ok. We were already very tired by time we reached Seoul so didn’t quite enjoy it as much as I expected. Received good news few days before we reached home that we got the visaaaah! The begs the question: now what? We don’t know yet but at least we got the visa.
Some inspirations for Singapore Pools worshipers:
- Our hotel room number in San Francisco was 1518, and the room number in Orlando was 1815. This is a good and justified excuse to buy 4D.
- We left with 1 bag weighing 25kg, and returned with 3 bags weighing a total of 72kg. So yes, I’m really really broke now.
- I received a total of 676 new emails in my office mailbox. C**p!
