Second Saturday State of My Studio: Cait and Ellie

This is a pic of my ArtBeadScene Ornament Blog Hop entry in progress

I have gradually been getting into the habit of writing a 2nd Saturday State Of My Studio Post to compliment MarshaNealStudio's Beads-of-Clay blog post by the same title.  Hers is an interactive post whereby we can  post a picture link of our studio and then anyone reading the blog post can travel around blog land and see lots of studios, if lots of folks participate.  So that is how this got started.  And this time I have lots to report on since it has been a wonderfully busy time.

Photo of my kiln opening after I fired my 100 hearts order.

Here is a picture of the 100 plus hearts on a plate. 

Here is a good closeup of the buttons and molds Cait made

The highlight of my studio happenings in the last two weeks was having friends over to play in my studio playground.  My friend Cait, known on Etsy as the BarefootWeaver made buttons from clay, her first clay experience since High School.  We used that two part  plastic molding material with buttons from my  collection and she came up with some real  beauties.

This is a picture of one of Cait's gorgeous scarves from her Etsy Shop.

a closeup of some of Cait's stoneware buttons drying in the food dehydrator

After all the clay work, Cait was intrigued by Ellie's stamping and pounding and wanted to try metal.  Guess what?  It is her  new passion.  She has fallen in love with metal.  Loves the release of pounding the hammer.  Loves the color of copper.  Loves words and letters.  Can you blame her?  She made all of those copper pendants  for her kids and daughter-in-law.

My  friend, Ellie, an artist in her own right, came over to learn how to rivet.  We watched my copy of Susan Lenart Kazmer's video on making rivets and then got to work.  I have a drill press and we used a 1/16 inch drill bit to make the holes and 16 gauge copper wire to make the rivets.  Copper is quite soft so the rivets kept bending over.  But eventually we got them to work out.  She made a lovely copper pendant.  But I am not sure she fell in love with riveting.

Piture of my friend Ellie's pendant.  She riveted the two smaller pieces of copper togther and then riveted them to a large piece of copper.  I love the way she wrapped the wire around the copper washers to attach them to the pendant. 

This is a picture of my custom toggle clasp order for a customer. I made several versions of a toggle clasp to go with this Tall Clover Pendant and then made this photo so she could pick out which one she wanted.  Actually I could have just sent her the one I l iked best, as that was her choice too.  But I love to have options and choices. Some of the ones she didn't choose are in my Etsy shop on sale, along with some other new toggles.

Ellie had to leave early and I forgot to get a picture of all of us.  Cait decided to take one of the two of us and put her camera on delay and set it on a table.  Pretty good results considering....  Me on the left and Cait on the right.

So these are the highlights of what has been happening in my studio since last time I did this.