Rings on her Fingers

If you're a regular reader of my blog you'll know that I recently moved into a brand new house. It's all shiny and new and still has that new house smell. But it didn't come with a driveway or paths around the house so all I want for Christmas..... is concrete! Yes, concrete. You see, we have red soil on our property and by red, I mean sticky, heavy, muddy red clay. The kind you sink into when it gets wet.... And it's summer in Queensland (aka the wet season) and this past week has brought a LOT of rain. So concrete would be a great gift. We've been waiting for the concretor since early November. He's a busy man and that is a good thing but oh my, I'm so sick of the mud and the shoe store that has developed at the front door. But thankfully, in between the passing storms, the concretors have been able to set up their form work and pour firstly the paths around the house and then the driveway. Yaaay! I got exactly what was on my wish list. But whilst...

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Little Lovelies for Last Minute Gifts

It's been a busy time at my place this week. There have been electricians and cabling contractors coming and going all week long. It's dusty work that they do, crawling in those tight ceiling cavities and cutting holes in my brand new walls. All this work was supposed to be carried out before the walls were installed but miscommunication between me and them (a long story) had left us without internet connection for 9 weeks! Anyway, I've been working around them but with dust flying everywhere from the holes they needed to cut in my walls there was absolutely no hope of casting any resin pieces. So instead, I've been working on some surface finishes on my resin bangles. And here are the results: What lovely little gems they are! I've just uploaded them to my website in time for last minute Christmas shopping. So take a closer look at these little lovelies..... perhaps you'll find just the thing for that special person on your Christmas list....

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Simple is often best!

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best! Take these striking pendants - Friendly Plastic strips marbled together and cut with cookie cutters. A very simple idea and lovely all on it's own. But when it's placed on a black resin base and topped up with clear resin, it just pops off the background. They don't need much else to finish them off..... just a few flat backed crystals and a silver bail and they're ready to thread on a silver chain and wear. I've used a Krafty Lady art mould (AM245 X4Lge 5 Dominoes) as the base for these pieces. They're nicely proportioned for my rectangular cutter set (Makins). When making these, begin at the bottom with the black and work your way up so that you can see what you're doing. Allow the black resin to cure before placing the Friendly Plastic onto it so that it doesn't sink into the resin and disappear! If you start with the clear resin in the base of the mould and work your way down to the black then you risk the ...

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Write with Flair!

Since I first started making these delectable Friendly Plastic pens, I'd been promising myself I'd find some nicer pens for the base. There was nothing wrong with the pens I was using. In fact they are great for the budget end of my line of pens. But I really wanted to also have a more upmarket end to the range and so I'm now introducing pens made with beautiful metallic nibs and ends. The ones below are all slimline pens but there will also be some wider barrelled pens too. These new additions will be available for purchase from my website in the next few days, just in time for a last minute Christmas gift purchase for that special person on your Christmas list....

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Pearly Delights

Have I ever mentioned how addictive resin is? When I first started casting resin a few years back, I thought it would be just another craft I tried my hand at so that I had some basic knowledge about working with resin. What I didn't know at the time was how seductive it would become. Back in my school days (yes, it was quite a while ago, but I still remember them), I always enjoyed spending time in the manual arts block but in particular I was fascinated by the Plastics Centre. It seemed that such mysterious processes went on in that place and they were difficult to master. I clearly remember trying to contol the hot wire to cut through styrofoam and I also remember cutting out and shaping perspex. We worked with thermosets and thermoplastics and it was a lot of fun even though my success with these materials in Year 10 was rather limited. Quite obviously a seed had been planted in my subconscious which was reignited when I poured my first bangle. But enough of the reminiscing. Le...

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Dramatic Black

Well, if ever two things were made for each other, then it would have to be Friendly Plastic and resin. Over the weekend I had a bumper Friendly Plastic session and knocked out 8 of my specialty pens, 9 Friendly Plastic tile components for 2 bracelets and a variety of smaller marbled pieces all combining Friendly Plastic and resin. I also cast 4 bangles. I have never been so productive! So expect to see a few of these items over the coming days as I have time to assemble and finish them all. In the meantime, here's a teaser: The butterfly pieces were cast in the Krafty Lady domino mould using black as the base and clear resin to embed the butterflies. The butterflies are made from Friendly Plastic using a variation on Liz Welch 's flower technique. So dramatic yet so delicate! These will most likely become pendants on elegant but simple gold chains. The middle piece shows how you can combine "fracture and fusion" strips with other materials to create unique pieces o...

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Add a bit of Sparkle!

At this time of year we are awash with festive glitter so I've decided that I too would get in on the act and combine resin and glitter. No, they're not Christmassy but they sparkle all the same and a girl can never have too many sparkles. So here's a little bit of resin eye candy to enjoy. The first bangle is a very delicate shade of lemon. There's actually no colour in this bangle at all, just a good dose of yellow glitter to give it lots of sparkle. And this one is filled with iridescent Mylar flakes and the tiniest bit of dye. It's such a frosty effect that I called it Ice Queen . And lastly, a green and blue bangle..... almost turquoise, but not quite. Lots of my resin workshop students really want to produce turquoise bangles and these are the two colours to use if you don't have turquoise dye on hand - just adjust the quantity of blue and green until you get the depth of colour you want. I also added a dash of yellow glitter to keep with the sparkly theme...

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Rainbow Heart

Whilst sorting through more boxes in the studio this week (I don't think I will ever get to the end of them!), I found some small Friendly Plastic hearts which match the larger heart in the Egyptian Lily necklace I posted last week. At first I was thinking along the lines of making them into a matching bracelet or earrings but I decided to use a different colour scheme and go in a totally different direction. I teamed them with some gorgeous multi-coloured beads which have been sitting in my stash just waiting for the right project to come along. These beads seem to have every colour of the rainbow in them and a lovely metallic sheen too. To attach the hearts to the chain I laid them face down on a heatproof surface and used a heat gun to soften the back. I placed an eye pin in the softened plastic and then tried as best I could to line up the second heart on top. Once they cooled, I turned a matching loop on the other side of the heart and then just connected them to small length...

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Update Your Decor for Free Winner

From Mill Lane Studio We have a winner for the Buyster.com rug giveaway featured on my blog a few weeks back who left this comment about her favourite rug: The colours are classic But the design screams SPLAT! Evoking images of pressed flowers or an artful paint incident Or maybe exploding stars lightyears away! Congratulations Marie - your thoughtful description has won you a $100 gift voucher to spend on the rug of your choice from Buyster.com.au rugs. Now, after such a creative description I just have to ask, which one IS your favourite? I'll be in touch by email shortly so that you can claim your prize. Thanks to wonderful folks at buyster.com.au for making this giveaway possible. Please stop by their website and check out all the other wonderful home decor and furniture items they have....

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Complementary Colours

Whilst finding new places for things in the studio (yes, I'm still unpacking..... and reorganising), I came across a few pieces of marbled Friendly Plastic which I hadn’t coated in resin yet. And as I’ve been casting with resin a lot lately I thought it was high time they got coated. So today I’m sharing a Friendly Plastic necklace with you. The colour combination in this piece is a little bit unexpected – blue with shades of orange – opposites on the colour wheel. Complimentary colours are always striking when used together but when you use variations of those colours (like peach and apricot with blue) they will play off against each other without competing. And so it is with this piece…. together the colours give off a lovely warm glow. I’ve teamed the Friendly Plastic heart with glass beads and vintage lucite flower in similar colours to the oranges and pinks and finished the necklace off with rose-gold findings. I really like the softness of these colours. But when it came...

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Butterfly Design Challenge

At about this time last year I was feverishly creating entries for the Annual AMACO Friendly Plastic Challenge. One of the categories was to create a butterfly from Friendly Plastic which would be displayed in the Holocaust Museum in Houston, Tx as part of a permanent installation. They are looking for 1.5 million handmade butterflies, one to represent each of the children who perished in the Holocaust. When I posted off my entries last year, I had no idea that my butterfly would win the category! And so I want to encourage you to enter this year's challenge too! You never know, your butterfly might be judged the winning entry. Entries close soon but it's not too late to enter. Entries must be postmarked by 18th November 2009 to be elligible so if you're in Australia or New Zealand it doesn't matter that it might take a week to get to AMACO, as long as it's postmarked no later than 18th November. For some inspiration why not visit the The Art of Friendly Plasti...

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Fantasy Christmas Tree

Well, we're in November and the countdown to Christmas has begun. In my local area, Christmas decorations have hit the shelves and the malls are being draped in Christmas attire. But you don't have to decorate with generic, store bought decorations or stick to traditional colours when you can fashion your own unique Christmas decorations from some simple paper craft supplies you might already have on hand. So with that in mind, I've designed this Fantasy Christmas Tree table decoration using Fantasy Film and Fantasy Fibre. This class is inspired by Laura Bray 's hard rock candies. It is such a pretty piece, perfect for gracing your Christmas Dinner Table and it's sure to spark plenty of compliments. Imagine a small group of these little lovelies adorning your sideboard or mantlepiece. This class is already filling and numbers are limited. If you're interested in the class, then give Jenny a ring (3393 3022) at Stamp Antics and she'll happily reserve a place ...

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The Kimono Fold Pocket

Are you looking for a quick but personalised and inexpensive gift for someone special? Perhaps this tutorial will give you some ideas. I'd like to show you how I make a Kimono pocket from an A4 sheet of paper. Place the paper in portrait position, pattern facing up. Fold in half taking, the top to the bottom. Find the centre point along the fold and then fold the right and left hand sides into the middle to form a roof shape. Open the page up again and turn it over. Re crease the diagonal folds so that they are mountain folds. Push the first fold (which is a valley fold) inwards so that the diagonal folds form a roof shape. Fold the right hand side (front only) across and crease. The distance away from the point will be decided by the item that will be placed in the finished pocket. Fold the left hand side across to the right and crease. You need the two folds to be equidistant from the point. If the left hand flap overhangs the right hand fold, then fold th...

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Halloween Treats for your Neck

Halloween is not such a big thing in Australia (yet!) but given that many of you who stop by my blog are international visitors I thought I'd share with you my take on Halloween jewellery. This jewellery set began with a faceted black resin piece cast from Krafty Lady mould AM353 . From the moment I cast it, I knew it was destined to be used in a Halloween project. And when I added the Swarovski flat-back crystals I knew it was going to turn out just the way I had envisioned. It's not often that something turns out the way I've planned it from the start. Most of my pieces evolve as I go along but this was one of those times when vision actually met reality. I've added chains, findings and components from Blue Moon Bead's Noir collection which set just the right mood for this necklace. Deliciously dark, yet lots of bling! For a different way to suspend the faceted resin piece, I've used the straight bar from a toggle set. It also gave me a unique and secure...

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Update Your Decor for Free!

I've been promising you this for days now and finally the time has come to announce the details of my big giveaway. In some of my recent posts, I've blogged about my kitchen splashback AND my new studio , but now let's move on to the living room.... not mine dear reader, but yours! How would you like to improve your home decor with a brand new rug? Just feast your eyes on these little beauties. This is just a small sampling of the huge range of rugs available at Buyster. I really wish I was elligible to enter this as my living room floor is still bare and they have so many rugs that I'd love to have in my own home. But anyway, the wonderful folks at Buyster are kindly making available a $100 gift voucher for one of my readers to purchase the rug of their choice. And all you have to do to be in the running is have a look at their rugs and tell me, in 25 words or less, what it is that appeals to you most about the rug you'd like to win. This offer i...

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RESIN-ate..... More resin treats

It's eye candy day again today. Resin is such an addictive medium... I tell you, once you start playing with it, you just don't want to stop. And as I promised yesterday, here are a couple of resin necklaces strung with a mixture of glass and lucite beads. I love this seahorse - I've used it in many projects before but never as a piece of jewellery. I cast it some time ago but somehow I never found the time to make it up. It's a fairly large piece (about 7cm) and it's actually black resin coloured with Duo Blue Green Pearl Ex and it has a very subtle sparkliness (is that a word?) about it. I've teamed it up with these gorgeous lucite leaves which remind me of seaweed! This one is an interesting piece! It started out as a heart with rococco texture impressed into it..... very nice, but hard to see in the photo. With a little bit of creative trimming I was able to carve out a niche to sit the glass flower bead into. It's finished off with a Swarovski crystal a...

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Resin Eye Candy

Two weeks have passed since the big move and I still have no internet connection. It's hard to blog and keep in touch with the virtual world without it, so forgive me dear reader that my blog posts have been few and far between of late. But, life without the internet goes on, and that means that between unpacking my new studio and cleaning the old one that there has been time for some creating. I always enjoy playing with resin so today's offerings are bangles. The first one is a marbled bangle, very loosely described as Tortoiseshell . It is quite transparent which the photo doesn't show and it's actually a light shade of orange but the black swirl is giving it more of an amber cast. It's buffed to a very nice shine! The next one is turquoise - one of my favourite bangle colours. Don't the white tendrils look so crisp against the translucency of the turquoise? This one is called Turquoise Tendrils. And the last one for today is fun and funky! A two-to...

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Mill Lane Studio...... unpacked!

Following on from the photo of my new kitchen splashback, I thought I'd also invite you into my new studio. It's just bare bones at the moment....... a nice big, open space with a bank of overhead cupboards, a bunch of underbench cupboards and a bench that is some 6 metres long which includes a computer work station. I'm one very lucky girl! As you can see, I have an abundance of light - the lovely big picture window is more than 3 metres wide. The drawback is that it's on the western side of the studio, so come summer, OUCH! it will be hot, but that's a small price to pay for the daylight I'll have to work in. You can now see I've begun to move into the studio and this is the first lot of some 30 cartons which are now piled into the centre of the room. The furniture is still to come but now that I've begun to unpack there is no bench space left to work on. Where did that 6 metres of bench space disappear to? It's a slow process but stack by stack, t...

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How to use up all your cardstock - Part 2

Remember that photo of me holding up the different coloured sheets of 12 x 12 cardstock against my new kitchen wall a few weeks back? Well I thought you might like to see how that translated into a glass splashback. After selecting the perfect colour from the cardstock (Bazzill Purple), we then had to colour match it to a regular paint colour and provide the glass manufacturer with the brand, name and code of the colour. Now this is where it got tricky because there are paint colours..... and then there are Bazzill colours. We had narrowed the choice down to about 5 shades and all of them were close...... very close. But none of them was quite right. It took more than a week of checking the paint chips in various lights until we eliminated them, one by one. And finally, we were left with just one - Dulux Jewel. And here it is - the finished glass splashback. Now that's purple! .....and I love it!...

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Fave Crafts Friendly Plastic projects

For all you Friendly Plastic fans out there here's a couple of techniques you might like to try. FaveCrafts.com has just uploaded these projects to their extensive craft library along with full instructions. The first card, called Three Kings , involves casting Friendly Plastic into Krafty Lady Art Moulds. Friendly Plastic and Krafty Lady Art Moulds are a match made in heaven. The flexible silicone makes demoulding a breeze. Look at the fantastic detail the Friendly Plastic has picked up. The second card, Unique Florals , combines the marbling technique with cookie cutters to create the interesting floral embellishments. This card uses both the marbling comb and a needle tool to blend and marble. Click on the card names to take you directly to Fave Crafts website where you can print out the images and instructions. I'll also be a guest blogger on the Fave Crafts blog in the coming weeks sharing a little about my work with Friendly Plastic so stay tuned for an update....

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